I think actively being your own filter to the best of your ability is probably the most you can do. Choosing the films and books and articles you read selectively based on personal impulses and inclinations, not basing the majority on...I guess I'll call it "crowd-advertising" (aggregation engines such as Reddit, etc.)
Lots of people make an active effort to not be influenced by corporate advertising, to be conscious of the obvious strings being pulled, they DVR shit and skip commercials, and on and on....
The internet, though, affects people similarly, and there's a continuous roll towards cultural homogenization right now in that most people are consuming things from similar sources, and are also generally looking at and reading the same things online regardless of culture or country. Obv good and bad, people are the same everywhere and it's great people are connecting this way now, but there's also just a general trend towards passive consumption of content I'd liken to couch potato TV addicts in the pre-internet era. It's just as bad in a different way.
The trend towards crowd-sourced content also leaves people with little context for what they're seeing. I think most of us are generally the same age, here, I think I'm few years younger than most of you, but I'm glad I grew up in a time when my attention wasn't under threat of being diverted by the internet constantly in that I was able to follow extended trajectories of film history and indulge those interests with little distraction. (Watching movies by Scorsese led me to this which led me to that and on and on). I can't imagine doing that, now, if I were 14 or whatever. Now the entry point into this stuff is so much more amorphous and convoluted.
I find this really funny, but...
...I have to imagine that that's going to be some eight year old's introduction to Jurassic Park before even seeing the movie. They'll watch the real thing some time and go "oh this is that movie from the flute video..." and not the other way around.
It's all backwards and forwards and up and down now and I think the loss of context, and also the loss of context due to the human element, just not having the time or attention to investigate things chronologically in a focused way over extended periods, is one of the greatest threats to culture as a whole. Nothing is really building on itself now except for the actual technological tools. Those are developing. It's too bad the importance of the actual content has become obscured by everyone's mad, zealous fervor for the technological tools they view it on.
