Tradition is what we inherit from the past and pass on to the future. Tradition erosion is what happens when the chain of transmission breaks — not because anyone decides to break it, but because the conditions that sustained it dissolve.
Traditional practices — religious observances, festivals, crafts, cuisines, forms of address — require specific conditions to survive. They require people who know how to perform them, occasions on which they are performed, and communities that value them. When any of these conditions dissolves, the tradition erodes.
Industrialization eroded traditions by changing the rhythm of life. Urbanization eroded them by dispersing the communities that sustained them. Mass media eroded them by providing alternatives that were more entertaining, more convenient, or more prestigious. The internet is eroding them by replacing local culture with global culture, inherited practices with algorithmic recommendations.
Tradition erosion is not necessarily bad. Some traditions — foot binding, sati, duelling — deserved to dissolve. But the mechanism of erosion does not discriminate. It dissolves the valuable with the harmful, the meaningful with the merely habitual. What replaces the dissolved traditions is not necessarily better — it is simply newer, and novelty, in cultural matters, is not the same as improvement.