What you are describing is the continued fall to smaller and smaller bits of stimulation and information. I’m worried about the consequences of this on the human mind and humanity in general. Our tech is gradually eroding our ability to focus on anything for more than a few seconds. I don’t want a future that is some weird mix of Idiocracy and getting the Black Shakes from Johnny Mnemonic. We need people that aren’t easily manipulated by ads and disinformation campaigns and that can think long and clearly about something.
But when do you get a free thought that's entirely your own? Just a moment when someone or something isn't barking at you to listen to this or buy that. I at least can't think clearly about something else if someone is reciting a story to me. Scary when most podcasts also have advertising, so you are getting a subconscious dose of that during all your waking hours.
Yes, there are many arguments that can be brought up about differences between newspapers and social media, etc., but I strongly feel like it is essentially the same kind of neo-ludditism that will play out the exact same way. Something new will come up after social media, and then people will jump on that as the next thing that "degrades the society". We can already see a micro-version of that, with people lamenting how "back in the old days, blog posts were long form and meaningful, not like those tweets and instagram posts".
People are always looking for the 'surprising' reasons why society is really in decay and everyone's living their day-to-day lives completely blind to it - except us few who know better.
There's huge demand for this sort of thing to be true, it's been the basis of every cult ever, plenty of extreme political movements, religions, and a million think pieces through history. Yet life and culture always ends up being far more boring and resilient than predicted.
Oh wow, I haven't even thought of that one until you mentioned it, but it certainly seems to ring true for the people I know as well.
When you're recording your own podcast.
You come on a discussion platform like Hackernews to voice your own thoughts and opinions?
So is a discussion platform better for the mind in that sense?
The Gutenberg revolution had its critics. I think criticising the Internet as a medium has parallels to that. That's not to say any arguments made are idiotic, just that they may miss the point. I think there are reasons why the view counts are so different that don't imply the Internet is a shitty medium.
Firstly, a 3 hour podcast takes 3 hours to listen to, generating one click per three hours of listenting time for that podcast. TikTok videos take a few seconds to watch, so in 3 hours you're doling out thousands of views.
Secondly, views are distributed differently for those types of content because everyone finds roughly the same things funny, but only few find the same things interesting. If you want to watch something funny, you're probably not gonna spend much time finding suitable content, instead just consuming whatever is popular, so a handful of videos end up with insane amounts of views. But if you want to take up a hobby project you'd pick something that interest you, which is very different from what might interest me, even within the domain of CS and maybe even within subdomains of CS, so views are distributed more evenly for instructional videos.
And now we're here comparing the view counts of popular funny videos to instructional videos. I think it's clear why that might not be a good data point.
I think things have flipped. TV used to be for serious content, Internet for cat videos. Now it's going the opposite way.
I used to listen to podcasts a ton but switched to listening to lectures or conference talks.
Pretty big difference between listening to Wendy Williams vs, I don't know, philosophical debates and deep dives into history and all sorts of intellectually stimulating things. Most people I know including myself listen to the latter which is nothing short of welcome mind-expansion and I'm a more interesting person as a result of it.
People listening to podcasts or reading books really aren't the people I'm worried about in the modern era.
Most of the content in those shows is still fluff and nowhere near as information dense as a lecture from Stanford or MIT. Take talking machines as an example, an interview with a guy like David Blei will be very shallow and watered down for the general audience, I'd much rather listen to him give a lecture at a machine learning summer school.
I don't know what GP's expectation was - that the internet would turn everyone into Aristotle?
Relevant crosslink in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21575365
This is the reason that Silicon Valley is pushing minimal guaranteed income: rich people need to pay off people who they can’t provide a job for anymore.
I agree people also need to enjoy a lengthy book once, an inspiring piece of music or whatever floats your boat, but aren't you painting a too gloomy picture?
real quotes from late 19th/early 20th century: https://xkcd.com/1227/
>With the advent of cheap newspapers and superior means of locomotion... The dreamy quiet old days are over... For men now live think and work at express speed. They have their Mercury or Post laid on their breakfast table in the early morning, and if they are too hurried to snatch from it the news during that meal, they carry it off, to be sulkily read as they travel ... leaving them no time to talk with the friend who may share the compartment with them... The hurry and bustle of modern life ... lacks the quiet and repose of the period when our forefathers, the day's work done, took their ease...
>So much is exhibited to the eye that nothing is left to the imagination. It sometimes seems almost possible that the modern world might be choked by its own riches, and human faculty dwindle away amid the million inventions that have been introduced to render its exercise unnecessary.
If anything, social media is moving the opposite way, where people are requiring more stimulation and information.
More stimulation but less information.
Perhaps I'm old, but TikTok failed to get me back over and over again.
Sadly, those kinds of people make some of the best consumers, and many online companies (from advertisers, to game developers, to news sites) are optimizing for that kind of addictive, short attention span engagement.
The people most "easily manipulated by ads and disinformation campaigns" certainly—at first glance—don't appear to be the same people who are most comfortable using modern media channels.
- pay creators
- deal with harassment
The two things, of course, that Twitter is totally incapable of doing. It's not clear how TikTok is responding to the same pressures.
I still don’t believe I would switch :)
Given the popularity of Vine, and the outrage when Twitter killed it, I have no idea why they thought it was a good move.
I’m bullish on Tik-Tok because I think it’s the next logical evolution of social media (and totally captures the Vine fan base which was pretty big to begin with)
First there was text, both Facebook and Twitter. Then images with instagram. Now people want videos that they can consume in short bits of time en mass.
I think you would be amiss to not see TikTok as a potentially big player in social media in the future.