Regarding the "Intellectual values of YouTube": If Gore Vidal were alive today, I suspect he would be scolding the Left for its hesitancy to engage where a large amount of engagement is actually happening. Joe Rogan is no William F. Buckley, Jr., nor is Ben Shapiro. Hacks they may be, in a procedural sense at a minimum, but much of the Left's refusal to engage with those of their ilk due to disapproval of espoused world views or inquisitive methods will simply relegate the Left and its ideas to caricatures to be demeaned in those fora, playing right into the hands of the Right. My 16 year old son chooses to educate himself on issues of public concern by watching YouTube videos. He may not reach a conclusion regarding an issue exclusively on that content, but he considers it to be an important source of viewpoints. (He is proudly “independent" in a household filed with Democrats.) That young men seek education on YouTube is the reality. If the Left and Center-Left don't engage in that forum (and to be clear, some do, e.g., AOC), then they are abdicating a core responsibility of democratic engagement and willingly handing over a whole cohort of potentially persuadable fellow-citizens to the Right.
I always thought the mix that made Twitter great was that 10% of the active users were absolutely insane, so the other 90% could spend time making fun of them. Then Elon destroyed this delicate balance, which probably can never — and should never — be recreated.
I largely agree with your assessment that "the popularity of these formats suggests that there’s a large audience of people with appetite for education, looking for new and more sophisticated ways to explain the world around them." But I very much disagree that these audiences are looking for more *sophisticated* ways of explaining the world. Certainly newness, or maybe surpprising or counterintuitive, is a big part of what they are looking for. But where you see a desire for sophistication, I see a desire for straightforward, universal and totalizing answers and explanations.
I wrote a long comment about this in your links round up (but gave up on it after having trouble logging in). Essentially, my argument there and here is that the way most people are educated and their engagement with the internet and social media rewards and feeds into humans' innate need for clear cut answers that can be given quickly, concisely and confidently. Therefore, instead of a whole media ecosystem of true debate and personal edification we have a marketplace full of people selling "the reason why"s, life hacks and "one weird trick"s.
In other words, all these curious people go to these sources looking for a way to understand the world, but instead of digging further and further into the nuances of the answers, they end up with a series of short, concise and, often, unexpected "facts" that try to explain everything easily, straightforwardly and completely.
Furthermore, when trying to learn, they want to go directly to an answer that sounds and feels like a concrete fact.. Saying things like "it's not that simple" or "it can be that way, but not always" or "it's not entirely known" leads to impatience and discomfort. I'm talking from personal experience talking to a colleague who is very intellectually curious and often asks in total good faith about new concepts and ideas (many that could be considered "woke") hoping to understand them. But she constantly gives up on in-depth explanations when she can't get straightforward and universal explanations that fit into the paradigms that she's already familiar with. This then means that it's easier and more comfortable for her to get information and (self)education from podcast intellectuals through social media.
When the curious reject nuanced considerations, the curiosity remains and they will invariably find an answer that better meets their needs. And once they understand the world through the prism of these explanations, any other reason or factor will be considered suspect or downright untrue, especially if it's given with caveats and qualifications. Eventually you get a guy who frames all the problems a man may have on the fact that he doesn't own any crypto, eats raw meat or suntans his scrotum (this is a real post I saw and I think I'm forgetting some of the other weird crap I'm supposed to be doing to be a "real man.")
I think it's probably still important to engage with these people's curiosity. It's likely useful to still try to give true and reasonable explanations to people who are struggling to understand them. But I would argue that it's important to go into these conversations understanding that most people inherently like easy answers they can act on. And that there are only a few of us for whom complicating and questioning everything is enjoyable. Even seeming autodidacts might just want to know things about the world rather than wrestle with their understanding and conceptions of it.
It would also be useful, during these conversations, to keep stressing that though there are rarely easy answers, thinking through those more tenuous and nuanced concepts has value since it helps us to begin to grasp reality and often leads to new and interesting questions.
"These are people with an absolute, almost pathological commitment to producing free content for short-form posting websites"
I think the shift to more short-form media platforms is more important to understanding the past few elections and politics than people think. With short-form media reducing attention spans, a lot of what happens in the world gets lost in the mix.
Not a fan of Pete either, but he is good at media strategy for a democrat and it will be interesting to see what he does next now that the bottom has fallen out of his plan for career-by-appointment. I'm sure he would find running for office to win beneath him, so I don't know. MSNBC?
I could never really get into Bluesky on account of it being full of uh.. I guess I shouldn't say soy liberals, but *you know the type*. There just seemed to be a lot of scolds and the culture was just like.. full of weenies I guess? Like these were all the people who got to work from home during Covid, and learned how to crochet, and they're now all here on this website variously huffing each other's gasses or getting mad over baffling infractions.
I hope everyone has fun together there, though. Twitter doesn't need to come back, and putting everyone on the same website was a failed experiment even before Musk took over.
Amazing you assholes learned nothing from the election. All you want to do is recreate the hell world that burned you so badly with zero learning or re-evaluation or progression in ideals. Real "progressive" there guys (eyeroll).
I tried Bluesky a couple of months ago, and thought it was terrible to be honest, and left after 2 days, felt it was very liberal type, and could not see a way forward for it, apart from YouTube, which I don't consider a "Social Media", at least the way I use it, I think Substack is the best out there right now, a "hidden gem", if you like...
One of the nice things about Bluesky is the lack of ads & bots, both of which have rendered Twitter almost unreadable.
Not for nothing, I have to say it's a LOT different than it was even a couple of weeks ago, let alone a couple of months ago. Will that hold? Who knows? So far, so good, though.
Sure it's OK to have a hug box, that echoes your corporate media talking points for forever war deodorized with woke platitudes. It's also OK to wholly ignore such a suffocating scenario altogether.
Just a certain type I noticed, not all liberals are bad!!, my main point being, I just didn't like the feel of the site, it wasn't a place I'd see myself in a couple of years, as time goes by I am cutting out the larger social media's from my life, fb and X are dead to me, will never ever use any of them again, no matter what...
Very unexpected to see that the Gatsby party tweet was posted from Moab, UT, a very small and isolated town where, in classic small town fashion, everyone tends to know everyone else’s business. Difficult to restrain myself from trying to figure out the identity of that tweeter 😅
Regarding the "Intellectual values of YouTube": If Gore Vidal were alive today, I suspect he would be scolding the Left for its hesitancy to engage where a large amount of engagement is actually happening. Joe Rogan is no William F. Buckley, Jr., nor is Ben Shapiro. Hacks they may be, in a procedural sense at a minimum, but much of the Left's refusal to engage with those of their ilk due to disapproval of espoused world views or inquisitive methods will simply relegate the Left and its ideas to caricatures to be demeaned in those fora, playing right into the hands of the Right. My 16 year old son chooses to educate himself on issues of public concern by watching YouTube videos. He may not reach a conclusion regarding an issue exclusively on that content, but he considers it to be an important source of viewpoints. (He is proudly “independent" in a household filed with Democrats.) That young men seek education on YouTube is the reality. If the Left and Center-Left don't engage in that forum (and to be clear, some do, e.g., AOC), then they are abdicating a core responsibility of democratic engagement and willingly handing over a whole cohort of potentially persuadable fellow-citizens to the Right.
I always thought the mix that made Twitter great was that 10% of the active users were absolutely insane, so the other 90% could spend time making fun of them. Then Elon destroyed this delicate balance, which probably can never — and should never — be recreated.
I think debating only works out when the other party is also there in good faith. This seems to be lacking most of the time.
I largely agree with your assessment that "the popularity of these formats suggests that there’s a large audience of people with appetite for education, looking for new and more sophisticated ways to explain the world around them." But I very much disagree that these audiences are looking for more *sophisticated* ways of explaining the world. Certainly newness, or maybe surpprising or counterintuitive, is a big part of what they are looking for. But where you see a desire for sophistication, I see a desire for straightforward, universal and totalizing answers and explanations.
I wrote a long comment about this in your links round up (but gave up on it after having trouble logging in). Essentially, my argument there and here is that the way most people are educated and their engagement with the internet and social media rewards and feeds into humans' innate need for clear cut answers that can be given quickly, concisely and confidently. Therefore, instead of a whole media ecosystem of true debate and personal edification we have a marketplace full of people selling "the reason why"s, life hacks and "one weird trick"s.
In other words, all these curious people go to these sources looking for a way to understand the world, but instead of digging further and further into the nuances of the answers, they end up with a series of short, concise and, often, unexpected "facts" that try to explain everything easily, straightforwardly and completely.
Furthermore, when trying to learn, they want to go directly to an answer that sounds and feels like a concrete fact.. Saying things like "it's not that simple" or "it can be that way, but not always" or "it's not entirely known" leads to impatience and discomfort. I'm talking from personal experience talking to a colleague who is very intellectually curious and often asks in total good faith about new concepts and ideas (many that could be considered "woke") hoping to understand them. But she constantly gives up on in-depth explanations when she can't get straightforward and universal explanations that fit into the paradigms that she's already familiar with. This then means that it's easier and more comfortable for her to get information and (self)education from podcast intellectuals through social media.
When the curious reject nuanced considerations, the curiosity remains and they will invariably find an answer that better meets their needs. And once they understand the world through the prism of these explanations, any other reason or factor will be considered suspect or downright untrue, especially if it's given with caveats and qualifications. Eventually you get a guy who frames all the problems a man may have on the fact that he doesn't own any crypto, eats raw meat or suntans his scrotum (this is a real post I saw and I think I'm forgetting some of the other weird crap I'm supposed to be doing to be a "real man.")
I think it's probably still important to engage with these people's curiosity. It's likely useful to still try to give true and reasonable explanations to people who are struggling to understand them. But I would argue that it's important to go into these conversations understanding that most people inherently like easy answers they can act on. And that there are only a few of us for whom complicating and questioning everything is enjoyable. Even seeming autodidacts might just want to know things about the world rather than wrestle with their understanding and conceptions of it.
It would also be useful, during these conversations, to keep stressing that though there are rarely easy answers, thinking through those more tenuous and nuanced concepts has value since it helps us to begin to grasp reality and often leads to new and interesting questions.
"These are people with an absolute, almost pathological commitment to producing free content for short-form posting websites"
I think the shift to more short-form media platforms is more important to understanding the past few elections and politics than people think. With short-form media reducing attention spans, a lot of what happens in the world gets lost in the mix.
Not a fan of Pete either, but he is good at media strategy for a democrat and it will be interesting to see what he does next now that the bottom has fallen out of his plan for career-by-appointment. I'm sure he would find running for office to win beneath him, so I don't know. MSNBC?
I could never really get into Bluesky on account of it being full of uh.. I guess I shouldn't say soy liberals, but *you know the type*. There just seemed to be a lot of scolds and the culture was just like.. full of weenies I guess? Like these were all the people who got to work from home during Covid, and learned how to crochet, and they're now all here on this website variously huffing each other's gasses or getting mad over baffling infractions.
I hope everyone has fun together there, though. Twitter doesn't need to come back, and putting everyone on the same website was a failed experiment even before Musk took over.
Amazing you assholes learned nothing from the election. All you want to do is recreate the hell world that burned you so badly with zero learning or re-evaluation or progression in ideals. Real "progressive" there guys (eyeroll).
I tried Bluesky a couple of months ago, and thought it was terrible to be honest, and left after 2 days, felt it was very liberal type, and could not see a way forward for it, apart from YouTube, which I don't consider a "Social Media", at least the way I use it, I think Substack is the best out there right now, a "hidden gem", if you like...
One of the nice things about Bluesky is the lack of ads & bots, both of which have rendered Twitter almost unreadable.
Not for nothing, I have to say it's a LOT different than it was even a couple of weeks ago, let alone a couple of months ago. Will that hold? Who knows? So far, so good, though.
A hug box echo chamber? How boring!
Is it not OK that some socials are liberal type? Xitter is so toxically MAGAt, Threads is starting to get more ‘conservative’.
Sure it's OK to have a hug box, that echoes your corporate media talking points for forever war deodorized with woke platitudes. It's also OK to wholly ignore such a suffocating scenario altogether.
Just a certain type I noticed, not all liberals are bad!!, my main point being, I just didn't like the feel of the site, it wasn't a place I'd see myself in a couple of years, as time goes by I am cutting out the larger social media's from my life, fb and X are dead to me, will never ever use any of them again, no matter what...
...valiantly attempting to change Bluesky’s culture from “toxically wack” to “tolerably wack."...
I think you mean X's culture.
Very unexpected to see that the Gatsby party tweet was posted from Moab, UT, a very small and isolated town where, in classic small town fashion, everyone tends to know everyone else’s business. Difficult to restrain myself from trying to figure out the identity of that tweeter 😅