We have an information ecosystem increasingly centered on platforms that are maximally advantageous to Gish Gallop/One-Way Hash arguments, and I have no idea how we go about reversing this trend, because evidently people like these formats a lot.
https://twitter.com/abbieasr/status/1443274671168888837
Noam Chomsky used to argue that television was inherently (small-c) conservative because if a TV hit gives you 5 minutes of total speaking time, you can’t really articulate a view very far outside the mainstream consensus without sounding crazy…
But it seems like something like the opposite is true when you toss the gatekeepers and shorten the average time even more. You can make a crazy view sound plausible if people are thinking in 30 second increments.
I’m having a minor moment of old-person panic thinking about the effects of transitioning, at the population level, from “reading books” to “consuming 30 second videos” as a primary formative media experience.
About a decade ago, at an Internet Governance Forum in Istanbul, I met a young media theory prof & asked what he was teaching, mentioning a couple books or papers I figured might be on the syllabus. “Oh no, he said,” I can’t assign texts…
“They never read them. I assign talks on YouTube.” I thought he had to be joking or exaggerating, but he was pretty earnest. Maybe he was just ahead of the curve.
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