TikTok Extends the Wasteland
hedgehogreview.com
hedgehogreview.com
I think about people after the Minow speech, the likes of Julia Child who were on a public station educating people but also the entertainer. You tuned in not just to understand how best to make your next meal, but because of Julia Child.
So I don't believe that it's worth trying to dissect the two apart in the modern age, but rather focusing on advertisement. We need far better regulations to address the modern usage of content, and a complete eradication of "native" ads that attempt to mimic the platform's programming. A silly sponsored label tag isn't good enough.
That's way different from, say, some YouTuber or TikToker who always has to stay bouncy and high-energy, and has to keep telling barely-related jokes and stories, just to keep their audience from clicking through to the next thing -- all that waters down the informational content instead of adding to it.
In his seminal 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman observed that television makes entertainment “the natural format for the representation of all experience.” Even though Postman was writing before reality TV and social networks, his breakdown of television’s rhetorical rules—that “simple messages are preferable to… complex ones,” that “drama is to be preferred over exposition”—are more relevant than ever.
Exactly right, and that necessarily means the informational content suffers, because the entertainment takes up so much bandwidth.
And if you want a big audience, you absolutely _have_ to be a performer too, because people will tune out and start watching / playing / consuming something else if you lose their attention. All of which means that mass "educational" media today, of any kind, is guaranteed to be to be one of the lowest-quality options for learning about any given subject.
That makes it sounds like a failure of the system, but in fact it works as intended. The point of consumer culture has never been whatever was being overtly advertised. It emerged as the attempt of atlanticist nations (lead by Amerika) to manage society’s violent, repressed urges (the only alternatives we knew of were nazism and communism). It is a mechanism to keep the primitive human mind distracted, with fast paced entertainment that destroys the attention span, rat race competitions, libidinal associations in product branding, and a fantasy world of happiness and comfort promoted through advertising campaigns – while the unavoidable grim reality (like third world exploitation which makes the whole system possible and the corruption in the incumbent systems of power) is being obscured from sight. Tiktok is just designed to reward the most effective agents of the system.
Capitalism is not a centralized ideology, it's perfectly fine to loathe liberalism and individual freedoms and still enjoy the economic prosperity that can come from a free market.
About the "third world exploitation that makes the system possible", could you please substantiate this claim? Working at factories in the third world is not demeaning as you imply, it's a good way to make enough money to build a life on and most of the third world (ironically not China) has unions to negotiate decent pay.
TikTok is also owned by the Chinese government which is not capitalist at all, we have extensive proof one of it's main objectives is destroying democracy and capitalism as a universal value. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Document_Number_Nine]
You seem to parrot things that seem aesthetically true (hard work is important) but aren't at all through inspection.
not sure that's a thing.
> Capitalism is not a centralized ideology
You are confusing capitalism and consumerism. My post refers to consumerism, which emerged in the 20th century; capitalism predates consumerism, while consumerism slightly predates neoliberal reforms. Indeed, Chinese culture is an example of non-democratic consumerism, proving the separation between concepts.
The history of consumerism and how Western countries have intertwined it with societal control can be traced back to Freud, Bernays, Lippmann and Dichter. Freud's premise was that there are primitive urges in the human mind which invariably threaten the stability of society. Bernays invented the techniques of public relations in order to manipulate those urges effectively, render people docile and manufacture their consent; they are today the bedrock of advertising. Lippmann argued that average citizens are inherently irrational in their democratic choices, which makes it necessary for an elite class to steer their opinion. Dichter tied it all together by promising that embracing sex and consumer hedonism will create a stable society and he furthered Bernays' work in psychoanalytic marketing.
These are all facts and an academically accepted narrative. Perhaps it sounds like a conspiracy theory because you haven't looked at it before. Consumerism was deliberately engineered in the 20th century in order to achieve socio-economic stability, without devolving into either nazism or communism.
> About the "third world exploitation that makes the system possible", could you please substantiate this claim?
Just some random examples: Nestle's reliance on child trafficking and slavery for the production of cocoa; epidemic of worker suicide at the factories where Apple's products are being manufactured; quinoa becoming unaffordable and threatening the food security of indigenous communities who traditionally relied on it.
Bollocks. Capitalism can't exist with rampant consumption; the stock price must grow. Its like trying to differentiate the hair from the hair follicle -- yeah, they're different, but one only exists for the other.
"Better" regulation isn't going to change anything. We just need outright bans. We can perhaps debate what types of add content and usage should be banned, but ban them nonetheless.
The article is well written, yes, but there's a tone in it that allows the reader to come away thinking that some of these quirks with TikTok are endearing or maybe funny (the millennial "pause"). The kinds of intentional dopamine hijacking that is how the company makes money (ice cream so good gang gang) is a little more nefarious than that.
For reference, it's this jwilliamsj guy, a young black man absolutely eviscerating another guy's explanation of "Why we shouldn't use the n-word."
It was amazing. A methodical, with references, academic breakdown of another persons (arguably terrible) idea. In 5 minutes and entertaining.
I don't know y'all. Tiktok is made of people. And while I'm often astounded at the sheer inanity of most of it, I also can't help but see that the lack of a "corporate filter" is definitely bringing some quality -- or at least experimentation -- the likes of which we haven't seen and may really be a counter to e.g. this whole SAG strike thing (which is to say, oh no you mean now Gladiator 2 and Deadpool 3 will come out slightly later? so sad)
democratizing it means that for every erudite point there will be 100 others. half of them will be q-anon or shitposts about kanye west's wife's new outfit
Ratio seems similar.
Did you check the references? And how long did you thought about the arguments? How much did you invest into finding flaws in them? Because this is a big problem with entertaining content and especially TikToks hyperfast attention-mill. While something can appear good in the moment of consumption, it doesn't mean this actually is true. And TikTok doesn't give you much time until the next topic high jacks your mind and pushes your attention somewhere else. This can be very dangerous..
And he did a very good job.
Do you know what you DO want? If you can express that, then it should be possible to find sources for that, such as education.
On a side rant, this is the same question that comes up with respect to Hollywood and pisses me off. "Why are most films now derivate, SFX-heavy garbage?" Answer: because people keep rewarding those movies with their dollars.
Feel free to dm me!
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Some misc videos also regarding reviews on Gauges, torches, multi-meters, supplies, etc.
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Anyway these are some channels I'm following lately: https://youtube.com/@Nighthawkinlight https://youtube.com/@thethoughtemporium https://youtube.com/@ButWhySci
They repeated every test
They checked out all the data on their lists
And then, the alien anthropologists
Admitted they were still perplexed
But on eliminating every other reason
For our sad demise
They logged the only explanation left
This species has amused itself to death
“ - Roger Waters, -Amused to Death_ 1992
This is the defining characteristic of the overly online crowd: their relationship to the Internet is substantively different to those who aren’t. And it colors how they behave online, and how they socialize.
So there's a choice between low risk entertainment that caps out at like 20% of the value of what your favorite thing is, and higher risk entertainment that very well could still be terrible but might have a chance of being good.
AI bridges that gap to de-risk the high investment entertainment so you no longer have to make that choice.
And then after watching we think: what a waste of time!
So perhaps what we need is an algorithm (AI?) to compute for us if we will like any given piece of content. I.e., the recommendation algorithm should be under /our/ control, not theirs.
This is not true, there are many ways to restrict who can see videos you post on TikTok. You can set it to "followers only" or "friends only" where only mutuals see. There's even an option to make a video completely private - only viewable by you. This is common knowledge for anybody who has used the platform in more than just the most cursory of ways, and I suspect that the author has not.
Furthermore, the article makes the point that most people (2/3rds) consume TikTok instead of making content for it, then spends the rest of the article comparing it to reality television.
People post all kinds of content to TikTok. Short form sketches, their music, short dramatic films.
>The term “attention economy” captures the extent of this domination: To be considered worthwhile, ideas must first entertain.
Here is a 3 minute video of a transgender person talking about the unique way they connected to the anime Neon Genesis Evangelion: https://www.tiktok.com/@justnausicaa/video/72534442906033882...
It made me think about the series in a way I never had before, and it's just a person talking to the camera. No jump cuts of "vlogger voice."
Then there's satire, where a point is made through comedy: https://www.tiktok.com/@bjcalvillo/video/7231313547857349930
Here's a short clip of a speech Ursula K Le Guin, famed 20th century science fiction author gave in 2014: https://www.tiktok.com/@leftoftheprojectorpod/video/72100686...
Here's something that is closer to what the article describes, but I think it's beautiful: https://www.tiktok.com/@dutchdeccc/video/7223142742933703978
All of these came across my "For You" page in the past couple months. As humans, might we be "wired" to view images of people communicating an idea as more exciting than text? Maybe. But I remain unconvinced that TikTok is somehow "worse" than anything else.
I’ve been trying to wrap my head around this. Perhaps I’ve just gotten old enough to take up the mantle of my parents, this is just the same thing I did to them and I should check myself before I make a hypocrite and a fool of myself. Except I don’t feel like this quite neatly explained the rift.
> Understanding TikTok through the lens of ubiquitous reality TV allows us to see that oddly named phenomena like “Main Character Syndrome”—in which the overly online dramatize their lives—aren’t aberrations. If TikTokkers act like the stars of their own entertainment channels, that isn’t a psychological issue—it’s an accurate assessment of the media landscape that reality TV established. On TikTok, we really are encouraged to treat our online presence as the proscenium arch, a curated pass to our “real” lives, even when we’re producing content explicitly for entertainment.
There we go. See, in _my day_ I was just a passive observer to other worlds. There were countless channels, films, games, etc. that created a reality that was often more vivid and compelling than meatspace. But for the most part, I was just the audience. I unplugged regularly to assert myself to the rest of the world, because that’s what I had learned I needed to do. Now, this alternate reality is bidirectional and real time. They aren’t merely observing, but interacting with the world through the lens of social media. And they’ve been doing it that way for the bulk of their lives, so it feels normal. Everything else doesn’t.
This helps me empathize with them more, but not the other way around. It doesn’t really help me rejigger my interactions with them to make them more meaningful. And I can’t help but feel this way of interfacing with the world is disastrous.
Sadly the conclusion each activist makes is that there’s no way to reform it. We have to live with it.
I think the realization of the wasteland helps you in your life if you allow it: