ADAM, host of the, ''MYTH of the 20th CENTURY'' Podcast joins us once again to discuss the psychology of MEDIA technology and the nature of PROPAGANDA in the 21st CENTURY.
An episode about different generations' experience of media might be interesting. Maybe have Ace on (been a minute) to rep Gen Z and a Millennial commentator too? The generational divide now seems to be along the lines of technology and media usage. We even have micro-generations because of how rapidly things change on the internet.
Good insight about micro-generations. It used to be that parents were too outdated to teach their kids anything useful about the world. It undermined their authority and encouraged generational solipsism among the young. Nowadays it’s not just parents - things change so fast that older siblings live in different worlds than younger ones, and the generational solipsism gets more and more granular.
Like my older siblings who were really into Homestar Runner, my younger brother who was into Club Penguin, separated by only a few years, and yet we all kind of watched the same TV shows and movies.
This can be related to algorithmic siloing. There’s no common culture, just more of what the algorithm pushes individuals to look at. High school kids I know don’t seem to have niche interests in music anymore and it’s been that way for at least a decade . For a while it seemed like popular YouTubers has taken the place of music in terms of dividing up social group tastes, but even that seems to have disappeared.
But then above it all still hover a couple huge media-driven figures who are Celebrities with a capital C. Taylor Swift everyone just knows about, not even for music anymore.
Re: The generational shortening and the speed of the news cycle crowding out of collective memory the possibility for “historical” events. The Facebook Newsfeed pioneered this, and I distinctly recall everyone HATED it when it was rolled out. The complaint specifically was: I don’t want to be bombarded with info about other people that I’m not actively looking for.
Fast-forward to today’s smartphone culture where being bombarded with other people’s unsolicited info is exactly what people go online to get. It’s truly a different world than a mere 15 years ago.
Also, re: Alex Jones a NBd his influence: I remember high school kids watching and quoting him around 2017-18 from YouTube. The whole “turning the frogs gay” thing was a hit. So I gather he had some kind of substantial audience/reach/popularity that warranted taking down.
Yeah, the timing is weird on that count, but maybe the point is that it wasn’t about him per se but about trying to normalize the action of banning controversial voices from these platforms—if that’s the goal, they wouldn’t want to start big, but rather small yet recognizable and then ramp up.
When I try to remember more of the context, at least with Twitter there was this prelude to his banning where everyone was wondering whether they were going to actually do it, and there was a minority of voices screaming that if they could do it to him, they could do it to anyone—Jones was just low-hanging fruit since everyone knew him as a bit of a crank, so people would in general be fine accepting Twitter kicking him off, thereby establishing the precedent. Lo and behold, only a year and a half later we get hit with COVID and Floyd, where social media went ban-crazy on any contrary messaging, and that culminated in getting rid of Trump’s account, which was an enormously powerful move.
Destruction/manipulation of older printed materials has been happening for a while. I recall seeing C.S.Lewis essays originally printed in the 50s but by the 70s reprint his references to the “white man” had all been suppressed.
An episode about different generations' experience of media might be interesting. Maybe have Ace on (been a minute) to rep Gen Z and a Millennial commentator too? The generational divide now seems to be along the lines of technology and media usage. We even have micro-generations because of how rapidly things change on the internet.
Good insight about micro-generations. It used to be that parents were too outdated to teach their kids anything useful about the world. It undermined their authority and encouraged generational solipsism among the young. Nowadays it’s not just parents - things change so fast that older siblings live in different worlds than younger ones, and the generational solipsism gets more and more granular.
Like my older siblings who were really into Homestar Runner, my younger brother who was into Club Penguin, separated by only a few years, and yet we all kind of watched the same TV shows and movies.
This can be related to algorithmic siloing. There’s no common culture, just more of what the algorithm pushes individuals to look at. High school kids I know don’t seem to have niche interests in music anymore and it’s been that way for at least a decade . For a while it seemed like popular YouTubers has taken the place of music in terms of dividing up social group tastes, but even that seems to have disappeared.
But then above it all still hover a couple huge media-driven figures who are Celebrities with a capital C. Taylor Swift everyone just knows about, not even for music anymore.
Great work
One more point from a garrulous old fart like me:
Re: The generational shortening and the speed of the news cycle crowding out of collective memory the possibility for “historical” events. The Facebook Newsfeed pioneered this, and I distinctly recall everyone HATED it when it was rolled out. The complaint specifically was: I don’t want to be bombarded with info about other people that I’m not actively looking for.
Fast-forward to today’s smartphone culture where being bombarded with other people’s unsolicited info is exactly what people go online to get. It’s truly a different world than a mere 15 years ago.
Also, re: Alex Jones a NBd his influence: I remember high school kids watching and quoting him around 2017-18 from YouTube. The whole “turning the frogs gay” thing was a hit. So I gather he had some kind of substantial audience/reach/popularity that warranted taking down.
LEGIT - but again, in the EARLY 00s, he was showing up in HOLLYWOOD movies and on FOXNEWS. And dropping content about how, ''9/11 was an INSIDE JOB''.
WHY destroy him 20 years after his PEAK and then claim its because of some dumb shit he said about SANDY HOOK is the point.
Yeah, the timing is weird on that count, but maybe the point is that it wasn’t about him per se but about trying to normalize the action of banning controversial voices from these platforms—if that’s the goal, they wouldn’t want to start big, but rather small yet recognizable and then ramp up.
When I try to remember more of the context, at least with Twitter there was this prelude to his banning where everyone was wondering whether they were going to actually do it, and there was a minority of voices screaming that if they could do it to him, they could do it to anyone—Jones was just low-hanging fruit since everyone knew him as a bit of a crank, so people would in general be fine accepting Twitter kicking him off, thereby establishing the precedent. Lo and behold, only a year and a half later we get hit with COVID and Floyd, where social media went ban-crazy on any contrary messaging, and that culminated in getting rid of Trump’s account, which was an enormously powerful move.
Destruction/manipulation of older printed materials has been happening for a while. I recall seeing C.S.Lewis essays originally printed in the 50s but by the 70s reprint his references to the “white man” had all been suppressed.