I’ve been thinking about how we share ideas, shape narratives, and what is remembered — and why. Now, just to be clear, there is a ton of media theory out there which if you’re not familiar with it, I recommend engaging with at least a little. Not because I want to give you homework, but because media are an important part of how we see the world, and they significantly impact how we see and analyze the world. So go dig out those Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman essays for a quiet read at your pleasure, but in the meantime let’s forge ahead.
So, my starting point: What is shared (and how, and why), what is remembered (and how, and why), and hence what is available to be engaged with and built upon, is determined to a significant part by available and popular media of their time.
Marshall McLuhan famously stated that the medium is the message, meaning that the medium itself kind of sets an agenda of sorts. It doesn’t just determine what is shared, but it shares its own point of view that all the content tends to be subservient to. Two blunt examples: TV is a visual medium and an entertainment medium, so the content needs to be engaging and visual, and/but TV also tells us that visuals that keep watchers watching are what counts. (Which has implications also for how political communication works, etc.) Twitter was a text-based social media channel that forced users to share their thoughts in very brief texts, and it rewarded high engagement with these thoughts. That meant that content needed to be built around engagement (anger, rage, provocation, shitposting, etc.), and/but Twitter as a medium also told us that short jokes and provocations a are what counts and that there is no place for nuance.
So where are we currently with “new” media, by which I mean new as in: non-traditional mass media; so I’m not comparing this to newspapers, TV or radio, but to digital/social media? The currently dominant crop of “new” digital media are based on short form video coupled to algorithmic dissemination. Those two things — short form video, algorithmic dissemination — are very closely interrelated and cannot be separated from one another. This is quite a change from just a decade ago, when for example text-based and image-based social media (notably, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram) were still also relevant, which they right now are not.
So: Short form video plus algorithmic dissemination. Part one is video, which is hugely creative, but in a very specific and quite narrow way. Part two is algorithmic dissemination, which has strong inherent biases: For one, the upper-case Algorithmic Biases that replicate and amplify pre-existing discriminations. But on top of that, the algorithms we are talking about in the context of social media are dissemination algorithms — algorithms that determine how much exposure any piece of content gets by amplifying or restricting the reach of the content — that optimize for engagement and virality.
Compare this to other options: Compared to any digital media, for example, sharing anything through physical media is inherently harder (see: books, newspapers, paintings, sculptures, DVDs, etc.). But also, as mentioned before, even during the short (15-20 years) era of social media, we’ve seen photo-based (Instagram, Facebook) and text-based social media (Twitter, Facebook) gain in popularity, and then decline quite rapidly again.
So, for now, most of the mainstream “online discourse” such as it is happens through consumer apps that are built around: short-form video, algorithmically disseminated.
This has implications:
One, it requires specific narrative skills to share ideas. If you can’t make your idea work in a short video that captures a certain type and amount of engagement, nobody will see it.
Two, it favors certain types of ideas and creative projects over others. Notably, things that are happy/funny/easily scrollable. Tiktok and Insta videos tend to be lightweight entertainment, and where darker or more outrageous things are posted they often disguise quite smartly as something else. (You’ve all seen, at some point, a video that seemed to show someone cooking or doing fitness while telling a much more earnest story about mental health or political conflict.) Think of it as a media-savvy way to trick algorithms and content moderation policy.
Three, effectively this ecosystem gatekeeps certain types of thinking. Long-form, deep, text-based exploration of ideas – the kind that allows us to really grapple with complex topics – faces an increasingly uphill battle for attention and engagement. It’s not that these forms are dying; it’s that they’re being pushed to the margins of our collective conversation.
I was thinking about this during discussions at the recent ThingsCon conference. At ThingsCon, there are a whole bunch of designers, researchers, tinkerers. Some of them express their ideas through prototypes: Highly video-compatible outputs. Some through concept videos, a near-perfect video format. Others write academic long-form research papers. Turning academic research into a compelling video is a real art form, it’s simply very hard to do and not many academics know how to do it well.
We also talked about why some things are remembered to much more than others: The Bauhaus created some great ideas and concepts, no doubt. But a good chunk of its popularity probably can be traced back to just a few students like Lucia Moholy who took a whole bunch photos at a time when that was much less common. By documenting both the outputs and the process and environment of their production, they created a visual archive. Without that archive, the creative output of those few years of design and architecture school (just 14 years between 1919 and 1933) most certainly wouldn’t have realized the immense, long-term impact that it has over the decades.
How do we share and document our discussions and explorations today? So far, I’ve mostly avoided video as a format and stuck to text and imagery. I certainly try to at least have a top-level documentation of every relevant project URL (after all, nothing is quite real without a URL to bind it together). These are questions we need to ask ourselves. In the meantime, if you see a project, idea, or person’s work you think is valuable to remember, help spread the word. Repeat it, remind people in different discourse spaces. Maybe you can be someone else’s lone photographer that contributes the archive that allows their ideas to be remembered a few decades from now.
