this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2023
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This article is well written, but the intense focus on TikTok is strange. I don’t understand how TikTok can be a source of true information or a town square for that matter. The videos are incredibly short and then the next one comes. You see a lot of dumb shit and stupid memes. It’s sometimes good at making people feel like they are learning something, but when you ask those people what they learned, they can’t synthesize or explain what it was they supposedly digested. To me, TikTok seems like pure dopamine hits without any sustainability.
Twitter, with its short character count, wasn’t any good for debate or sustained learning either. It was good for being a dunk tank—a place where people try to dunk on each other. It also became an echo chamber that helped polarize people politically. I don’t really understand the appeal of Twitter.
There have been surveys showing young people get information from TikTok even if it is a bad source.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbescommunicationscouncil/2022/06/29/tiktok-as-a-source-of-information-for-gen-z-and-what-it-means-for-brands/
I feel old when I think “kids these days” but I do wonder if there is a deep, fundamental problem with TikTok, Reels, YouTube shorts, and such. I taught in the HS for awhile this past year and I felt like the students had a very short attention span. How are they supposed to give sustained focus to learn something when they are training their brain for short, 90 second (or shorter) bursts?
I've seen some very well made and informative videos on Tik Tok, but they're almost always videos correcting the misinformation from other videos and compared to videos filled with misinformation they're not even a drop in the bucket.
i agree this metaphor of the global town square where everyone speaks at once in sound bites that magically encourages quality communication is some original dotcom era internet marketing style bullshit
burn the whole thing and make something new that does encourage learning and progress