What We'll Lose In The Great Information Transfer
(and why I'm suddenly a catastrophist)
Table of Contents For Skimmers:
Introduction
Humankind continually battles a variety of challenges. How to coexist despite our differences. How to reconcile death and nothingness. How to parallel park while strangers rate your performance. But perhaps most intriguing of these dilemmas is the ongoing tension between information, accessibility and communication.
Some 32,000 years ago our ancestors stumbled into the most egalitarian form of transmitting ideas; anyone with eyes and a fire bright enough could make sense of paintings on the wall. Fast forward a few millennia and ideographs popped up, ascribing symbols to concepts and throwing a monkey wrench into linguistic progress. By 3,000 BCE Sumerians needed a way to write down recipes for beer, so cuneiform was developed - a system of logo-syllabic pictographs.
From there, our communication systems sped up. Papyrus gave way to medieval manuscripts, permitting bored monks to pen Spongebobian letters in the hopes of distracting the majority from remembering that they can’t read.
In the 1400s, Gutenberg’s printing press made literature more available for educated elites, helping snobbery reach record highs across Europe. Fortunately, it wouldn’t be long until Martin Luther risked his life to lead a communication revolution that translated The Adventures of Blue Sky Daddy and his Twelve Sidekicks into a plethora of languages.
Even then, it would take hundreds of years of intellectual progress until mass education - the skeleton key for unlocking information for all beings - would be prioritized. Surely, the Dark Ages were named so for a reason, but the idea that literacy should be commonplace slowly snowballed throughout the Renaissance, picking up speed during The Enlightenment before avalanching into a 21st Century human right.
Still, the imposing figure of Liberalism remains only the guarantor of literacy. Although many countries lag behind, today most of them have some structure in place to teach children reading and writing. In the advent of these structures we’ve course-corrected humanity’s greatest mistake, one which began when our predecessors abandoned their caves. Demonopolizing access to both receiving and creating information is a feat to be celebrated, but not one bereft of challenges.
Thesis
Pushed on by the headwinds of handheld technology and its limitless opportunities, humankind is venturing into uncharted territory. Information was once gatekept in libraries, mailed periodicals and the magazines teenage boys hid under their respective mattress. Of course, technology created new forms of communication, such as the radio, television and now, the internet.
On the surface, some may perceive this age of crowdsourced information as beautifully egalitarian. Although the waters are brimming with Alex Jones sea-monsters that slither about deepfake whirlpools, one can find the true state of our world if critical thinking becomes their north star. Nevertheless, a serious problem persists and it is one that worries me deeply.
It seems as though the centuries long battle to make written information universally accessible might soon be for naught. The percentage of young people who read with regularity is declining rapidly. In the late 1970s, 60 percent of 12th graders read some form of literature everyday. By 2016 that number had shrunk to 16 percent. One of every three high school seniors didn’t read for pleasure at all that year.
But teens aren’t staring numbingly out of windows instead of reading books. As we will see, studies report the remarkable amount of time teens spend on social media, specifically opting to eye-down videos and not e-books. As much as it may sound like it, my argument is not of the old man, getoffmyyard variety. I agree that learning can take place through numerous vehicles, Snapchat not excluded.
Rather, I am asserting that we are in the age of a Great Information Transfer. That the trend of video-learning is not only here to stay but becoming normalized among our youths. From this springs some discomforting questions. Who will be The Uploaders and how trustworthy, how qualified will they be? What and who will be left behind in this great transfer, relegated to the dusty confines of library bookshelves? Will videomakers be able to squeeze Kuhn’s theory of the Paradigm Shift into a desirable, 30-second format? Will they want to? Will they know to?
The Data
Jean M. Twenge, Gabrielle N. Martin, and Brian H. Spitzberg of San Diego State University provided much of the data that inspired this essay. Their 2019 report commissioned for the APA revealed a trend that many might have already believed to be true. Analyzing 50 years of surveys from 1976 to 2016 manifested in an alarming paper titled - “Trends in U.S. Adolescents’ Media Use, 1976 –2016: The Rise of Digital Media, the Decline of TV, and the (Near) Demise of Print.”
Indeed, their paper houses the aforementioned stat concerning the dwindling number of teens who read daily. But their research is not the only of its kind. The Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan conducted a similarly longitudinal study. In 1996, when widespread social media use was still just a glimmer in Mark Zuckerberg’s eye, only 8.3 percent of high school seniors claimed they either “never” read literature or did so only a “few times a year.” That percentage tripled by 2012; the most recent year published by our Wolverine scholars.
Just this June the Bureau of Labor Statistics found that folks ages 15 to 44, otherwise known as Millennials and/or Gen Z, read for “10 minutes or less per day.” Of course, we must account for Covid’s impact on this data collection. After all, one could somehow pretzel themselves into concluding that spending more time at home would naturally discourage reading.
The Literacy Trust collected similar statistics that predate Covid and extend into at least October of 2021. One of their surveys questioned how many young people read outside of class on a daily basis. Precisely before lockdowns began, the year 2019 produced the lowest percentage (25.8) since the study’s inception in 2005. Those numbers spiked during COVID lockdowns but fell back down to Earth in 2021 (30.1 percent.) As life nears closer to business-as-usual, children have returned their books to the shelf once more.
But what is this data if not accompanied by a correlating uptick in video usage? Let’s look where videos are most commonly found today. Murmuration, a nonprofit whose purpose is to bring high quality education to all public students, produced a report noting that by 2022, social media was no longer just “a tool” for Gen Zers, but “a part of their identity.” This helps make sense of the shocking 35 percent of teens who claim to be “almost constantly” on one of those apps, according to Pew.
And what are those apps? Primarily YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat and Facebook. Within that holy quintet, 25 percent of teens opt for Snapchat and TikTok; two places known for their short videos. For those wondering: with perhaps the minor exception of FaceBook, no, adolescents are not doing any significant reading while on these apps.
When they are reading for education, however, a generational shift in preferred learning style is evident. Up to 60 percent of Millennials claim printed books to be their preferred style but for Gen Z that number drops below the majority line, down to 47 percent. Unsurprisingly, 59 percent of Gen Zers selected YouTube videos to be their most preferred learning style. The transition is happening before our eyes.
Allow me to augment this research by citing a passage from my own work, recycling that “On average, tweens spend 4:44 hours on ‘entertainment screen’ media per day with that number rising to 7:22 for teenagers. Note that this does not include time spent for neither schoolwork nor homework.” That sound you just heard wasn’t just a gasp, it was the death knoll of reading as a widespread form of communicating.
Parents are surely aware of this trend, but it easy to understand why they sweep this dirt under the rug. Shoving and iPad in front of a child induces silence quicker than a glance from Vincenzo Pentangeli. Now, teachers and people with too much time on their hands (like myself, who occupies both roles) are left to expose the grime. As an activity, young people are reading less and watching videos, particularly shorter ones, more. The data simply supports this.
What The Impact Isn’t
Hence, you are forced to live with the unpleasant sounding “Great Information Transfer” nickname for this era, which sadly does more to underline my inability to write profoundly than it does highlight the unnerving time we’re entering. Gathering the data to coin this homely term wasn’t terribly difficult, but making predictions about its impact will surely make a fool of me.
A Canadian scholar known for intertwining the world of philosophy and media studies, Marshall McLuhan’s revelatory work altered how we think about communication. In his most famous publication, The Medium Is the Message (1967), McLuhan expressed his central argument when writing: “The personal and social consequences of any medium—that is, of any extension of ourselves—result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology.”
Let’s strain McLuhan’s word soup into something more palatable. The medium humans choose for conveying information reflects ourselves as a species in that moment in time. In a rather pertinent example, he simultaneously debunks the guns-don’t-kill-people, people-kill-people contention while clearly explaining his own claim.
McLuhan quips that modern guns were designed with the explicit purpose of murdering our fellow species, so to ignore the driving factor behind the gun’s development is nothing more than a foolhardy attempt at absolving us from responsibility when people are shot down. In a grander, more abstract sense, even guns, according to McLuhan, can be a medium of communication if we ascertain the reason humans invented them and why they’re being used.
A more clear example to help relay his thesis: the electric light. It’s invention and widespread adoption expressed specific human desires. The desire to extend our frivolities and pleasures into the nighttime, perhaps by watching Ted Williams at 7:30 instead of playing hooky to catch him midday. The desire to bring a crime-preventing glow to alleyways, making it safe for women to ditch the household and lindyhop into premarital romance. Electricity communicates a longing to break liveliness out of the confines that daylight once kept it in.
Naturally, this led me to wonder why such attention-dominant apps exist and what the youths’ preference for them (over reading) says about humanity. In McLuhanian terms, what is the younger generation communicating? In a most factual sense, today’s youth might simply opt for a means of ingesting information that requires the least energy. Punctuating this is the fact the I just asked Siri for a synonym for the word underscore and you can see it in the first word of this sentence. In other terms, having someone explain Lockean political theory in a 48 second TikTok saves you from the countless hours needed to finish Two Treatises on Government. I get it.
Prioritizing efficiency in this way only requires one to find comfort with their ego. Unlike what I am doing here, you can no longer utter “I recall my first time reading Judith Jarvis Thomson…” while in the midst of a grad school debate on abortion. The push to reference your personal bibliography often gives more weight to your credentials than it does your argument, and something tells me that the younger folks will be okay with missing out on this self-aggrandizing habit.
Still, the substitution of videos for literature is truly alarming. But to be clear, it in no way relates to apathy or depressed curiosity. Younger folks are imbibing information at an incredible pace and the last two elections are touchstone moments that partition any perceived connection between shrinking reading time and attitudes of indifference. In fact, Gen Z turnout was a major reason that younger people outvoted Boomers in the 2018 midterms. At least for now, it appears as though today’s youth isn’t eschewing books due to a lack of interest, rather they merely prefer the timesaving outputs from short-video apps.
Pandemic aside, reading, writing and math scores haven’t been much affected by this book-to-video switch, either. Although the best WaPo can offer is a confounding “we’re not sure why” when explaining how American education, contrary to what you’ll hear in the media, actually isn’t crumbing apart. It still seems like students are getting by just fine with their new preferred learning style.
The true test will be seen in the latest data post-shutdowns. For now, one might assume teenagers are telling us that not only can they accomplish learning goals on their own terms, but they can consume more content more quickly precisely because of their terms. Their gratitude is extended to uploaders through subscriptions, not to authors in the form of fan letters.
But therein lies the rub. Whether it be YouTube videos or TikTok shorts, the younger generations depend upon others to present them the information they seek. While education levels and civic engagement might remain unaffected during the Great Information Transfer, the range of selection for available content might dry up. This runs counterintuitive to what we’ve come to believe about the internet. Shouldn’t this unprecedented, global hub of human connectivity cash in on our individual uniqueness and therefore function as a marketplace for every type of content known to Man?
I’m dubious. Wistia’s State of the Video Report for 2022 discussed how the video has come to dominate American information consumption and will continue to do so in spite of the loosening of Covid restrictions. All the signs point towards the video as a means of communication that is here to stay, if not grow exponentially. And while that sentence sounds like it was ripped from an old Malcolm Gladwell article, it evolves into something weightier when remembering that video usage is inclining exactly as reading is declining.
Content producers of all kinds are aware of this. It is no coincidence that everyone from octogenarian politicians to scholastic corporations have created TikTok accounts in recent years. I’m loathe to trust either of the two aforementioned entities, which without further ado brings us to my my pressing concerns: can we trust The Uploaders and what, or what won’t they, they upload? What gets left behind and can we trust what gets pushed in front of our eyes?
What The Impact Could Be
As we plow forward like hormonal ne’er-do-wells into our relationship with universally accessible technology, the internet exposes itself as an Orwellian experiment. Although not mothered by capitalism, it was quickly adopted by those with a keen eye for moneymaking. Today, the American dream no longer requires the sweat of your brow or inexhaustible gumption. You need only invest in one of those megawatt, circle camera thingys and a cheap editing software.
The promise of monologuing your way to influencer stardom seems obtainable. After all, a vlogging career unlocks a paradisiacal work-life balance where uploaders control where they work, how long they work and what they want to work on. It is a form of vocational liberation and as idyllic as it can be lucrative.
Of course, you’ve read about the hazards of media tech before. It is no secret that the pathway to internet success isn’t accuracy, but attentiveness, and to attract viewership one must be both outlandish and topical. Speed has forsaken caution as much as shock value has honesty. The damage on our society, not just impressionable teens, is evident in the early returns.
Is it a coincidence that Q’Anon, Sandy Hook deniers and Great Replacement Theory have all become mainstream or adjacent to it in modern times? Regardless, this trend and its negative outputs have been commonplace in the national conversation for a decade now, which forced me to turn my gaze upon the Great Information Transfers’ other pitfalls.
If we are to prognosticate the future, this makes it crucial to comprehend a 30,000 foot view of information communications. My handful of introductory paragraphs fall shamefully short of doing it justice, but the big picture pattern is clear. Humans have spent most of their time vying for access to literature, perhaps by fighting for translations or literacy education. Printed words - content - was always there, however. Now literature remains widely accessible. Contrarily, it is the content itself that is in jeopardy, and I have identified three reasons as to why.
My primary concern lies within the content creators themselves. The playbook for success in the internet age has concrete rules, principles supported by the research conducted by Fortune 500 companies and independent polling firms alike:
Shorter videos reign supreme
Stick to trendy, “sexy” topics
If informative or educational, make content entertaining
For current topics, strike while the iron is hot, of course
Although dweebs like myself publish content for the love of the game, many in this day and age do it for income. In keeping with capitalistic tradition, the monetization of video content has tossed aside most, although not all consideration of public good.
While books will not join the BlackBerry, Blockbuster, betamax, or beeper on the Island of Misfit Tech, there still remains a looming challenge. All of the recent data confirms that the eyes of our youth are transfixed more on videos than literature, necessitating someone to put important information in front of them in a new format.
Who will upload the content integral to a well-rounded, American education onto TikTok, Snapchat, YouTube, etc? It took me 13 frustrating minutes just to think of the b-word alliteration a few sentences prior, so color me skeptical that The Uploaders are going to dust off Eric Foner’s Second Founding, read and notetake for ten hours, transcribe their notes to fit a 30 second synopsis, edit the video and then send it off to Social Medialand.
Granted, young folks hardly gravitate towards those subjects anyway. Pew rescues most of my essays, but I don't need them to understand that Americans usually don’t take an interest in Jean-Jacques Rousseau during adolescence. Or Evolutionary Psychology. Or Talmudic Theology. Or Eastern Anthropology.
Dissecting their work is a waste of time and money for The Uploaders. One day, however, the youth will mature into curious minds and wonder about such things. If they hold steadfast to video as their medium of information, they will be left as wanting as they are uninformed.
With no incentive to research, film, and upload them, these headier branches of literature may fall by the wayside. It is difficult to envision an army of tech-savvy teens dutifully thumbing through The Classics before breaking them down into tidy TikTok videos. Despite some progress, we’ve yet to see a barrage of world experts take to the apps to pick up the slack, either. Sometimes it really does seem like it is the Green Brothers against the world on this front.
Even if this army of teens comes to fruition, algorithms will likely impede their progress. My second concern is the way in which popular video content becomes so. New users to a video app often relay their interests in a quick survey. Then, the app places videos with those interests in front of you. The longer you stay on the video, the more data the algo has and similar videos suddenly appear. All of the video apps either copy this process or do something similar. Moreover, crowdsourcing is deployed to further pinpoint what video you may want to watch.
So far, this hyperchanneling of interests has largely resulted in powerful echo chambers that calcify one in their passions instead of introducing them to others. Along the way it exposes them to anti-vax conspiracies, toxic, unsubstantiated abortion alternatives and the quacks responsible for the January 6th Insurrection. While the untrustworthy companies (or countries: China) behind these apps certainly play a hand in popular content, there is no denying that their algorithms are fueled in part by organic human desire. In the most troubling terms, we’re seeing such dangerous content because we like it. Because we want to.
This leaves little room for the Lockes, Pinkers, Wests and Wills of the world to creep their way in front of our eyes, especially now that The New York Times has proclaimed TikTok the favored search engine of Gen Z. But what does happen if you type “John Locke” into TikTok’s search feature? The first video is an uninformative, two minute clip of his most famous quotes, which has tallied a comparatively paltry 15k views.
Next in the queue? A 12-second scene from BBC’s Sherlock series which has been watched over 540,000 times. Never forget, algorithms inherently prevent you from straying outside of your established interests. To boot, these app’s search functions display little promise of introducing you to the content I fear will be left behind. Unless the populace at large simultaneously discovers the urge to study medieval Christian theology, St. Augustine might be relegated to obscurity, otherwise known as Andrew Sullivan’s Dishcast (I joke, its a great pod and hugely popular!)
My third concern questions if presenting Locke’s ideas - or a similar figure’s - is even feasible on such a platform? Here, a logistical and stylistic issue arise. University scholars spend lifetimes studying such figures and movements, finding themselves solely responsible for fascinating course titles such as Boccaccio's Decameron: Tales of Sex & Death in the Middle Age. Can we really expect the life works of these influential thinkers to be boiled down into a series of 30-second TikToks? How can one read Foucault’s Discipline and Punish and do justice by it in so short a montage?
Brevity truly is an imperative. You may not trust Microsoft’s study that the current attention span lasts 8 seconds, but the Head of Product Marketing for TikTok Europe, Kris Boger, surely does. It led him to state that: “Undoubtedly short-form video is keeping people, especially young people, entertained, informed and engaged…We look forward to seeing it fully cement itself as a permanent, effective and important way for brands to reach consumers for years to come.”
He doesn’t represent the only company that subscribes to the short-form method. Snapchat released a 2020 report approving the same technique. Last year, FaceBook (Meta) launched short-form reels in order to compete. In fact, The Zuck doubled down by pressing Instagram to do the same. Just recently YouTube announced its plan to draw The Uploaders from TikTok by sending them 45 percent of ad revenue on short-form videos.
Take a moment and consider your favorite authors, thinkers or influential figures of serious consequence. Imagine someone indulging you to present their contributions to our world. Their famous publications, pieces of art, history-shaping rebellions, ideological battles: the things that make you forget to eat lunch. Is there any way you could possibly squeeze their legacy into a minute-or-less video that young folks could stomach?
A Prognostication
Clearly, I’ve brought into question the reliability of The Uploaders, wondering who they are, their intentions and capabilities, and if they could be trusted. Some can. Some can’t. Unfortunately, the somecans seem to have the impact of a slingshot pebble while the somecant’s hit like a catapult hurling fireballs into a Tito’s distillery. David’s defeat of Goliath, which in recent history may look like the coverage of George Floyd’s murder, come few and far between, hence the mythological reverence.
I predict communal backsliding to spring from the carelessness of The Uploaders. We’ve already seen some proof in how Covid and vaccine information were disseminated. For instance, if today’s youth had landed on The Atlantics’s Derek Thompson for their Covid news, they would have be armed to the teeth with the accurate reporting needed to determine an appropriate risk profile during the pandemic.
Instead, as Pew divulges, turning to TikTok and YouTube undoubtedly refined those companies’ respective algorithms which in turn exposed young folks to conspiracy theories; ones that might have persuaded them to avoid the vaccine for unscientific reasons. Ones which might have encouraged them to join super-spreader events maskless and unafraid.
Pew’s 2020 report, “Americans Who Mainly Get Their News on Social Media Are Less Engaged, Less Knowledgeable” supports this notion. Most people who get their political news from social media are under age 30; a claim that on the surface isn’t very troubling. It is the 57 percent of those in that category, however, which causes concern as they test out as having “low political knowledge.”
Pew also polled about a pandemic conspiracy theory that suggested powerful people planned this virus’ spread. About “a quarter of U.S. adults who get most of their news through social media (26%) say they have heard ‘a lot’ about this conspiracy theory, and about eight-in-ten (81%) have heard at least “‘a little’ – a higher share than among those who turn to any of the other six platforms for their political news.” Gulp.
The elements for video success are in direct opposition to what is required for a well-informed public. To become an author supported by a major publishing house, writers usually undergo a rigorous fact-checking, peer-review process. Although the state of journalism is edging closer and closer to ideological punditry, reporters undergo the same process. You cannot always trust the information you receive there - which is why high school civics teachers dedicate units to deciphering bias in the news - but at least there are mechanisms in place to weed out the preposterous dishonesty. To some extent, the same can be said for nonfiction literature.
This is only part of what today’s youth will lose. If anything, the popular video destinations are notorious for making boundless the harmful, misleading and conspiratorial content that uploaders camouflage as news. Every added second spent on a video and its host site is money earned. Ethics is the only motivation for informational honesty, and one does not need a TikTok from Robert Reich to learn corporate America’s relationship with morality.
Academic integrity will continue to be sacrificed if we worship at the Altar of Getrichquickism. To my knowledge, the lust for money isn’t cooling off. Lacking an audience large enough to propel The Uploaders into converting books into videos, bombastic, groundless editorials will become the norm. The information game no longer has a referee and its points are tallied by viewers and time viewed, not responsible, albeit potentially boring scholarship.
Although born of the same parents, attention is now the favorite son of moneymakers, not the sensation of a curiosity soothed. I expect a fight among corporations and influencers alike to conquer more market share. The monetization of attention spans will push content makers further into devious business strategies, no matter how damaging they may be. Major events such as pandemics, celebrity deaths, and political controversies will become races in which the level of absurdity determines the winner.
This causes ethics and factual integrity to divorce. After all, who can remain faithful when the temptress of luxury struts past? And what a savvy seductress she has become. Flaunting addictive video apps in front of a demographic known for their intemperance might be the most brilliant innovation since Standard Oil went vertical. The competition to capture attention is underway, its rewards leave little desire to publish anything reminiscent of intellectual pursuit.
I’m aware of how pessimistic I sound. How pessimistic I’ve become. But isn’t that a natural reaction when business models target the most destructive, regressive elements of human behavior? The national trajectory is in dire need of precisely what apps aren’t prioritizing and The Uploaders aren’t producing: educational, accurate content that stitches together our social fabric. I fear we can only hope that The Great Information Transfer never morphs into The Great Substitution, for what we lose in precious literature will never compare to what we lose in ourselves.