Maybe. I think the point is valid but in the traditional media there is plenty of ways in which the incentives and rewards lead to pathological behavior, especially with TV but also with some forms of print.
I totally agree that there are always incentives at play! I'm not even trying to make the claim that they're worse, although I do believe that.
One of the new incentives more at play with modern media is using a sense of social visibility, community, and belonging as a reward. Well sometimes true, I think that for the most part it is false or at least very shallow.
Someone shouting at or praising a book, newspaper, or TV rarely felt like they were part of something bigger and making a difference.
New Media enables these feelings in a way that I think is exaggerated, and leads to a different type of pathological Behavior.
To take an example, I think that some people, on some level, feel that posting some mundane comment about superconductivity makes them feel more part of the science, history, and Society. It is a subtle satisfaction of a need to validate ones on existence. I know this all sounds very Freudian, and it probably is. But my central objection is that this gratification is just a new form of junk food for the mind, leaving people malnourished and ultimately dissatisfied.
It's basically a psychological trap, like someone satisfying their need to learn with a tweet instead of reading a book. Not everything needs to be a book, but some people trick themselves into thinking they're a scholar after reading a tweet.
That's true. It is something I'm observing with kids around me: they don't learn from books, they hate to read, but they consume video like there is no tomorrow, wherever and whenever they can. Inane stuff, but also really bad stuff as well as good stuff. Getting them to be selective is hard, but it is far less hard than to try to get them to read.
I really struggle with this, I would love to get my kids to read more (they are the ones I can influence the easiest) but it's very much an uphill battle. Their peer group is just like them, and 'reading is for old people' is pretty much how that whole generation sees it. They may well be right and I'm probably tilting at windmills but I'll keep trying. I wouldn't know how to get through life or run a business without my literacy and ability to write, it's what allows me to absorb knowledge far faster than I could do from any other means of communication. Video, in comparison, sucks. It is so low in information density that unless the subject is something where video actually enhances the information it is a distraction and bloat.
Yeah I think that's another way of viewing what I'm saying. Different levels of information density I'm fine with, but what concerns me is that the median itself is rarely conducive to nuance and detail. Even some of the top tier educational videos gloss over things that make the conclusions conditional or even completely incorrect. It has the appearance of authoritative knowledge, but if you take it at face value you'd have a completely inaccurate understanding of the subject matter. I'm a scientist myself and watched what I thought was a fascinating and detailed 30 minute video about power transmission last night. I had a question so I clicked through to written description of the phenomenon which explained it in one paragraph and completely invalidated the video.
I worry about my kids in the world if people lose the expectation of detail
