I find a lot of these articles that compare worries about social media to worries about TV, or worries about comic books, or in this case worried about trashy novels on mass market paperbacks incredibly frustrating.
They miss the fundamental issue with social media that was never true before.
The answer is data. No other media before ever had so much information about every individual that consumed it. No media before could tailor their content at an individual level. About the most you could tailor your content to was a zip code.
This is the problem with TikTok. It’s not that the quality of content is low. It’s that TikTok knows exactly what you like and when you like it, and can give you the exact content to scratch that itch at the time.
There are several problems with this.
- It sucks up all your time.
- You’re never uncomfortable and/or consuming content that isn’t what you already want at the time. That means you are rarely exposed to anything that isn’t releasing dopamine all the time and it means you’re rarely challenged.
If you compare the viewership of Game of Thrones with the readership of the original novels, the gap is enormous — not because one is “better,” but because different media win different kinds of attention.
Most people are never choosing between Being and Time and an HN thread.
But if they were forced to choose, we already know which one would dominate sheer engagement.
That doesn’t mean HN replaces philosophy — it just means that attention has its own economics.
And any medium that captures attention will inevitably show qualities (good and bad) that heavyweight works simply can’t compete with.
>If you compare the viewership of Game of Thrones with the readership of the original novels
The novels are unfinished though and I hardly believe they will be completed by him seeing how the penultimate novel has taken him over a decade to do about 75% of it and him being 77 already. I would never start a series I know it is unlikely to be completed.
I'll point out that I read Steven Brust's Vlad Taltos series, which started in 1983, is projected to run to 19 books with 17 done. Brust is 70, but he appears to be in reasonable shape, and the books have been pretty regular of late, so it looks like he'll finish.
I also read the War Against the Chtorr series by David Gerrold. That also started in 1983, but the last published book, the 4th of 7, came out in 1993. Gerrold being 81, despite his claims for almost a decade that books 5 and 6 are near completion, I am confident I will not see the end of the series written by him :-(
I started A Game of Thrones in 1996, when I walked into a bookstore out of the cold in Toronto, and asked for a recommendation (I will always remember that day for several reasons, not just A Song of Fire and Ice!)
30 years later (give or take a week), I don't expect to ever see the end; I have a feeling GRRM has kind of lost interest/passion in the Song of Fire and Ice series, since he's started churning out other stuff like Dunk, but you know what, its ok.
There is a big difference between paperbacks and TikTokification:
Paperbacks required authors to spend the same amount of time/effort to create content with a vastly expanded market and distribution mechanism.
TikTok and Insta created N creators to M consumers where N is nearly the same as M. Making the distribution channels bigger but effortless to create content doesn’t magically equate quality paperbacks with short form hummingbird-attention videos.
One really appreciates the “pocket” label of this format if one wears suits, sport coats, or blazer jackets, or almost any of several styles of coat that fall under the category of “overcoat”: these books really were pocket size! For those pockets, that is. The thicker ones are pushing it, but the ones closer to 250 pages fit neatly in a blazer pocket. Thicker ones are fine in the cavernous pockets of many overcoats (though, hell, so are trade-size books)
(Phones work better in a jacket, too—I think we made a mistake running away from that clothing style, they’re like wearable purses that also make you look nicer. Sure suits are kinda wasteful with the way the jackets get downgraded if the pants are destroyed, but odd jackets we should have held on to!)
They also fit nicely in the back pocket of jeans, and leveled-out sitting on your wallet. I pretty much always had a book there from middle school until sometime after I was married.
Yeah suits are kinda ass. Again, the need to have trousers so closely matched they can pretty much only come from the same batch as the cloth in the jacket. Sucks. Looks nice, but man that blows.
Jackets are dope, though. Get some summer-weight ones and even in that season you don’t have to use trouser/jeans pockets. So nice.
There is a fundamental difference in consuming short form content, and reading a book- no matter how trashy the book is.
When reading for long hours, or for a short time over days and weeks- it teaches you to concentrate, to have some kind of discipline. It helps you focus and develop empathy. Reading is fundamentally different for the reader, and it makes them do other things well. Reading trash trains you to graduate to serious books- this is true for many.
But consuming TikTok readies you for more TikTok. More Shorts and Reels and Snaps. Wathing short form stuff damages one's ability to do other things as well.
And from the creators' perspective, I think trying to keep up with short form media for engagement's sake actually impedes their ability to create more serious stuff.
I don't totally miss his point, though. When smartphones and "internet places" spread as media, those already ready for serious stuff will graduate to those. And yes, these places will have a small role to play.
But they are definitely more negative than positive.
Genuine classics never disappear, whether it's been 1,000 or 2,000 years (like the Greek philosophers we still read). If something vanishes because of a technological shift, it suggests its value was likely fleeting to begin with. What truly matters tends to survive.
It has sort of surprised me how few teasers/trailers there are in short-form video. Seems like an obvious fit. I'd prefer it over the mediocre mobile games and dick pill ads they sling at me now.
I don't use TikTok but spend some time on Instagram. Despite the format, I enjoy a lot of intellectually stimulating content (and, sometimes, conversations) on the platform.
Sometimes a friend would show me their feed and I'd be shocked at how different the content they are presented by their version of the algorithm.
There are a lot of people putting a lot of effort to create very interesting content and we should not belittle their work just to fein intellectual superiority.
There's really nothing inherently wrong about the format.
> There's really nothing inherently wrong about the format.
"Our conventional response to all media, namely that it is how they are used that counts, is the numb stance of the technological idiot. For the 'content' of a medium is like the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind...The effects of technology do not occur at the level of opinions or concepts, but alter sense ratios or patterns of perception steadily and without any resistance. The serious artist is the only person able to encounter technology with impunity, just because he is an expert aware of the changes in sense perception." — Marshal McLuhan, Understanding Media
I feel like McLuhan is so thoroughly accepted as gospel now that it’s refreshing to see someone casually dismiss the idea out of hand like OC. I would love to see a serious exploration of the argument against McLuhan in 2025, just for fun.
You mean aside from the fact that his quasi-mystical, self-important proclamations have no factual basis? I personally dislike how his ideas cast a cynical veneer over truly transformative changes without actually contributing anything useful to the conversation.
Who takes this stuff as gospel? Academics who study critical theory?
> Over one billion TikTok videos will be viewed today, and yet, you’re still here, reading a speculative essay about media economics. I don’t take that for granted.
Well said. Articles like these bring a sort of relief to me from the constant chaos of short-form media and the like. Very refreshing.
I found this article interesting but I'm not sure I understood the point.
I think the main concern with short form video isn't taste or appetite, but just the ability to digest.[0]
Though the effects on attention might be more acute than we think. A friend of mine found that he's able to read books just fine, if he just switches off his electronics first. Suddenly his brain comes back online...
[0] See also: The mere presence of a smartphone reduces basal attentional performance [even when switched off]
As someone who has a hard time putting down tiktok, I have to say: Yes, the platform and algorithm is addictive and predatory, but some of the content is really good. Lots of very funny sketches, in particular. I don't like dances and whatever, so I get none of that.
I like Cal Newport and own all of his books, but this sort of commentary is ultimately just pretentious. Aristocrats back in the day had similar thoughts about peasants even being literate.
I assure you, by sheer virtue of quantity, no matter what criteria you use YouTube/TikTok/Shorts/etc has a [set of videos] which demonstrates quality similar to any novel or literary work.
It's true there's more garbage out there than ever before, but this is an artifact of democratization of creation and this is good imho. I also reject the premise that time to creation is an indication of quality.
That reasoning doesn’t make any sense. Half a billion litres of Coca Cola are produced every single day, but the chance of a bottle of Coca Cola being made whose quality is similar to that of a good imperial stout is exactly zero, even though they’re both brown carbonated beverages. No amount of quantity can overcome a process intended to standardise for something other than quality. If the algorithm aggressively selects for mediocrity, mediocrity is what will be produced.
I'm not sure I understand your analogy. YouTube has both diversity and quantity at levels tens of orders of magnitude higher than any high-quality-low-quantity good. Given the subjectivity of quality and amounts considered it's simply statistical fact that YouTube will always have things at the highest ends of subjective quality for any category.
The algorithm doesn't select for mediocrity - it selects for viewership, but regardless there are millions of creators at there that aren't optimizing for views anyway. It's the same reason some set of random blog posts or comments on sites such as this one will have quality similar to snippets of the highest quality technical documentation. Sheer diversity and quantity will always win.
YouTube I'd grant you, not Shorts/Reels/TikTok - the format of the media simply isn't amenable to output matching longer-form work, no matter how much gets produced. To me that reads akin to "there are so many tweets that for any criteria a [set of tweets] demonstrate quality similar to any long-form written piece."
> the format of the media simply isn't amenable to output matching longer-form work, no matter how much gets produced
why not? seems like a tautology. what's a robust set of criteria we can use the evaluate this objectively. I bet you TikTok will win. mind you I am not saying the average TikTok is good, just that there's probably some set of videos that that are of comparable quality than something put together over a longer period of time like a novel.
I understand what you're saying and that you're not talking about the average. The problem is specifically that short form things are short. It's like the monkeys on typewriters - you'll get some beautifully crafted sentences, but you're never going to get a number of sentences that add up to an actual work of Shakespeare - they're aren't enough atoms in the universe for the number of monkeys and typewriters you'd need.
But that’s more of a theoretical truth than a practical one, isn’t it? High quality novels are easily found. TikTok videos of equally high quality and depth? Perhaps not so, or exceedingly rarely.
Infinite monkeys with infinite time could surely also produce something spectacular and eye-opening, statistically speaking. But umm, you’d have to wait infinite time for it to be done, so it’s not really efficient when time is a finite resource.
Even movies won’t capture the nuances of a somewhat decent novels. I have no hope to see something really complex like “The Malazan Book of the Fallen” in any other form.
I don’t see how it’s is a statistical fact. There’s nothing I’ve seen on YouTube that compares even slightly to a high quality movie or TV series (unless it’s an unauthorised copy of a movie or TV series…).
that's a funny example, because something like Cobra Kai literally began on YouTube, there are others like Hazbin Hotel.
anyway, as for the statistics, for the case of YouTube since there are is no forced directive to which all videos must follow (creatively), you can treat all videos as random attempts. then it's just stats to show that such a distribution will have outliers that match or exceed in subjective quality the gate kept works (traditional tvs or literature).
Well, you’ll never see an erotic film on YouTube, or a war documentary using real combat footage for example, so there are many categories where it’s simply not capable of competing. And even without straight-up banned content, ‘advertiser-unfriendly’ content is aggressively buried by the algorithm, which discourages people from making it, so the ‘quantity’ part might not be true. Some content might be so heavily punished by the algorithm that almost nobody thinks to make it. This is a problem for your position, as it’s not enough for YouTube to win in some categories; it has to win in every category.
sure, but my point wasn't exclusive to them (hence the etc in the first comment). it was just related to any mass media platform, all of them collectively will win. you are right about YouTube in particular though, good point.
The quality of Coca Cola can only be compared to other colas. Comparing a soft drink to an imperial stout makes no sense. In my book, the imperial stout always has zero quality, because I would never see a reason to voluntarily drink it, whereas I might indulge in a diet coke every now and then.
But that’s why comparing subjective qualities of different things is a waste of time.
YouTube has many highly educational videos that are better than most professional production tv, especially for the hard sciences.
But GP said their reasoning worked regardless of what standards for quality were being used. It was a much stronger statement than the one you’re defending.
Comparing one billion exact copies of the exact same thing to a different thing that shares some superficial qualities doesn’t make any sense whatsoever when the GP is simply saying that among the huge quantity of content on TikTok and YouTube some short form videos are are as artistically valuable as the best examples of any other more traditional media forms.
Edit: to phrase it differently, GP stated that among the huge quantity of content on TikTok and YouTube some short form videos are are as artistically valuable as the best examples of any other more traditional media forms. The short form
content on both platforms isn’t all good, but there is so much variety that some of it is. You responded that Coca Cola isn’t an Imperial Stout. It isn’t, but that has absolutely nothing to do with GP’s point.
I don't know. There's definitely fewer serious novels of a certain kind being published, and movies that aren't special effect spectacles tend to flop or go straight to streaming (for now).
Films got dramatically cheaper to produce and streaming gave them a platform to be easily distributed outside of the very exclusive cinema market.
Now the problem is quality and production. Studios don't have to be very selective at all any more so median quality has gone way down. Streaming platforms have a ton of content and terrible discovery which means there are huge volumes of mid content and a few gems that unless they are popular are impossible to find.
Publishing had a huge demographic change and is suffering from a different kind of bias than in decades past which has the same kind of diversity-limiting effect, just substituting different groups being promoted and left behind.
Culturally all over media production there's also a problem with a difficult to make distinction – "trying to be diverse" vs "actual diversity" and the imbalance is pushing people into silos: politically, culturally, and in every other way.
That headline resonates with me, echoed even. Then I saw it was by Cal Newport. Then I thought, when I have adequate attention I’ll read the article through, but I’m on the last 30 pages of a book and on my phone too.
> A closer look reveals that by vastly increasing the market for the published word, paperbacks also vastly increased the opportunities to make a living writing serious books
We can grant that this is true and yet it doesn't seem to provide encouragement. The equivalent today would be slop TikTok demand vastly increasing the opportunity for "serious" TikToks, whatever those may be.
A 'serious TikTok' is not a film. To think a film and a TikTok are alike is to make an elementary mistake in media analysis.
I can buy that we're going to get an explosion in fantastic short-form content. I'd say that the _Almost Friday TV_ group, who started a few years ago, are an example.
But this remains terrible news for predecessor mediums, who will suffer diminished demand and a general decline in the competency of audiences to enjoy those mediums ("great writers need great readers").
And yet, penny dreadful editions and pulp magazines that existed before pocket books... did they have the same effect? Or did they only produce pocket book writers?
They miss the fundamental issue with social media that was never true before.
The answer is data. No other media before ever had so much information about every individual that consumed it. No media before could tailor their content at an individual level. About the most you could tailor your content to was a zip code.
This is the problem with TikTok. It’s not that the quality of content is low. It’s that TikTok knows exactly what you like and when you like it, and can give you the exact content to scratch that itch at the time.
There are several problems with this.
- It sucks up all your time. - You’re never uncomfortable and/or consuming content that isn’t what you already want at the time. That means you are rarely exposed to anything that isn’t releasing dopamine all the time and it means you’re rarely challenged.
Most people are never choosing between Being and Time and an HN thread. But if they were forced to choose, we already know which one would dominate sheer engagement.
That doesn’t mean HN replaces philosophy — it just means that attention has its own economics. And any medium that captures attention will inevitably show qualities (good and bad) that heavyweight works simply can’t compete with.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iE68aF538e0
The novels are unfinished though and I hardly believe they will be completed by him seeing how the penultimate novel has taken him over a decade to do about 75% of it and him being 77 already. I would never start a series I know it is unlikely to be completed.
I also read the War Against the Chtorr series by David Gerrold. That also started in 1983, but the last published book, the 4th of 7, came out in 1993. Gerrold being 81, despite his claims for almost a decade that books 5 and 6 are near completion, I am confident I will not see the end of the series written by him :-(
30 years later (give or take a week), I don't expect to ever see the end; I have a feeling GRRM has kind of lost interest/passion in the Song of Fire and Ice series, since he's started churning out other stuff like Dunk, but you know what, its ok.
Paperbacks required authors to spend the same amount of time/effort to create content with a vastly expanded market and distribution mechanism.
TikTok and Insta created N creators to M consumers where N is nearly the same as M. Making the distribution channels bigger but effortless to create content doesn’t magically equate quality paperbacks with short form hummingbird-attention videos.
TikTok isn’t much bigger than open mics?
https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/p...
Paperbacks will now only be sold in the larger trade paperback format.
(Phones work better in a jacket, too—I think we made a mistake running away from that clothing style, they’re like wearable purses that also make you look nicer. Sure suits are kinda wasteful with the way the jackets get downgraded if the pants are destroyed, but odd jackets we should have held on to!)
Jackets are dope, though. Get some summer-weight ones and even in that season you don’t have to use trouser/jeans pockets. So nice.
When reading for long hours, or for a short time over days and weeks- it teaches you to concentrate, to have some kind of discipline. It helps you focus and develop empathy. Reading is fundamentally different for the reader, and it makes them do other things well. Reading trash trains you to graduate to serious books- this is true for many.
But consuming TikTok readies you for more TikTok. More Shorts and Reels and Snaps. Wathing short form stuff damages one's ability to do other things as well.
And from the creators' perspective, I think trying to keep up with short form media for engagement's sake actually impedes their ability to create more serious stuff.
I don't totally miss his point, though. When smartphones and "internet places" spread as media, those already ready for serious stuff will graduate to those. And yes, these places will have a small role to play.
But they are definitely more negative than positive.
Sometimes a friend would show me their feed and I'd be shocked at how different the content they are presented by their version of the algorithm.
There are a lot of people putting a lot of effort to create very interesting content and we should not belittle their work just to fein intellectual superiority.
There's really nothing inherently wrong about the format.
"Our conventional response to all media, namely that it is how they are used that counts, is the numb stance of the technological idiot. For the 'content' of a medium is like the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind...The effects of technology do not occur at the level of opinions or concepts, but alter sense ratios or patterns of perception steadily and without any resistance. The serious artist is the only person able to encounter technology with impunity, just because he is an expert aware of the changes in sense perception." — Marshal McLuhan, Understanding Media
Who takes this stuff as gospel? Academics who study critical theory?
Who is OC?
I have not seen that particular jargon before but it rhymes with OP (Original Poster) that I was able to figure it out from context.
Well said. Articles like these bring a sort of relief to me from the constant chaos of short-form media and the like. Very refreshing.
I think the main concern with short form video isn't taste or appetite, but just the ability to digest.[0]
Though the effects on attention might be more acute than we think. A friend of mine found that he's able to read books just fine, if he just switches off his electronics first. Suddenly his brain comes back online...
[0] See also: The mere presence of a smartphone reduces basal attentional performance [even when switched off]
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-36256-4
I assure you, by sheer virtue of quantity, no matter what criteria you use YouTube/TikTok/Shorts/etc has a [set of videos] which demonstrates quality similar to any novel or literary work.
It's true there's more garbage out there than ever before, but this is an artifact of democratization of creation and this is good imho. I also reject the premise that time to creation is an indication of quality.
The algorithm doesn't select for mediocrity - it selects for viewership, but regardless there are millions of creators at there that aren't optimizing for views anyway. It's the same reason some set of random blog posts or comments on sites such as this one will have quality similar to snippets of the highest quality technical documentation. Sheer diversity and quantity will always win.
why not? seems like a tautology. what's a robust set of criteria we can use the evaluate this objectively. I bet you TikTok will win. mind you I am not saying the average TikTok is good, just that there's probably some set of videos that that are of comparable quality than something put together over a longer period of time like a novel.
Infinite monkeys with infinite time could surely also produce something spectacular and eye-opening, statistically speaking. But umm, you’d have to wait infinite time for it to be done, so it’s not really efficient when time is a finite resource.
anyway, as for the statistics, for the case of YouTube since there are is no forced directive to which all videos must follow (creatively), you can treat all videos as random attempts. then it's just stats to show that such a distribution will have outliers that match or exceed in subjective quality the gate kept works (traditional tvs or literature).
But that’s why comparing subjective qualities of different things is a waste of time.
YouTube has many highly educational videos that are better than most professional production tv, especially for the hard sciences.
Edit: to phrase it differently, GP stated that among the huge quantity of content on TikTok and YouTube some short form videos are are as artistically valuable as the best examples of any other more traditional media forms. The short form content on both platforms isn’t all good, but there is so much variety that some of it is. You responded that Coca Cola isn’t an Imperial Stout. It isn’t, but that has absolutely nothing to do with GP’s point.
Now the problem is quality and production. Studios don't have to be very selective at all any more so median quality has gone way down. Streaming platforms have a ton of content and terrible discovery which means there are huge volumes of mid content and a few gems that unless they are popular are impossible to find.
Publishing had a huge demographic change and is suffering from a different kind of bias than in decades past which has the same kind of diversity-limiting effect, just substituting different groups being promoted and left behind.
Culturally all over media production there's also a problem with a difficult to make distinction – "trying to be diverse" vs "actual diversity" and the imbalance is pushing people into silos: politically, culturally, and in every other way.
> A closer look reveals that by vastly increasing the market for the published word, paperbacks also vastly increased the opportunities to make a living writing serious books
We can grant that this is true and yet it doesn't seem to provide encouragement. The equivalent today would be slop TikTok demand vastly increasing the opportunity for "serious" TikToks, whatever those may be.
A 'serious TikTok' is not a film. To think a film and a TikTok are alike is to make an elementary mistake in media analysis.
I can buy that we're going to get an explosion in fantastic short-form content. I'd say that the _Almost Friday TV_ group, who started a few years ago, are an example.
But this remains terrible news for predecessor mediums, who will suffer diminished demand and a general decline in the competency of audiences to enjoy those mediums ("great writers need great readers").
tikok/YT shorts/IG reels is many orders of magnitude higher supply of slop than Simon Schuster paperbacks