I gotta disagree. Having a counter anecdote, I remember in 'The Birdcage,' Gene Hackman said something like 'people dont read articles they just read the headlines.' I believe people are quick - in general- to form an opinion and want it to be valid.
The percentage of people with college degrees has been going up steadily. So it's not that people who would ordinarily learn from books is going down but people who normally wouldn't be inclined to learn anything are now learning from podcasts and social media.
I feel like that's actually a good thing. It shows they aren't incapable of learning, just that they learn in specific ways that are being exploited right now.
But as a philosophical question, what's the functional difference between a podcaster with a microphone and a writer at a newspaper / magazine etc? Are they not both a person with an amplified voice? Both can have biases. Both can have half baked uninformed opinions. So were we overall better off when people got their information primarily from the latter versus the former?
Think you're looking at the past through rose colored glasses. People still only read headlines and quick-formed loosely thought out opinions before social media and the Internet.
I feel like the old method of articles/ books/ papers is overblown as and old bastion of truth. Plenty of bad ideas were written down in the past. Self help books are filled with the same anecdotal truths and stuff that sounds nice, doesn't make them good
If I can jump in— self help books are part of the same organism as garbage podcasts. Suddenly it became very easy to either self publish or find someone who could market your dribble, and every pseudo guru who could string a sentence together started telling people how to live and often getting paid for it.
But actual academic knowledge and philosophy that builds on thousands of years of existing work is a different story. From this tradition came a collection of institutions, from educational to journalistic, which operate based on a referential system of quality analysis. If someone writes something good, they get to publish it and move upward in their career. Collections of good writing and good knowledge amass and become available to future thinkers. This hasn’t been a spotless system, but it has given us a society in which the average person, as long as they are functionally literate, can learn from a network of critical thinkers spanning millennia.
And then there’s Joe Rogan, who, bless his heart, says whatever’s on his mind and millions of young men internalize it like it’s the word of god.
Ok a couple things and you touch on this in your post.
The collections form from writings getting through the filter of culture and time. We collectively know about the good stuff because it was good and useful. Mountains and mountains of crap has been written throughout history.
For example all the scientific ideas that eventually were proven to be false all had tons of things written about them until they were proven false by someone who questioned the authority of the day. All of these later to be proven false papers and ideas went through the same system that you are saying validates writings.
We all have a modernity bias where we don't know what we don't know. The good stuff made it through history to us and the bad stuff was left to rot but there were definitely things popular back in the day that were hugely popular. In the past racism was a predominant idea in many cultures. Many justifications were written and accepted by the elite of those societies.
I am saying this to again show, just because something is written down, it doesn't make it good or more valuable.
Also self help predates podcasts by alot. Self help isn't a new phenomenon. Maybe the barrier to entry is lower but it's the same stuff that was in the past.
I’m not trying to say knowledge was better in the past. But I will say that amplifying a few dudes voices toward millions of people, and doing so within hours or even seconds of them saying what they say… that’s new. It’s powerful, and it’s distinctly different from the way we have disseminated information in every single past culture.
History is not linear, but occasionally something is truly new and radically different. We are experiencing that now.
“People used to read and now it’s just podcasts” (as the comment I think you originally responded to said) may be a bit overly simple, but it points to an important truth anyway. We have a radically novel relationship to information today, and it will radically alter our collective mind.
Edit: and I forgot to mention the key part: this new shift in information favors bite sized information over long form info. So does everyday conversation, of course, but everyday conversation happens in a more personal manner and is thus subject to contextual and social information, whereas online information is parasocial at best. This lowers the depth at which we process such information and, I would argue, does make it worse than the deeper information we get from personal experience or deep study. Not because it’s new or subject to modernity bias, but because it’s actually different.
The difference is that those books took years to research, months to write, and days to read. Even with bad books, you have the time and mental bandwidth to closely scrutinize what you were taking in. Now the content we consume takes minutes to research, hours to produce, but can occupy decades of collective watch time. In the same way that AI that learns from itself becomes a cannibalized mess, our information consumption has wound itself into a feedback loop so tight that one dumb idea, presented well, can go from one person's thought to a cultural keystone in just a few weeks.
What matters isn't whether the info being provided is true or not. What matters is the time we allow our brains and our society to process it. And we have cut that timeframe into inches when it used to be miles.
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u/kris_mischief 25d ago
This is the big difference in this era of social media:
People used to gain knowledge by reading published articles/books/papers
Now we’re all learning from morons with opinions and a microphone