YouTube and Neil Postman's vengeful ghost

My Battle of Ideas speech notes! Also: BIG ANNOUNCEMENT, screen time strategy, my Mandarin study routine, etc

My YouTube speech summarised

First a BIG ANNOUNCEMENT!!!!

This photo was taken before the round started and that was NOT our final score!!!

I am going to be on University Challenge. (WHAT!!!)

Luckily I made the (brilliant) team for my university’s first UC run in six years! The process was sooooo much fun, we got to spend lots and lots of time in a Wetherspoons in central Manchester, and I highly suspect that the ITV team picked me because I admitted in the audition to having read four different Madonna biographies. We will most likely debut on the current series in the second week of November, but I am going to harass literally all of my contacts on the day so they are forced to watch it. Keep your eyes peeled!!

Notes from my speech at the Battle of Ideas

I have spent the last two months working for the Academy of Ideas in the run-up to their Battle of Ideas festival,* and got to speak at the event on the ‘(De)socialised on YouTube’ session! We had a full room, a good range of speakers (Fraser Myers from Spiked, YouTuber Andrew Gold, ex-Triggernometry producer Elliot Bewick, Equiano Project promoter Ada Akpala) and a spirited audience. This was my second public appearance as a writer - my first was a London Student Network event where I was on a panel with Sir Alan Duncan (!!!) and did a primordial version of my Battle speech.

My main points

I described YouTube’s negative impact on education by drawing from two of media theorist Neil Postman’s Commandments of Television (from prophetic 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death): 

• Thou shalt have no prerequisites

  • ‘No previous knowledge is to be required. There must not be even a hint that learning is hierarchical, that it is an edifice constructed on a foundation.’

  • YouTube’s algorithm guesses what you want to watch, but constantly pushes new stuff with no base structure or order. Ideas don’t grow in complexity; everything is flattened to one level of simplicity instead

• Thou shalt induce no perplexity

  • ‘There must be nothing,’ he said, ‘that has to be remembered, studied, applied, or, worst of all, endured’

  • This is WORSE on YouTube than it was on TV. The nature of YouTube - with its endless algorithm and intrusive recommendation section - means creators are constantly vying for your attention, drawing you away from the video you’re watching so they get ad money instead

  • If you find yourself grappling with a difficult subject and it gets too much, you can simply click away. This is much easier than, eg., going back over a statement that eludes you - were you reading a book, that would only take a glance!!

Our chair mentioned that YouTube might be a refuge from traditional education. But I went to school during the age of interactive whiteboards and ‘multimodal learning.’ YouTube videos were shown in class all the time because it was assumed they would help us learn. When we had research tasks to do, we were always sent online to collate what were essentially ‘fun’ facts, with little emphasis on context or linkage. I was encouraged to read fiction by English teachers (great!) but never directed to form a non-fiction reading habit across the other humanities, even though there are legions of people writing very well about all sorts of subjects for a general audience. 

Actual recent Twitter post from the (state) school I went to - the students involved are 14-15, most will go to university, and they’d probably be fine - and learn MUCH MORE - if you just gave them an accessible book to read about Berlin in the Cold War. This is the fun-facticisation of education in one photo - patronising, wasteful, and deeply anti-intellectual. I remember hating this kind of stuff when I was there and not being able to articulate why, because all signs pointed to it being really good educational practice. I felt extremely vindicated upon reading Postman for the first time.

This meant I left school with significant knowledge gaps! Eg. after eight years of history lessons I didn’t really have a concept of who Napoleon was, because he simply never came up - my teachers might have taken him for granted, and he certainly would have had an impact on the periods we did study - but the fun-facticisation of education means students will always lack applicable background knowledge. I also found that a general, institutional derision around ‘learning dates’ (see Horrible Histories) meant I eventually struggled to place people and events on a mental timeline. There was a huge emphasis on historical method, using primary and secondary sources, etc - but this means very little to someone without content knowledge. 

I started my current non-fiction habit with Hollywood biographies when I was 18-ish. The books I read were undoubtedly ‘trashy,’ but I was amazed by how quickly and effectively they let me pick up historical and cultural context and form meaningful links, which eventually became my own theories - and helped me to hold my own when encountering new texts I disagreed with. So I would like to say that non-fiction books were my refuge from traditional education, which had already been poisoned by YouTube by the time I got to secondary school!

To an audience member who asked about YouTube as a continuation of the working-class autodidact tradition

• Jonathan Rose’s Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes helped to shape my perspective on this - 19th c. British working-class autodidacts read A LOT. They kept and frequented libraries in their local communities, discussed books amongst themselves, and found more identification with what we think of as a ‘Western canon’ than you might assume. Their studies were centred around active engagement, not passive viewing, and they created strong relationships with the printed word that are off-limits to people who spend loads of time on YouTube.

• For a more authentic continuation of the Jonathan Rose tradition, look instead to the /lit/ board on 4chan (article forthcoming). They haven’t abandoned book-reading - they make MS Paint graphics walking people through different book lists, eg. ‘start with the Greeks.’ Nobody’s making any money from this. The /lit/ acolytes are generally fed up with academe and alienated from mainstream society.  

• (I didn’t say this on the panel, but I think it’s regressive to assume that working-class autodidacts are in special need of entertaining study material. And I don’t think people are any more dyslexic now than they were in the 19th century)

To an audience member who mentioned tech monopolies

• Tech monopolies should be a bipartisan concern, transcending culture wars - they affect everyone who uses the internet, no matter their ideology. Most of the people writing about them are on the far left. [NB. I am addressing a bipartisan audience, which is the biggest benefit of speaking at the BOIF!!]

• It is mad that one company stands to gain from the majority of (non-adult) videos posted online. YouTube’s monopoly is worrying because it gives them an unheard-of amount of leverage over the way people interact with the internet, and an undue influence over shifts in politics and culture.

• I suggested applying the principle of ‘interoperability’ to video streaming and sharing. An example of an ‘interoperable’ technology is email - if your email provider does something to annoy you, like change its UI or ramp up its ads, you can simply switch to another one. There’ll be some hassle but you can still talk to all the same people, and you won’t be cut off from any service that requires an email address. [If YouTube ramps up its ads - it already has multiple times in the past few years - you’re stuck! You’ll have to stay on the platform for videos that aren’t posted elsewhere. There are a few ‘minimal’ mirrors of YouTube, but their creators are breaking the law.]

  • What if you could choose your own platform, UI, level of censorship, etc as a ‘skin’ to watch a user-generated but centralised database of videos? Think an RSS feed but for the MP4 format

• Another idea I didn’t mention - pay-on-entry social media or streaming sites. What if a site could operate without ad incentives because every user pays a small sign-up fee, covering server costs and worker pay? 

  • This wouldn’t quite work in our current climate because tech investors want to see lines going up forever - stable profits are worthless. That’s why creators and audiences are always eventually squeezed in terms of dropping engagement (you’re meant to buy ads), non-chronological timelines (you’re meant to look at more ads), addictive in-app short video feeds (you’re meant to spend more time online, in which you can look at more ads), etc. 

• What about an Aardman-esque social media site in which everyone who contributes automatically gets a stock? Would that be workable? Am having a think

Books of leftist tech criticism I didn’t mention but still recommend for further reading: 

• Chokepoint Capitalism by Cory Doctorow and Rebecca Giblin - an accessible overview of the financial tricks tech companies use to maintain monopolies within the culture industry (music streaming, e-commerce, ebook publishing, etc). Some practical solutions are given, although few are workable on an individual level. Unfortunately diluted quite a bit by environmental agitation and other seemingly distant concerns - not necessarily a bad thing, just felt tenuous in context and may put off readers who aren’t already aligned with leftist issues. 

• The Chaos Machine by Max Fisher - I was already offline when I read this (really just off social media) but it helped to keep me off for even longer. I am suspicious of ‘disinformation’ and ‘misinformation’ as buzzwords because I think they are too easily manipulated for political ends, but Fisher does a really great job of exposing the financial incentive behind inflammatory algorithms/the infinite scroll. I ended up concluding that I was fine with social media existing, but that I wanted out temporarily for the sake of my own health and happiness.

• Internet for the People by Ben Tarnoff - a very well-written outline of the financial and political forces underlying a) disparities in internet connectivity, b) the nature of Web 2.0.

To an audience member who mentioned parasocial relationships

I have been victim to these - I think:

1. social media encourages a passive, Great Gatsby-esque style of barely-there social interaction - you can like and post things so certain people will notice you, rather than reaching out directly 

2. Follower counts create artificial hierarchies, which block friendships that may have blossomed organically in real life

My parasocial follower was quite weird, but it would have been less weird if she’d just have DMed me straight off the bat.

***

My relationship with the Internet now

My ‘1000 days off social media’ post is my most successful on this blog, and I feel really bad because I didn’t complete the 1000 days! I benefited from the attempt and would like to try again one day. I’m on Twitter - more than I would like to be - and I use Instagram just for DMs but have a ‘Distraction Free’ version that doesn’t show me the timeline or Reels (I got sucked in during my study breaks at university this year and briefly wanted to die).

Right now: I use an app called Forest, which shuts other, more distracting apps down for you while planting a cartoon tree. I am a heavy user because it’s great for record-keeping. I log almost any activity that counts towards an external goal and that isn’t ‘being on my phone,’ minus ‘going for a walk’ or ‘watching a film’ (both also really useful in staying offline, but logging them just feels wrong). I am logging this blog post right now under ‘Misc writing.’ I used this app relentlessly in my final year of university and that’s how I know exactly how long I spent on each module (between 60 and 70 hours).  

Every day, I try to log twice the time on Forest than on my screen time app. I think it’s important to have an ‘other side’ to screen time - ie. you can have it, but it needs to be outweighed with a mixture of things that are good for you and that you genuinely enjoy. And instead of beating myself up for being on my phone late at night, I make up for it during the day, thus also making sure my psyche/concentration span is in check. I am allowed days where I do absolutely nothing, but I also can’t be on my phone. Like at all. This is good because the phone is anathema to true relaxation and actually stresses me out a lot - WAY more than you’d assume all this gamification does. 

I’ve failed this challenge lots (my big goal is to get a 100-day streak and see how I feel afterwards - I’m not close and there is no cigar, but if it happens then I’ll blog about it. Once I’m there, I’ll probably start adjusting the ratio so it gets progressively more difficult to achieve). However - since starting, I don’t think I’ve ever had a single day *just* on my phone, or without any sort of work towards something! Those were common-ish until I was about 18. 

I will probably keep doing this for ages because a) it’s a great integration of my other goals with my anti-phone goals, b) I like, and need, the structure it gives me in my post-university days. I have sub-goals that feed into this, eg. log 225 hours applying for various things/pitching articles before the end of this year, spend a certain number of hours on writing projects, etc. I also have two habit-tracking calendars set up on my phone’s home screen - one for an hour of reading in English, the other for an hour of reading in Chinese. (You should NEVER feel guilty about doing this even if, like me, you hold reading to be a sacred activity and untouchable by modern ‘productivity’ doctrine. You might need more of a push to regularly do things you enjoy, but that’s because you’re up against an extremely addictive enemy.)

How I’m studying Mandarin these days

After graduating from a Chinese and Linguistics degree, I needed a workable plan to continue studying Mandarin. Its diminishing returns can be really difficult to cope with when you lack goals beyond simply ‘become fluent.’ I had a point last year when I thought it was all a waste of time and that I wanted to quit after graduation - luckily I kept going, mainly because I read a Ruan Lingyu biography and realised my language skills gave me valuable access to knowledge I valued and that would be off-limits in English.

 My reading skills are better than they are supposed to be (I read 30 books throughout the course of my degree), but I’m still not happy with my speed or comprehension. My listening skills are OK for newscaster Chinese, but do not serve me well elsewhere. And I can functionally communicate - this is fluent-ish when I’m familiar with the topic - but struggle to do so in an elegant, idiomatic way. 

I am doing two separate things at once to try and rectify this:

1. The Language Learners’ Super Challenge

This is a long-term immersion challenge invented on the Language Learner’s Forum. Participants have to watch 100 films and read 5000 pages in their target language within 20 months. I tried this in 2021 - I didn’t get very far within the challenge, but I did discover late-60s Hong Kong Mandarin melodrama, which became my final-year dissertation topic!! (I love that this project allows for cultural flexibility).

I’m currently at 17% of pages and 8% of films. A major goal this time around is to investigate contemporary mainstream Mainland cinema - while my listening will progress no matter what I watch, I’ll be satisfied just to increase my knowledge of that industry and link it to the conclusions I already made from my exploration of film in other contexts.  

These are the films I’ve seen so far for the challenge. I LOVED Bi Gan’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night, with its Antonioni influence - it was everything I hoped Jia Zhangke’s Platform would be. I would like to recommend The Mermaid for other Mandarin learners because of its visual humour, which still works even if you don’t immediately get all the dialogue. There were some promising moments of beauty in The Wandering Earth, but I hope the slow-motion trend falls out of fashion. 

I have no specific reading goal beyond JUST READ (I am trying to help myself realise that 30 books is a great foundation but not very much in the grand scheme of things, which is why it still often feels mentally strenuous). I use a e-reader and am alternating between Li Handa’s Han historical stories and Tiny Times (小时代), a delightfully trashy novel set in the Shanghai magazine industry. In a year or so, I’d like to try and get some ZH-EN literary translation work to supplement my other writing. (I want to be a bilingual luminary, like Eileen Chang but the other way around!!!)

2. Chengyu spaced repetition

I was frustrated by my barely-there knowledge of chengyu so I collected 700 of them (from the HSK 7-9 list, then from the Zhongkao and Gaokao vocabulary lists) and made digital flashcards on Memrise, which creates a ‘daily review’ along spaced-repetition principles. It’s pushing my passive knowledge into the active realm, and has slowly advanced all the other skills I have. (I LOVE when I’ve learnt one and it comes up during immersion!) 

*I’m not the only or even the most notorious Ella in the office, which is disappointing.