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.
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.
> 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 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).
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.
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]
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 is 100% some egotistic intellectual superiority as someone who consumes long form written content and long form video content. But its hard not to look down on short form video as a format and the culture of the medium. It seems clear to me that shorter form content is forced to "simplify" topics and sweeten narratives to retain the viewers attention. I've seen a ton of short form videos where I came away thinking wow what a great little video i really feel like i've learnt something. But then I double check to see if its actually true and its simplified to the point of being misleading. My sister shows me these videos all the time and its misleading or completely untrue majority of the time.
> 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").
What? This is terrible news. I've always loved the mass market paperback format, it's perfect for reading. Trade paperbacks are annoying to shelve, annoying to carry, and less comfortable to read.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
I don't see how TikTok readies you for more TikTok. You can safely combine it with YouTube longs and movies/documentaries.
I set a limit to avoid too much TikTok. And also TikTok often shows me 3-10 minute educational content, which I consider pretty well made. Dan McClellan talks about bible, form example. Or Jason Pargin on different topics. Brittney Hartley on nihilism and atheism.
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.
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.
Even more fundamental than data collection is advertising.
Books, and to some extent film, are the only media which aren't absolutely flooded with advertising. Print serial media are (though it's rapidly vanishing), music is (through both broadcast and streaming services, though not via direct media purchases), serial video (television, cable, streaming services, YouTube, and of course social media, are all absolutely saturated with advertising. Which is what the data are feeding, of course.
That Newport fails to make this distinction, and that the goal of TikTok et al are to absolutely engross your attention and time, is a critical failure of this piece.
I appreciate the optimism, and it's definitely worth noting that this isn't the first or last time that the intellectual elite had freaked out about the lowering of standards for the garbage the proles are imbibing. But the hinge of this article is that cheaper access to mass popular fiction opened up a new market for great unknown writers. This was true because the medium in paperback encouraged, rather than undermined, the reader's interest in reading. You pick up a paperback in the train station before heading home... your attention span at least stays the same, or maybe gets longer as you learn to enjoy long form fiction. The paperback business model is still based on keeping your attention fixed on a something for a long time (you know, like "Stranger Things"). Media like TikTok are designed to turn you into a vegetable with an attention span approaching zero. So I don't think these are equivalent.
The paperback vs hardback is more like Netflix vs cinema. Tiktok / short form video is like newsreels in Roger Rabbit, where the 'toons make the content.
Attention like other objects of value is bound by laws. Quality <-> Quantity axis
High quality -> You can attend to a few things with high degree of complexity.
Low quality -> You can attend to a lot of easy stuff.
EOD - Dopamine regulation now is based on how you train your attention.
So the problem is more sinister than the "time sink". What you don't use, you lose. So once we spend enough time in low quality, it takes a lot of effort to get back to higher levels.
27 comments
[ 336 ms ] story [ 303 ms ] threadMost 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.
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 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.
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
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.
> 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").
https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/p...
Paperbacks will now only be sold in the larger trade paperback format.
tikok/YT shorts/IG reels is many orders of magnitude higher supply of slop than Simon Schuster paperbacks
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.
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.
I set a limit to avoid too much TikTok. And also TikTok often shows me 3-10 minute educational content, which I consider pretty well made. Dan McClellan talks about bible, form example. Or Jason Pargin on different topics. Brittney Hartley on nihilism and atheism.
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.
It absolutely is. Ticktock is the bottom of the barrel.
Books, and to some extent film, are the only media which aren't absolutely flooded with advertising. Print serial media are (though it's rapidly vanishing), music is (through both broadcast and streaming services, though not via direct media purchases), serial video (television, cable, streaming services, YouTube, and of course social media, are all absolutely saturated with advertising. Which is what the data are feeding, of course.
That Newport fails to make this distinction, and that the goal of TikTok et al are to absolutely engross your attention and time, is a critical failure of this piece.
The paperback vs hardback is more like Netflix vs cinema. Tiktok / short form video is like newsreels in Roger Rabbit, where the 'toons make the content.
High quality -> You can attend to a few things with high degree of complexity. Low quality -> You can attend to a lot of easy stuff.
EOD - Dopamine regulation now is based on how you train your attention.
So the problem is more sinister than the "time sink". What you don't use, you lose. So once we spend enough time in low quality, it takes a lot of effort to get back to higher levels.