Paine
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I’ve recently started watching YouTube Shorts. It’s probably the only social media I engage with, unless one considers this site social media.one downside of communication-by-meme, which is a dominant form of communication on social media, is that it rarely allows for any sort of nuance. the whole point of a meme -- or one of them -- is to avoid having to express any specific opinion. you can be all things to all people (or the opposite).
i'm not saying you are wrong, but i do think that you need to take your observations and the polls on this with a grain of salt. if everyone had exactly the view that paine expressed, i am not sure social media would be much different. the nuanced view is just not social media friendly.
i long ago predicted that twitter would be the demise of democracy. i didn't mean it 100% seriously -- and i certainly didn't predict that a right wing edgelord would buy it and turn it into a firehose of disinformation -- but i think the general intuition was right. nothing good can come from limiting expression to 240 characters. people accuse me of writing long posts. they certainly are long compared to tweets. they are not long compared to the history of written expression. it wasn't that long ago that advertisement -- one page advertisements in magazines and newspapers -- contained more text than all but my longest posts. what has happened is that americans, and maybe others as well, have lost the ability to express ideas coherently.
I think short form video content has its flaws, but, IMO, it’s a stark improvement over the kind of content that dominates Twitter, even in its liberal heyday when I was active on it.
No social media alone is substantive enough for a healthy media diet though.