Sean Illing
Appearances
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: How TV, Twitter and TikTok Remade Our Politics
It's just very hard to think honestly and carefully because it's just, you're just scared shitless about what's going to come back your way. At least I am.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: How TV, Twitter and TikTok Remade Our Politics
We're trying to think of democracy as a communicative culture, right? We think of democracy as a decision to open up the public sphere and let people speak, think, and decide what ought to be done. So in that sense, it is a culture of open communication. And thinking of it as a culture rather than constellation of practices or institutions is not a pedantic or academic thing.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: How TV, Twitter and TikTok Remade Our Politics
We're trying to emphasize the open-endedness of it. The fact that it's always in a state of becoming. And the fact that you can say that a state is democratic and the fact that that doesn't necessarily tell you how it's governed is pretty instructive. It's not for nothing that fascism has only ever emerged out of democratic societies.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: How TV, Twitter and TikTok Remade Our Politics
There's something about the collision of mass media and mass politics that made fascism possible. If fascism can emerge out of a democratic society, anything can. And I just think when you talk about this tendency to conflate liberalism and democracy,
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: How TV, Twitter and TikTok Remade Our Politics
obscures the fact that democracy really is an unwieldy thing and without something like liberalism to check some of its excesses it can spin in very unpredictable directions and there's all kinds of examples of that throughout history and even today spend another moment on that distinction between liberalism and democracy because i think for a lot of people they they really are quite conflated what would an illiberal democracy look like they look like hungary
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: How TV, Twitter and TikTok Remade Our Politics
It may look like Weimar Germany, right? It may look like Russia. I've said this elsewhere. Russia is kind of a police state now. But, you know, I mean, Russia was a kind of a liberal democracy in a sense that Putin was pretty popular, overwhelmingly popular. I think he still is, though this is not something I track very closely.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: How TV, Twitter and TikTok Remade Our Politics
And so even if he's a tyrant, and surely he is, he's also a populist. And we wouldn't think of a state like that, a country like that, as a democracy. And it's not in a sense that these are places that are kind of shape-shifting into autocracies. But to the extent those regimes or those leaders are popular, to the extent that the publics in those places have been convinced...
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: How TV, Twitter and TikTok Remade Our Politics
that they should follow their leaders wherever they take them, they are democratic in some fundamental sense. So tell me then about what you call the paradox of democracy. Well, it's the fact that the very thing that makes democracy possible, which is wide open, free expression, that while that's a condition of democracy, it can also be hijacked and turned against it.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: How TV, Twitter and TikTok Remade Our Politics
And that's what fascism is, right? So the thing that makes it possible is also the thing that threatens it from within. And that tension or that paradox is baked into the structure of democracy if you see it.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: How TV, Twitter and TikTok Remade Our Politics
in that way right there's just no transcending that right if you're going to open up society then you're opening the culture up to all manner of persuasion all manner of rhetoric the the inspirational leaders and the artist and the demagogues and the any other manner of bad faith actor you can imagine, right? Like it is a free-for-all in that way, right? And so that's just what it is.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: How TV, Twitter and TikTok Remade Our Politics
And that's what makes it, I think, a paradox, right? You just simply cannot get out of it, right? The very thing that makes it possible is also the thing that perpetually threatens it. And in that sense, democracy is just sort of situated on a precipice always.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: How TV, Twitter and TikTok Remade Our Politics
Yeah, I think so. I mean, we have a line in the book where we say, our ideology is our technology, our technology is our culture, and culture always precedes politics. It's really just a way of saying that politics flows out of culture, and culture often flows out of technology. Ooh, tell me more about that idea that our ideology is our technology.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: How TV, Twitter and TikTok Remade Our Politics
Well, it's about the biases of our technology imposing themselves on our politics and becoming a thing that actually governs it, right? So like, One of the knocks on people like McLuhan was that he's too deterministic. He's like a straight-up, hard, technological determinist.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: How TV, Twitter and TikTok Remade Our Politics
I'm not quite that, but I guess I am a soft determinist in the sense that I think human beings, if not quite a tabula rasa... are heavily conditioned creatures. I don't want to say that context is everything, but it's kind of everything. And if you tinker with something as fundamental as our media environment, then you also tinker with how we structure our world.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: How TV, Twitter and TikTok Remade Our Politics
You tinker with our whole sense-making apparatus. You tinker with our categories of thought. And on some level, you tinker with the core experience of being human in the world.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: How TV, Twitter and TikTok Remade Our Politics
Yeah, you know, so McLuhan...
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: How TV, Twitter and TikTok Remade Our Politics
he comes along and says don't just look at what's being expressed look at the ways it's being expressed and then postman says don't just look at the way things are being expressed look at how the way things are expressed determines what's actually expressible and you're getting at this and this is partly why postman is more interesting to me as a political person because he's really just asking
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: How TV, Twitter and TikTok Remade Our Politics
does our media environment even allow a serious public discourse? And I think it's maybe in the first or second chapter of Amusing Ourselves to Death, and this gets at the ideology point, I think, because he's talking about Reagan and William Taft and how William Taft could not have been president in 1980. Why is that?
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: How TV, Twitter and TikTok Remade Our Politics
And he says, you know, JFK is the first TV president, but TV was still fairly new, and every new medium bears the stamp of the one it's sort of overthrowing. But by the time you get to 1980, TV has really transformed the culture. And by the time we get to Reagan, he says it's no longer... Or the question is no longer, do I agree with that guy? It's do I like him?
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: How TV, Twitter and TikTok Remade Our Politics
And that's the thing that still dominates our politics. It's vibes and feelings and impressions. And Postman noticed that with Reagan, that he was wildly popular despite people actually, when you drill down, not liking his policies really at all. And why was that? Well, it's because they liked him on TV.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: How TV, Twitter and TikTok Remade Our Politics
And in that sense, it's not an overstatement to say that TV changed what it even meant to be a good candidate. And therefore, it changed the kinds of people who could be good candidates, the kinds of people who would even run for office in the first place. That's a change. It's so fundamental that it's almost more fundamental than ideology.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: How TV, Twitter and TikTok Remade Our Politics
I mean, it's just a complete transformation of how we do and practice politics that's I think hard to overstate, but it seems true to me. Do you think he's overstating that?
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: How TV, Twitter and TikTok Remade Our Politics
It may be more about attention than optics, but again, it still feels like internet is, at least at this point, still just amplifying the culture that TV has. built. The internet is more individualistic, it's more immersive, but it is still very much anchored to that world that photography and TV built. But you watch politicians on Twitter, right?
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: How TV, Twitter and TikTok Remade Our Politics
I mean, they're pushing themselves in the same way that social media influencers do. You have a lot of politicians now who are basically just professional
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: How TV, Twitter and TikTok Remade Our Politics
posters and they're just they're on there to say things that will get engagement and that will trend and that's good for them to the extent that it gets people talking about them right i mean i guess that's somewhat different from tv let me try a theory out on you because
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: How TV, Twitter and TikTok Remade Our Politics
I think that's right. You know, I... didn't come from the journalism world. As you know, you hired me. I was coming from the academic world. And so my first few years in this business was just me figuring out how to not suck at this. And many fine people on both sides would say I'm still figuring that out. But I started in September 2016. Right as Trump was really monopolizing our world.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: How TV, Twitter and TikTok Remade Our Politics
And it was incredibly frustrating. He was exploiting us. He was exploiting our business model. And by us, I mean all of press, really. And we all kind of knew it, right? But it felt like we had no choice. I mean, I guess there's always a choice, but you know what I mean. And then I ended up writing a piece about this concept of flooding the zone and something kind of clicked for me.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: How TV, Twitter and TikTok Remade Our Politics
Do you want to say what flooding the zone is? Yeah, you know, it's a phrase that was popularized by Steve Bannon. And, you know, it's basically a very 21st century way of doing propaganda where the purpose isn't to convince a society to believe the same thing. The point is to just flood it, overwhelm it.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: How TV, Twitter and TikTok Remade Our Politics
with lots and lots of noise so that it's very disorienting and very confusing and people do not know what to believe. And I wrote that it's basically a way of manufacturing nihilism or at least cynicism. And it works because of the way we do business. We race for content, for clicks, for attention, and we act like
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: How TV, Twitter and TikTok Remade Our Politics
greyhounds chasing a slab of meat every time Trump would unleash one of his unhinged tweets or whatever. I mean, it was maddening. And it's still maddening. But this gets to something we try to say in the book, which is that what the media thinks it's doing is not really what it's doing. Certainly not anymore. A lot of the press is still wedded to this 20th century model of journalism.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: How TV, Twitter and TikTok Remade Our Politics
where we conquer lies by exposing them. We deliver truth to a country desperate to hear it and people make informed decisions and yada, yada, yada. But this just doesn't seem to be what's going on. There's too much bullshit to debunk, too many conflicting narratives to untangle. The information space has been shattered into zillion pieces thanks to the internet.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: How TV, Twitter and TikTok Remade Our Politics
And the audience is so fragmented and self-sorted. A huge chunk of the country doesn't really trust public institutions or the mainstream media, and they're not listening. And a lot of it feels like it's just a political class talking to itself. And it's just, I know that's kind of depressing, but that has been my experience.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: How TV, Twitter and TikTok Remade Our Politics
Right. And that's what was so maddening about flooding the zone. The story I globbed onto in the piece I wrote was, I guess, the 2017 story about Hillary Clinton selling Uranium One to the Russians or something like that. I mean, it was a complete horseshit, but it was a story that Bannon had fed to the press and it kind of took off. But that's basically all it is, right? I mean, we are...
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: How TV, Twitter and TikTok Remade Our Politics
part of our business model is selling conflict this is especially true on tv and this is something that really comes into fruition in the 90s with the birth of cable news and kind of horse race politics conflict just works right it's politics is theater politics is sport And to the extent that media has profited from that model, we've also helped instantiate it, right?
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: How TV, Twitter and TikTok Remade Our Politics
We've also helped make politics in the minds of people who are consuming our content think that's what politics is. And the thing that's so crazy about flooding the zone is that it works because people are doing their jobs the way they're supposed to, the way they've always been done, right? Something is out there. And if it's bullshit, you debunk it. And you tell people why it's not true.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: How TV, Twitter and TikTok Remade Our Politics
But the problem is that, like you were just saying, in the process of debunking something, you are also amplifying it. You're pumping it out there. It's getting tattooed in people's consciousness. And if you do that enough, it just becomes very dizzying and confusing to people. And it's a way of hacking the way media works. And I think it was extraordinarily...
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: How TV, Twitter and TikTok Remade Our Politics
effective and no one really seems to have an answer to it. I certainly don't.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: How TV, Twitter and TikTok Remade Our Politics
Great to be here. Thanks for having me.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: How TV, Twitter and TikTok Remade Our Politics
I have no idea. None. I really don't. It's part of my frustration with this. It's just, it is very hard to see a way out, absent some kind of radical paradigm shift. And I have no idea what that would even look like.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: How TV, Twitter and TikTok Remade Our Politics
Yeah. And this is actually helping me clarify what I find annoying about the popularism debate, which is something I know you've written about, you've talked about on the show. This idea that a political party should just figure out what's popular and then appeal to it. Okay, that's fine.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: How TV, Twitter and TikTok Remade Our Politics
But if you take media ecology seriously, then you start with the media environment and then notice how it favors certain kinds of rhetorical appeals or incentivizes certain styles of communication. And then notice how that in turn influences public opinion. So it's like Trump's just a good example. He's a dude who just gets social media and he knows what drives news coverage more generally.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: How TV, Twitter and TikTok Remade Our Politics
So he just said and did outlandish shit
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: How TV, Twitter and TikTok Remade Our Politics
in spectacular ways and he rode that attention straight to the white house and this is partly why we emphasize persuasion a lot in the book and it's not persuasion in the sense of democrats convincing people that universal health care is a good idea it was his ability to get attention to use the media environment to reinforce the image of trump the brand of trump and to turn the campaign itself
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: How TV, Twitter and TikTok Remade Our Politics
a kind of circus that is itself an act of persuasion and it's the kind of thing you could never do if you were just following survey data and then trying to craft your opinions around that right i mean republicans they just use the asymmetries in the media to create salience around issues that favor them and they just drive public opinion with persuasive rhetoric or propaganda or whatever it is.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: How TV, Twitter and TikTok Remade Our Politics
Well, it basically just means that the forms of medium we use determine the content, right? So you can think about it like this. And this is the way Neil Postman, who wrote Amusing Ourselves to Death, put it. I mean, his book is a kind of indictment of TV, but he actually loved junk TV. He thought it was very entertaining.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: How TV, Twitter and TikTok Remade Our Politics
And Democrats just don't operate like that.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: How TV, Twitter and TikTok Remade Our Politics
I think that's right. But I think also...
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: How TV, Twitter and TikTok Remade Our Politics
trump was willing to test a hypothesis that i don't think republicans were willing to test before he showed it was that it could work you know maybe that's one of his real contributions is to show that everything he just said is right but he also showed that if you just don't give a at all about the liberal democratic game and you just go after power and you just signal that you you're going to win you're going to win that your enemies are my enemy
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: How TV, Twitter and TikTok Remade Our Politics
That works. That works because there's a decent subset of the country that actually isn't invested in liberal democracy in that way. They do just want to win and they are convinced that the other side is a kind of existential threat. And Trump was willing to go farther than anyone else in testing that. But now that he has and it worked, I think that pretends bad things.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: How TV, Twitter and TikTok Remade Our Politics
The problem is that the news and politics, because it relied on TV, had to ape the mechanics and the logic of TV. It had to be entertaining. And I was listening to some interviews that he did the other day, and he used Sesame Street as an example here. What he was saying is that Look, it's not that kids don't learn how to spell when they watch Sesame Street. Surely they do. And that's great.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: How TV, Twitter and TikTok Remade Our Politics
I think a lot turns on what you mean by healthy, right? For me, healthy just means stable, right? Like not imploding, you know? But the price of that stability might be a lot of injustice or it might mean a lot of people are excluded from political life. I mean, you could make the case that mid to late 20th century politicians
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: How TV, Twitter and TikTok Remade Our Politics
american liberal democracy was very healthy in the sense that it was you know there were exceptions but there were certainly long periods of relative stability but there were very high prices to pay for that like lots of people were excluded from political life and a lot of speech wasn't allowed to express itself in the public square right and so there are always trade-offs and you could look at the culture today like there's like a lot of
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: How TV, Twitter and TikTok Remade Our Politics
a lot of people making noises about how free speech is under attack and there's a sweeping culture of censoriousness and all that. But you can also look at the world today and say, well, speech is actually more free than it's ever been by a country mile in the sense that there are fewer barriers to entering the public arena and speaking.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: How TV, Twitter and TikTok Remade Our Politics
Everyone can be their own communication platform at this point. More people are allowed to speak now than ever. And that has obviously created a lot of tension in the system. But it is free and certainly freer than it was in the past. And I think that's a good thing, even though there's a lot of growing pains involved with that.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: How TV, Twitter and TikTok Remade Our Politics
I mean, if the price of a stable democratic culture is a significant chunk of that society being excluded, then I think that's too high a price to pay.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: How TV, Twitter and TikTok Remade Our Politics
I think they can both be true at the same time. I mean, I think if your position is to say that cancel culture is itself a phantasm, that they're not actually people and forces out there punishing people speech in one way or the other. I think that's just not the case.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: How TV, Twitter and TikTok Remade Our Politics
But it's also true that if you allow everyone to speak, the boundaries of permissible discourse are going to be challenged, and they're going to move. And that process is always bumpy. It's always contested. It can feel like unfreedom, perhaps, if you're on the wrong end of it. And maybe there are cases where that's really true. But I think both of those things can be happening at the same time.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: How TV, Twitter and TikTok Remade Our Politics
I think a lot of the people who are deeply worried about
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: How TV, Twitter and TikTok Remade Our Politics
cancel culture don't reflect enough on what's actually happening on these bigger questions we're talking about here again it feels very suffocating but it really is just i think the a culture of free speech doing what a culture of free speech does unleashing lots of different voices lots of different opinions lots of different styles of communication lots of disputes about where the lines are
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: How TV, Twitter and TikTok Remade Our Politics
It's that the medium of TV also communicated an important message. And the message was that education and entertainment are bound up with each other. And so
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: How TV, Twitter and TikTok Remade Our Politics
and it's playing itself out.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: How TV, Twitter and TikTok Remade Our Politics
I think it's very likely. I think there's almost a kind of comfort in looking at the history of democracy in media and noticing this pattern of revolution and how we communicate lots of disruption and disorder. Then there's a lag period and we adjust. You know, I mean, I was just looking at a quote this morning actually from McLuhan.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: How TV, Twitter and TikTok Remade Our Politics
that conditioned a generation to expect education to be entertaining right and so tv will do the same thing with politics shows so like john oliver's show which is great but it only works if it's entertaining and funny and it's the same thing with cable news where you you turn on morning joe and they're bebopping along and playing rolling stone songs while cutting to commercials
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: How TV, Twitter and TikTok Remade Our Politics
So he says, 20th century man's relationship to the computer is not by nature very different from prehistoric man's relationship to his boat or to his wheel, with the important difference that all previous technologies or extensions of man were partial and fragmentary, whereas the electric is total and inclusive.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: How TV, Twitter and TikTok Remade Our Politics
I'm still working out what that means, but I think it's relevant to what you're saying. Tools like the wheel or the hammer are used instrumentally. Those are extensions of our feet and hands, extensions of our physical capabilities. But McLuhan insisted that electronic media is an extension of our nervous system. So our ability to experience what is happening isn't limited by our bodies.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: How TV, Twitter and TikTok Remade Our Politics
We can know what's happening anywhere, everywhere, all the time. And I think his point was that our brains weren't equipped to deal with this much stimuli, this much information, and whatever cognitive tools we developed over time to deal with information, to organize our experience in the world, we're going to be totally overwhelmed by the electric revolution.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: How TV, Twitter and TikTok Remade Our Politics
And this is where you see the kind of Christian humanism bubbling beneath the surface with McLuhan that I find so fascinating. And he never quite says it, but I think he's kind of worried about our souls on some level. He's a very Catholic thinker, right? Yes. I think he was a convert to Catholicism. And if you think about the
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: How TV, Twitter and TikTok Remade Our Politics
global nervous system for a second, which is, I think, a really vivid way of thinking about the internet, it is so obvious that that's not good.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: How TV, Twitter and TikTok Remade Our Politics
If we are being confronted by the anxieties and the outrages everywhere all the time, and we can't do anything about it, and the algorithms are pushing all the terrible shit in front of our faces all the time, that breeds fatigue and cynicism and probably despair. And it's all so new, really. This is barely begun.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: How TV, Twitter and TikTok Remade Our Politics
There's not, I mean, I said this before, we don't even have a name for whatever this next era is going to be because we're still in this weird convergent space. But it is pummeling us from every direction. And things are changing so fast. I just don't think we can... There's enough time to gain our footing. And I think we will adjust, I hope, before we blow ourselves up. But this is still so new.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: How TV, Twitter and TikTok Remade Our Politics
It just feels like it's been around forever because it's so damn exhausting.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: How TV, Twitter and TikTok Remade Our Politics
It is always a TV show first. It has to be. The form itself, the medium itself imposes that. That's kind of what he's getting at.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: How TV, Twitter and TikTok Remade Our Politics
Well, that's one thing about media technology today that is actually very different from the past. It evolves so much faster now. For most of human history, the world you died in looked a lot like the world you were born into. And that kind of stability puts culture on a solid footing. Now I don't even understand what my 13-year-old niece is doing on TikTok.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: How TV, Twitter and TikTok Remade Our Politics
You know, the pace of change is too fast for our institutions, too fast for our culture, and probably too fast for our minds to adjust. If the internet is as transformative a technology as a printing press, and I think it's certainly comparable, then it's going to take several decades to fully adjust to the changes it has wrought.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: How TV, Twitter and TikTok Remade Our Politics
We had roughly 200 years after the printing press without any major revolutions in media technology, and we needed all of that time. to develop the institutions of modernity. But I'm not sure we have another 200 years to adjust to this revolution, and things are going to keep changing at breakneck speed.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: How TV, Twitter and TikTok Remade Our Politics
So I don't know where that leaves us, Ezra, but I do think it means we should expect a bumpy ride.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: How TV, Twitter and TikTok Remade Our Politics
It's hard to say, but on some basic level, teaching kids or really at the very least, you know, as a secondary education level, teaching people about different communication technologies and the styles of speaking and the rhetorical strategies and the ways they push and pull and impose themselves on us and manipulate us teaching them about
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: How TV, Twitter and TikTok Remade Our Politics
really teaching them about media ecology itself and teaching them about these technologies, not as reflections of our world, but shapers of it, but at least give people some kind of intellectual self-defense system or at least some way of recognizing maybe when they're being
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: How TV, Twitter and TikTok Remade Our Politics
manipulated and when they're being pulled and pushed and twisted up by these different forces but i'm not especially sanguine about how effective that might be but that kind of media literacy of that kind seems to me more helpful than what a lot of people often talk about which is civics education because i don't think that's really the problem here
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: How TV, Twitter and TikTok Remade Our Politics
Well, I have to recommend Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death. I know that's a book that's been mentioned here before because I just feel like I have to recommend a media ecology book and McLuhan, God bless him, is so difficult to read. Postman is at least incredibly clear and accessible and it's a very good way into media ecology as a way of seeing and thinking about the world.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: How TV, Twitter and TikTok Remade Our Politics
The second book would be Walter Lippmann's Public Opinion. And I think that was published in 1922. I really think Lippmann, despite his eventual turn against democracy, he sort of threw in the towel. I do think he understood the problems of democracy, especially in the post-industrial world. And whatever you think of his prescriptions, his diagnosis really holds up. So anyone thinking...
The Ezra Klein Show
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through these problems would do well to read Littman. The third book would be Thomas de Zengotida. So an anthropologist of all things, but he wrote a book called Mediated. And it's just a really lucid and well-written and kind of funny look at the consequences of living in a media-saturated society at the personal and the political level.
The Ezra Klein Show
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And I've always felt like it's a very underappreciated book. So I would recommend that. Sean Elling, thank you very much. Thanks for having me, Ezra.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: How TV, Twitter and TikTok Remade Our Politics
I mean, I think that's the point that Sesame Street is trying to make, right? And so it's maybe easier to understand it by contrasting it with like the printed word, which I think Postman was probably a little bit romantic about, but... He argues that print has these pretty clear biases because of the nature of the medium. It's slower, it's more deliberative, more demanding, it's linear.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: How TV, Twitter and TikTok Remade Our Politics
It's the domain of ideas, of abstract thought, or at least it tends toward that. I think some of these distinctions that these ecologists make between different mediums may be a little too neat, but the core point is right. But TV, unlike print, is not a medium. that encourages rational thinking. It is all about action and imagery. It's about evoking emotional responses in a more passive way.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: How TV, Twitter and TikTok Remade Our Politics
And again, this goes back to the Sesame Street point. More importantly, TV has to be entertaining in order to capture an audience and sell ads. That's what it exists to do. So Postman just says, that the purpose of a medium can't be separated from the content it produces. So TV has to be entertaining. It's image-based, so the people on it have to look a certain way.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: How TV, Twitter and TikTok Remade Our Politics
They have to be attractive in politics because so much of it happens on and through TV has to reflect these biases, right? I mean, that's the ideological bias of TV. I mean, you think he's basically right there?
The Ezra Klein Show
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Yeah, we go through this, sort of the book is kind of moving through history, lurching from one revolution in media to another. And we start in Athens and Rome, both societies that were formed in large part by speech and rhetoric, but also upended by them.
The Ezra Klein Show
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There's a printing press where that gives us the birth of newspapers and books and helps give us the Enlightenment, but it also unleashes a devastating religious war that devours the continent. In the 19th century, we get the Telegraph and the Penny Press, and that's really good for spreading liberal democratic norms, but it was also a really important platform for nativist and nationalism.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: How TV, Twitter and TikTok Remade Our Politics
get fascism in the 20th century and fascism was not possible without mass media like film and radio those are indispensable vessels for fascist propaganda and then of course we get television and now the internet later and the thing again about all those revolutions is not that the technologies are good or bad. It's just that they're disruptive in very unpredictable ways.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: How TV, Twitter and TikTok Remade Our Politics
Sometimes you get the Arab Spring and sometimes you get Pizzagate. But they change the way a society thinks and orients itself. It changes the way a society relates to each other and to the world. And that has far-reaching complications. It changes us. And by extension, it has to change our politics, I mean, how could it not?
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: How TV, Twitter and TikTok Remade Our Politics
Well, Twitter has been, I think, bad for me personally. I mean, I've joked that I'm the worst version of myself on Twitter, but the thing about Twitter is and I'm very curious what you think about this, is that to be on there is to give yourself over to the incentives driving it. Attention, virality, the impulse to perform. And I think that's bad. It blinkers our intuitions.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: How TV, Twitter and TikTok Remade Our Politics
It creates anxieties and pressures that bleed into our work, certainly mine. And for individual writers, it's...
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: How TV, Twitter and TikTok Remade Our Politics
kind of become a platform for just personal brand promotion and that carries its own kinds of perverse incentives i mean i don't know maybe that's too dark you know mccluhan had this phrase a global village he coined which is sounds kind of techno utopian like he was you know very excited about this future of the internet where we would all be
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: How TV, Twitter and TikTok Remade Our Politics
together but like his point was actually the opposite of that no it would be the size of the world but the psychological dynamics would be like a little tiny town where like everybody's all up in everyone else's business everyone's always looking over everyone's shoulders but there's all these social pressures and i feel those pretty intensely
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: How TV, Twitter and TikTok Remade Our Politics
And the more I step away from that and just do stuff like podcasting, which is kind of removed from Twitter and some of that immediate feedback, it just feels liberating. I mean, it just feels more satisfying. I don't know. Is that your experience?
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: How TV, Twitter and TikTok Remade Our Politics
Yeah, you know, we probably overstate the broader impact of Twitter. I think like 80% of the country is even on there. But I think it has been very toxic for our business, for journalism. And to the extent that Twitter impacts how journalists think and what they cover,
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: How TV, Twitter and TikTok Remade Our Politics
and what they fear and what they're chasing after, it has to have some impact on the public discourse, which is still influenced by political media, even if it's not as significant as it once was. Like TV, though in different ways, it's just not a space for deliberation. And for that reason, it's not good for what we do. It probably doesn't promote a healthy democratic system
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: How TV, Twitter and TikTok Remade Our Politics
culture but at the same time i guess that's sort of the paradox that we're getting at in the book right twitter is democratic in the sense that it's pretty wide open And if the result of that openness is, you know, a lot of bile and garbage, I guess that's just what democracy looks like sometimes. But the feedback is so immediate and so intense.