After listening to a number of podcasts hosted by pundits or rich people, I think most of them are too online (just like media people). It struck me how pervasive this is regardless of the person’s expertise, political leanings, podcast content, upbringing, etc.
I listened to Joe Rogan, Scott Galloway, the guests on Left Right & Center, Kara Swisher and Hard Fork. Everyone discussed what they watched on Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Threads, BlueSky and TikTok. They addressed comments from anonymous users, public spats on social media, numbers for likes and followers, etc.
Then each shared their judgements, drew conclusions and made predictions based on their online worlds.
There’s a couple of problems here:
- First, online is not reality.
- Second, what they see is usually not provable nor disprovable.
- Third, purportedly, the algorithms feed each user a curated view of “reality”. Rogan talked about his instagram feed being full of drug & gang related violence in third world countries. Swisher talked about ASMR food prep videos and left leaning political commentary. Galloway spoke of the “crisis” of young men. (I see almost none of this content being pushed to me online. I get old school bodybuilding clips, pizza makers, 1970s-1990s music videos and animal rescue videos).
I am a skeptic so I tend to question the veracity of anything I see online today. To me, it’s all suspect until proven otherwise. It’s as “real” as TV.
Clearly, other people are much less judgmental. They see things online that influence their perspective of the world. Trump is obviously not seeing what I see. Silicon Valley CEOs constantly discuss Tweets, posts and commentary that are not in any way representative of the world I inhabit. Millennials are informed by reality TV. GenZs by TikTok. Boomers by Fox News.
Life has taught me to question what is presented by TV, movies, news and print media as facts. Online is no different. It’s just faster and more voluminous. That doesn’t make what is presented there true.
