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Another flight, another opportunity to think, to ponder, to reflect.
I’m on my way home from a long weekend in Montreal, in a window seat high above the clouds — but still feeling a little low about what I’d started reading in the airport lounge.
The headline from The Atlantic was intriguing: “This Is the News From TikTok.”
I’m not on TikTok. I don’t plan to start using TikTok. The only TikTok I care about is the clock that is counting down to the deadline our newsroom faces each day.
Lest you think I’m a luddite, I fully recognize the power of the world’s most popular social media apps to grab what’s left of our digital attention span, especially among those much younger than me.
So, I read on with a focus far stronger than that needed to digest a 15-second TikTok.
I read about how Pew Research found 39 per cent of adults under age 30 regularly get informed about current affairs via the app, largely through summaries by “newsfluencers” and other short, entertaining “news-adjacent” videos.
I read that those who get their news from TikTok’s algorithm insist they can decipher what’s going on in the world: “Even if they have to extrapolate facts from memes, the brevity and entertainment value compensate for a lack of factual detail.”
And finally, I read how content creators’ efforts to game the algorithm that drives traffic on the platform have resulted in a definition of “news” that has stretched to… “anything that’s new.”
It’s a good thing I had a glass of wine in front of me to help me choke down that definition — one that pays no heed to facts, accuracy, truth or the other heavy lifting involved in journalism.
The antidote to my read about TikTok turned out to be the in-flight re-reading of a 16,000-word essay in The Economist by James Bennet, the former New York Times editorial page editor.
“When the New York Times lost its way” was the headline for the defense Bennet mounted for his resignation amid controversy at the paper he had rejoined after 10 years at The Atlantic.
I couldn’t ignore the tag and the subhead, which were as anti-TikTok as can be. LONG READS was flagged in all caps, almost a trigger warning. The subhead was literally a call to action: “America’s media should do more to equip readers to think for themselves.”
There was much in Bennet’s damning portrayal of the NYT that left an editor like me circling this and highlighting that. At no point, however, was there a meme.
I can’t imagine how the article would translate on TikTok. And if you could somehow compress it into a short-form video, I doubt it would be entertaining enough for the algorithm to surface it to TikTok’s millions.
I worry our culture and society are approaching a crossroads, where some have brains rewired in a way that dense text is beyond their capacity, while others are thought to be standing in the way of a post-literate world. Some content to let an app determine what they consume — delighting in the simple, the quick, the catchy — and others willing to take time to go deeper, to make room for nuance, to be challenged rather than entertained.
Those hooked on distraction will fall victim to an information diet that may be new, but certainly not news — and that has serious implications for the institutions that rely on an informed citizenry.
Meanwhile, TikTok et al will have dried up all those longstanding sources of real news, sucking up the ad dollars and eyeballs that supported them.
Somewhere over the Great Lakes, I stopped to think, to ponder, to reflect. I lowered my tray table because I suddenly needed another glass of wine.
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