The trouble with low ID: Information density
On Facebook Reels, Bill O'Reilly, and the time we're too inclined to waste on convenient content that just isn't very good
At some time in the future, probably not that long from now, people will look back on the present as a time of excruciatingly low information density. We are living through a conspicuous explosion of content creation -- YouTube alone claims that more than 500 hours of video content are being uploaded every minute. That's the equivalent of 3.4 years of new content per hour. And then there's TikTok, Instagram, Spotify, Snapchat, Facebook, Twitter, and on and on.
■ Some of this content is astonishingly good. Much of it is middling. No small portion of it is garbage. The well-known historian Niall Ferguson examines the world of pop history delivered via podcasts and declares, "They are mostly drowning it [history] in a tidal wave of blather, at best sloppy, at worst mendacious."
■ There is another side to the coin, of course, which is asserted in the words of another historian, David H. Montgomery: "There are awful history podcasts -- and also great ones, with excellent research. (This statement also happens to be true of books.)" It is not the medium itself that determines the quality of the content: Someone keeps paying Bill O'Reilly to put his name on books. That doesn't make the printing press the problem.
■ But thanks to the ease of production and dissemination, so much content is being poured out at such low information density that the pendulum almost certainly must swing somewhat back in the other direction, if from nothing else than audience exhaustion. There are only so many swipes a person can give to a litany of mediocre Facebook Reels before they may begin to regret not simply picking up one of the 100 books everyone should read.
■ The immediacy of electronic media can be utterly seductive, but if that seduction isn't followed by a fulfilling experience, then people will ultimately grow weary. And wasn't weary boredom what the Internet promised to eradicate?
