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Hans talks with Lia Haberman of the newsletter ICYMI about the ostensible death of the hashtag; Georgia talks with media scholar Whitney Phillips about catching breaking news via internet memes. Also: Hit Em!
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Intro Links
- Google has an illegal monopoly on search, judge rules. Here’s what’s next – MSN.com
- Crooked Media, Producer of ‘Pod Save America,’ Reaches Deal With Union, Which Withdraws Claim Company Engaged in Union-Busting Tactics – Variety.com
- After Walkout, Crooked Media Union Reaches Tentative Deal With ‘Pod Save America' Company – MSN.com
- Spotify is full of AI music, and some say it’s ruining the platform – FastCo
- Cartoon Network Website Shuts Down, Warner Bros. Discovery Kicks Visitors Over to Max – Variety.com
- 5 Podcasts for the Constantly Online – NYT
- XOXO 2024 Schedule!
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#DeathoftheHashtag
Find Lia:
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Meming the News, Newsing the Memes
Find Whitney:
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Never Post’s producers are Audrey Evans, Georgia Hampton and The Mysterious Dr. Firstname Lastname. Our senior producer is Hans Buetow. Our executive producer is Jason Oberholtzer. The show’s host is Mike Rugnetta.
The idea, the teacher said, was that there was a chaos
left in matter – a little bit of not-yet in everything that was –
so the poets became interested in fragments, interruptions–
the little bit of saying lit by the unsaid–
was it a way to stay alive, a way to keep hope,
leaving things unfinished?
as if in completing a sentence there was death–
– Excerpt of Ars Poetica (the idea) by Dana Levin
Never Post is a production of Charts & Leisure
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Creators & Guests
What is Never Post?
A podcast about and for the internet, hosted by Mike Rugnetta
Friends, hello, and welcome to Never Post, a podcast for and about the Internet. I'm your host Mike Rugnetta. This intro was written on Tuesday, August 13, 2024 at 9:17 AM, and we have a rad show for you this week. 1st, Hans talks to Leah Haberman, digital media marketing strategist and author of the hugely influential newsletter, ICYMI, about the once ubiquitous hashtag. Did it die?
Mike Rugnetta:Is it dying? Hashtag mystery. Hashtag questions. Hashtag where have all the hashtags gone? And then Georgia talks with media studies scholar Whitney Phillips about the deep and literal ambivalence that comes from learning of major breaking news via novelty Twitter accounts, and raunchy emoji laden text messages.
Mike Rugnetta:But first, let's talk a few of the things that have happened since the last time you heard from us. I have 5 news stories for you this week. Google is a monopolist. Rules US District Court for the District of Columbia Judge Amit Mehta, who having, quote, carefully considered and weighed the witness testimony and evidence, found the tech giant to be engaging in anti competitive practices around its search product. Google pays 1,000,000,000 and 1,000,000,000 of dollars a year to be the default search engine on Apple Devices and countless other gizmos and services.
Mike Rugnetta:This, the court found, shuts out upstarts and furthermore, overpowers Google's ad service, which was not subject to scrutiny in this case, but is the focus of another currently ongoing. What happens next? It'll be a while before we know. Another proceeding will begin soon to determine After a one day walkout on August 5th, workers have reached an agreement with management at Crooked Media, the producers of Pod Save America and other shows for people with Aaron Sorkin box sets who manage Barack Obama fan pages on Facebook. NLRB NLRB for, quote, unilaterally changing the status quo of the previously negotiated recognition agreement by insisting on a permissive subject of bargaining.
Mike Rugnetta:Upon reaching an agreement, the union withdrew the complaint. All in all, the tentative contract was the result of a year of negotiation and one day of collective action. When you fight, you win, folks. Spotify is robots. Chris Stoeckle Walker for Fast Company reports on the increased prevalence of AI generated music on the platform, which finds its way into recommendation pipelines and amasses 100 of 1000 of listens, though the provenance of the work is not at all clear.
Mike Rugnetta:FastCo sought confirmation from the streaming giant on the humanity or not of various artists, Pitcher, Jet Fuel, and GingerAils, and Awake Past 3, to name a few, and didn't get it. Ed Newton Rex, CEO of AI dataset copyright watchdog startup Fairly Trained, calls this practice, quote, copyright laundering. He says, Spotify just straight up shouldn't allow music on the platform that is using models where there's serious concern that they are trained on other musicians worked without permission. Stockel Walker points out, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek has said there are no plans for Spotify to unilaterally ban AI generated music. Goodbye.
Mike Rugnetta:Oops. They did it again. Todd Spangler at Variety reports that Warner Bros. Discovery has axed the entirety of cartoonnetwork.com, redirecting visitors to the paywalled portal of streaming service Max, where the channel's back catalog is now housed. The act crumbles a mountain of clips and comments and episodes of beloved shows like Adventure Time and Steven Universe.
Mike Rugnetta:This comes on the heels of similar decommissions. Comedy Central, MTV News, and CMT websites were also summarily shut down. And finally, a drill tweet appeared at the top of a Harris Walls campaign email. And another thing, I am not mad. Please do not put in the newspaper that I got mad, appeared at the top of a mailer fact checking a Trump press conference.
Mike Rugnetta:Drills' response, quote, in case you thought IDF rape camps were the worst thing our government is sanctioning, above a quote tweet of a post showing a screenshot of the August 8th mailer. Listen, if you're so keen on making him a government mouthpiece, why not just offer the man a job? How about drill secretary of piss, the cabinet position this country truly deserves. In show news this week, Never Post got a shout out in the New York Times. Emma Dibdin included us in a list of 5 podcasts for the constantly online, alongside our pals, IcyMI and Who Weekly, amongst others.
Mike Rugnetta:We'll put a link in the show notes if you wanna go see what they have to say about us and other terminally online pods. For our part, we think you should also be listening to 16th minute of fame, and there are no girls on the Internet. And finally, we are gonna be at XOXO in Portland next week. If you are going to be attending, you can catch us doing our first ever live show on Friday, August 23rd. Check the festival schedule to see when we're on.
Mike Rugnetta:If you will not be in attendance, fret not. Our next episode will be a recording of that show. 2 whole new segments written specifically for the XOXO stage. We cannot wait for y'all to see them in person and then soon after hear them in the feed. Okay.
Mike Rugnetta:That is the news I have for you this week in our first segment. Hans talks with Leah Haberman about the ostensible death of the hashtag. But first, in our interstitials this week, our take on Drew Daniel's dream club genre, 3 imaginings of the Internet's electronic genre par excellence over this last month. We hit you with Hit
Clip:You're gonna hit him.
Clip:They will never know what hit
Clip:You get to hit
Clip:him.
Clip:Alba's ass.
Clip:Hashtag sorry, not sign.
Clip:Hashtag winning.
Clip:Hashtag you gonna die.
Clip:Hashtag blessed.
Hans Buetow:Okay. Fantastic. Alright. You feeling ready? Yep.
Hans Buetow:Leah, before we get going, I would just like I wanna pose a couple of hypotheticals to you.
Lia Haberman:Okay.
Hans Buetow:Okay. First hypothetical. If I were to say to you that we on Never Post are hashtag blessed to have you on this podcast, what would your response be?
Lia Haberman:Hashtag LOL.
Hans Buetow:Another hypothetical. If I were to write a tweet for this episode, promoting this episode that use the hashtag podcast, it used hashtag marketing and like hashtag never post. What would I be telegraphing about our show with that usage?
Lia Haberman:I think you'd be telegraphing that you don't entirely understand modern Internet language and how people communicate with each other.
Hans Buetow:So what would you say if I said that the hashtag is dead?
Lia Haberman:That's a bold statement.
Hans Buetow:I should probably start at the beginning. Leah Haberman, you are a social media expert who works with brands to identify where audiences are going and how to reach them. You have consulted with brands like Google, Robert Half, AT and T, Macy's, big names in the world. And every week, you write a marketing newsletter called, IcyMI, which buffer has called one of the best marketing newsletters 2 years running and I tend to agree because I and our team regularly and carefully read it to understand what is happening on all of the major social media platforms. So thank you for being here and answering my weird questions.
Lia Haberman:Thank you. I I don't think the newsletter has ever covered hashtags in my memory of 3 years of writing this newsletter. So this is a this is a good one. This is this will be an interesting discussion.
Hans Buetow:Okay. Excellent. Excellent. Okay. So a little bit about where I'm coming from and why I have asked you here.
Hans Buetow:I would consider myself to be a moderate consumer of select social media who never posts. And, recently, I was looking at my Twitter feed and I just realized, oh, wait. I'm not seeing hashtags anywhere. They have basically disappeared, and I didn't really notice them going. So then I hop over to Instagram and, nope.
Hans Buetow:Very few hashtags there either and I'm just realizing I'm not sure when and why they're gone because they always seemed useful to me. So I thought about who I could ask about this and I wanted an insider's perspective, Someone who has worked for years with the nuts and bolts of how hashtags have evolved and who can maybe tell me about the moment and the reason that hashtags evaporated and you are that someone. And so to start with, like, yes, no, are we using hashtags? Are they are they cringe?
Lia Haberman:It's slightly cringe. I think hashtags were super useful when they launched. I think they have been used and abused since then and become largely irrelevant other than to brands, for example, in a marketing context. I think now if you see a hashtag, it's more than likely gonna be a brand post versus the way that a person posts naturally. When brands took that over, that really killed the whole hashtag as a clever content concept.
Hans Buetow:Very interesting. What you said about this feels very different from how I think of hashtags historically. So here's where I last meaningfully paid attention to hashtags and I think where they locked in my mind as, like, defining of what a hashtag is. So it's 2015. I'm working on a comedy radio show, that records live in a theater.
Hans Buetow:So a big part of the social presence of that show is to use a hashtag for the event. And that to me is one of the big uses in my mind, which is, like, categorization. And that's one form, that's one subset of categorization, but it's like a way finder or, like, a designation of a community or or a shared interest and maybe in that, you, like, add reach and search. And then you have, in parallel to that, I was working for this show running the Tumblr.
Lia Haberman:Love Tumblr.
Hans Buetow:Love Tumblr. Oh, I had such a good time and it was Duragor. It felt not just necessary but kinda, like, clever to sprinkle hashtags in kind of liberally, but they had a different purpose and that those hashtags were content. So, like, they were, like, a parenthetical or, like, a subtext. So they were contrasting or they were adding sideways contact.
Hans Buetow:They were, like, kind of a whisper at the end of a post to say more and, like, the good or funny or insightful tags, like, if you could make them that, they would, like, even be screenshot and put in as an addendum. So, like, categorization and content, to me, felt like the 2 worlds that hashtags were important for and people really made use of. Does that feel like a way that we could categorize the historical use of hashtag, or do you feel like there's other uses that it had too?
Lia Haberman:The one thing that you haven't mentioned also, and I would say probably in 2015, this was super relevant. I think probably the 2000 tens up to about 2020. There's also the hashtag movement. So, you know, hashtag activism, black lives matter, ice bucket challenge, Arab Spring, you know, all of these things where it was important to be able to gather people around the hashtag. I think the one other thing, and this might fall under categorization, but really if you think about the early hashtag as well, there was a whole concept of, you know, if there was an earthquake or another natural disaster, it was a way for people to find each other to be able to ask for help, offer help, identify maybe where their family was, for example, get government resources.
Lia Haberman:So I don't know. I I I'm not sure if that falls under categorization. It it probably does. I guess these are all kind of like subtexts of, you know, how or why we use hashtags.
Hans Buetow:That totally feel like categorization to me. These, like, ways of bringing like information together, which when you look at the morass, like, the huge quantity of information that started to be generated, those actually felt really useful, like, you could follow a thread of something because the hashtag would put this tag onto things. When do you think the content start to get pushed too far?
Lia Haberman:I I mean, it's probably concurrently with all of the hashtag uses. So I don't know if you remember the Jimmy Fallon, Justin Timberlake skit where it was like, hashtag blessed, hashtag podcast, hashtag conversation.
Mike Rugnetta:Hey. Check it out. I brought you some cookies. Hashtag homemade, hashtag oatmeal raisin, hashtag show me the cookie.
Clip:Sweet. Hashtag don't mind if I don't. Pretty good. Hashtag getting my cookie on. Hashtag I'm the real cookie monster.
Clip:Hashtag no no no no no no.
Mike Rugnetta:Delicious. Right? Hashtag I did it all for the cookie. Hashtag LOL, LOL, LOL, LOL, LOL,
Clip:LOL, LOL, LOL, LOL. Hashtag classic.
Lia Haberman:And that was, like, 10 or 11 years ago. So that was happening even as the hashtag the importance of the hashtag was growing. There was kind of this, you know, the flip side of it that it was being mocked.
Clip:Hey, guys. Yeah. Quest?
Mike Rugnetta:What's up?
Clip:Hashtag shut the up.
Lia Haberman:I would say in maybe 2,016, 17 was when I started advising brands not to use a hashtag that nobody cared about but them. And so that was kind of a problem when there were events or there were things that they wanted to publicize, and they'd use these hashtags, and nobody had any interest in that hashtag. So it just became clutter or spam within the content. Brands thought they were either being clever or they were, you know, conveying raising brand awareness and, you know, as part of their messaging and their identity, But it was really just noise that nobody wanted to hear.
Hans Buetow:When you're saying overused though, the thing you mentioned was brands. Do you feel like the people were also overusing?
Lia Haberman:I don't think the average person overused the hashtag. I think the I I think you mentioned something like the try hards or, you know, I'd say brand marketers. Mhmm. Not to disparage brand marketers, nothing but love. But I do think that somebody who was used to speaking in kind of marketing lingo or corporate speak, the brands and the people working at the brands are the ones that really, I would say, destroyed the effectiveness of the hashtag.
Hans Buetow:You mentioned something in your list as a as a function that I wanna throw this at you and see how it feels because there were also these activism causes. There were these things like Arab Spring 2011 was a was a huge one there. You have occupy both in the US and globally happens in 2011. Black Lives Matter starting in 2013. Me Too starting, like, taking Toronto Berg statement.
Hans Buetow:It was a huge one. That's 2017. That feels maybe like it's as good as it got. Like, they fulfill their destiny with those sort of unifying things around major difficult things. And, like, where does the hashtag go from that, especially when it's a brand trying to sell you something?
Hans Buetow:Like, after me too, does making a hashtag for your movie feel kind of, like, silly?
Lia Haberman:I don't think so. I could I think it could have multiple uses. I don't think it's wrong to have a hashtag around your movie name, for example. 1,000,000 of dollars have been spent. There's a good chance that somebody wants to talk about that movie.
Lia Haberman:Yeah. But if you're having a corporate conference that nobody really wants to go to, your employees are being forced to attend, and you use a hashtag, that's where you've got a conversation. Nobody really wants to join. You know, a brand will have sort of an acronym with, like, 2024. I'm thinking of and and not that I'm just gonna use an example.
Lia Haberman:But like South by Southwest, for example. So people are there, SXSW. I think it's already a win that they got people to use SXSW as the hashtag. But then if you're part of the organizing committee, you want people to use sxxw 2023, 2024. You know, you wanna be able to categorize it.
Lia Haberman:So not only were they trying to spark conversations that weren't happening or occurring naturally, but then they also tried to steer or force the conversation into a specific hashtag that people weren't necessarily interested in using. So instead of listening to the community, listening to the conversations being had, they were trying to co opt the conversation and and force it or steer it in a direction that they wanted it to go.
Hans Buetow:Right. Right. Right. Where do you see them being used most across platforms right now?
Lia Haberman:That's a great question. Where do I see hashtags being used most is probably TikTok. That's a different question than where do I see hashtags being used most in an appropriate and relevant way
Hans Buetow:Yeah.
Lia Haberman:That relates to whatever the content is that's being shared. I wouldn't say that that's TikTok. I think when you look at TikTok now, the way that hashtags are used are very similar to the way that they were used when Instagram came out. I don't know if you remember there was hashtags like instagood or insta love. Right.
Lia Haberman:All of these kind of, hashtags that were basically irrelevant. Like, they had no meaning. There was no meaning to instagood or insta love, but it became a thing that your hashtag doesn't need to be relevant at all to what it is that you're posting, and you can really go random. You can really go off topic, to glom on to certain trends. So does that mean that TikTok creators will naturally evolve into kind of that next era of the useful hashtag, the activism hashtag.
Lia Haberman:Yeah. Maybe. You know, that could be something that ends up happening. But right now, I think on TikTok, we are with the hashtag where we were with Instagram 10 years ago.
Hans Buetow:So that's TikTok. Let's stay on Instagram for a second because Instagram has made some moves recently with the hashtag to reassert the importance of the hashtag and almost bring it back? Does that feel like a correct statement?
Lia Haberman:There is a huge frustration on Instagram. The message is mixed. Adam Masseria will come out and said, hashtags essentially don't increase your reach or the impressions of your content. So he sort of dismissed the hashtag. Yeah.
Lia Haberman:And then came out and said, yes, use hashtags and use hashtags within the body of your caption, not in the comments. And then there was a difference between how many hashtags you were supposed to use. People used to use 30. Then the I think the most recent guidance has been, like, up to 5, for example. So people are really confused and really not sure how to use hashtags on Instagram at this point in 2024.
Hans Buetow:It feels like the historical wisdom was that adding in those hashtags for brands was a way to increase visibility and reach. Was that ever true?
Lia Haberman:Yes. And I will say it was a way to count the impact of what you were doing. So to be able to go back and measure how far your conversation traveled.
Hans Buetow:Mhmm.
Lia Haberman:That was a valuable metric when you were trying to understand what was the ROI of having a social channel, having a social team. And, generally, I think the platforms were very liberal in their, measurement of how far your hashtag went. And so it was just a vanity metric that looked really good when you were reporting on a campaign and get these really fantastic numbers to be able to show internally.
Hans Buetow:So how without the hashtag are those numbers being gathered now?
Lia Haberman:People are constantly posting on whether it's Slack channels, group chats, Facebook groups. Help. How do I track this conversation? And especially now that we have this focus on DMs and stories. Any ability to be able to track that conversation once it goes into a DM, is is very hard.
Hans Buetow:So it it feels like what you're identifying here is a real contradiction. The folksonomy of the hashtag is completely collapsed, but at the same time the Internet is suffering from a lack of organized info, like, especially if you think about, like, the AI onslaught that's happening now and, like, how much we desperately need to be able to categorize, we are on one hand giving up a tool that's act demonstrably quite good at it while the need for it is rising. Have we found other solutions to replace the hashtag or is this just a void that we're experiencing in with this glut of information that we have that we just don't have a good tool for searching?
Lia Haberman:So I think you used to be able to curate the information that you got on your feed. There used to be a chronological feed. There used to be, you know, the people that you followed, and that's the content that you get. So if something was happening, you did have to go look for it. Now with 0 chronological feed, with the FYP that's just serving you stuff from people you don't follow, it's very hard to escape.
Lia Haberman:And so I think as part of that, the idea that you're gonna go seek out more information, is just unnecessary at this point.
Hans Buetow:And the hashtag then feels less relevant because it doesn't help us in that process of the fire hose. If you're looking into the fire hose, what good does a hashtag do you? It just is more clutter. Within that, you need different tools to be able to sort through the massive information. We're not reaching out.
Hans Buetow:We're trying to fend off.
Lia Haberman:That's a really good way of putting it. And I think, yeah, if if anything, if you were gonna think of, like, what affected or impacted the hashtag, the f y p feed is probably the thing that killed the current, you know, the hashtag as we know it.
Hans Buetow:So to go back to the original statement of this, is the hashtag dead? I had not updated my idea of the hashtag in a long time and maybe the thing I have been holding on to as, like, the quintessence of a hashtag, it just doesn't exist anymore. Like, that has gone away. Yes. The hashtag is dead.
Hans Buetow:Like, long live the hashtag?
Lia Haberman:Yes. We're probably just nostalgic for the original hashtag. And I do think if the hashtag ever comes back, it's probably gonna be as kind of a novelty or a nostalgia play in a completely separate way than they were originally intended back in 2009.
Hans Buetow:Leah, thank you so much for coming and helping me. I feel kinda liberated actually after this conversation. I feel I can let go of something that has maybe been like, I can emerge into a new me.
Lia Haberman:I'm glad I helped. I feel very nostalgic now. Yeah. So I think you've essentially kind of shifted that from your mind to mine. So now I've got to ruminate on this for the next couple of weeks.
Hans Buetow:Well, thanks for ruminating, during this. We really appreciate you being here.
Lia Haberman:Thank you so much.
Hans Buetow:Where can people find you online?
Lia Haberman:You can find me on every platform, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, threads, and of course, Icymi or in case you missed it, have not touched on hashtags yet, but I probably will when this podcast comes out.
Hans Buetow:Oh, fantastic. We'll look forward to that. And please, everybody, go and subscribe to it. It is a treasure trove of insights about everything that is happening. We learned so much about what's coming down the pipe from Leah.
Hans Buetow:Thank you again to Leah Haberman. For this story, I wanted to get a sense of how hashtags functioned, kind of on a macro level. But I'm also really interested in how actual people use them in real life. So what are your hashtag habits? Have those changed?
Hans Buetow:How have they changed? What would you like to see happen to the hashtag in the future? You can give us a call, send us an email. Info on how to send us your thoughts is in the show notes.
Georgia Hampton:News alert looks sideways eye emoji like ho dancing woman emoji. Biden, man with white hair emoji, has dropped down arrow emoji, his presidential American flag emoji, ass peach emoji, out, circle with line through it emoji Of the race. Running woman emoji. Today. Calendar emoji.
Georgia Hampton:And the nomination ballot emoji will go to come Allah, 3 water droplets emoji. Harris, woman with blonde hair emoji. Where were you when you found out about Joe Biden stepping down from the presidential race? I was online, on my phone, in my apartment, and I got that text from a friend. And while I was reading it, I realized that I find out about a lot of major news in this way and so do, like, all of my friends.
Georgia Hampton:That's weird. Right? Isn't it weird for anyone else? And is it, I don't know, messing with our brains or something? To be more specific, I was curious how this kind of news sharing could complicate our relationship with the news.
Georgia Hampton:Maybe there's something positive or even radical about hearing world events through channels. So I spoke with Whitney Phillips, an assistant professor of digital platforms and media ethics at the University of Oregon. By her own description, she studies everything that is stressful and upsetting in politics and on the Internet. She's also the writer of several books about the sociopolitical landscape of the online world, including The Ambivalent Internet, which covers the complicated nature of how we exist and, crucially, joke on the Internet. I started our conversation by asking her opinion about another way that a lot of people found out about Biden dropping out of the race.
Georgia Hampton:Not a horny copypasta chain text, but another unexpected source. So Joe Biden stepped down from the presidential race on July 21st at 12:46 PM. 4 minutes later, the Twitter account Liza Minelli outlives posted this tweet.
AI Voice:Liza Minelli has outlived Joe Biden's race for reelection. After weeks of pressure from fellow Democrats, he is stepping down as the party's nominee for president.
Georgia Hampton:Now for the uninitiated, the Liza Minnelli Outlived's Twitter account posts basically exactly that. So if a famous person passes away, if a historic event happens, if power changes hands, this account will say Liza Minnelli has outlived x y or z. So this tweet about Joe Biden stepping down beat major news organizations' coverage of this event. So CNN doesn't tweet about this news until 1:0:6 PM, which is 20 minutes after the official POTUS tweet. MSNBC doesn't post about it until 1:28 PM.
Georgia Hampton:So the Liza Minnelli outlives account is breaking news. Like, it is breaking news for a lot of people, and a lot of people found out this news this way. Like, all of the tweet responses to this post are either, oh my god. I can't believe I found out this way, or I'm so glad that you're the reason I found this out. Mhmm.
Georgia Hampton:And I just I bring this to you because I'm curious. How does this make you feel? How does hearing this, this way people are finding out news, how does that strike you?
Whitney Phillips:It I mean, it's interesting because my expectation is that people will receive their news by pulling out the computer in their pockets and be inundated with information, good or bad, if they're shopping for groceries, if they're walking their dog, that that really this particular outlet of of breaking the news to me is I mean, it's interesting that it's it's related, has a celebrity connection, but it's just more we are mobile. We're in the middle of things. We are busy as we receive information about the world, and that is just how we do politics now. So my main reaction to that story is to not have a reaction. It's so commonplace to be inundated by giant news in these very strange moments.
Whitney Phillips:These, like, nothing moments of walking from a grocery store. I'm both surprised by it, but then also because this is what I study and have studied it for a long time sort of think, yeah, that's just politics. That's just what it's like now. And just as always with everything online and in politics, there's a lot of feelings, a lot of kind of furrowed brow, a lot of, like, yeah, shrug. That's just how things are and everything in between.
Lia Haberman:Right. I mean, exactly. I think, like, that's how a lot of us find out about stuff like this.
Whitney Phillips:Yeah. There's an informality to really formal and big moments. You know, if you talk about people of previous generations, sort of where they were when they found out, you know, the the the classic is when, president Kennedy was shot. You know, my mom will talk about you. You somehow had to be in the orbit of a television or a radio.
Whitney Phillips:And so there were a lot of people who were able to make their way through the day without being kind of roped into the conversation because they just weren't in the pathway of mass media. And now we are almost never, outside of the pathway of mass media and so these huge moments, these catastrophically bad or good or just, you know, important moments become part of walking down the street, going to the grocery store, waking up from a nap, like, the the line between the serious informal and the everyday and informal is just so blurry that, yeah, you get your news in these ways that 15 years ago, if you told us that this is how we were going to get our news, we'd be like, that sounds wild. And now what's wild is that it's not wild.
Georgia Hampton:Exactly. I mean, I I really wanna lean into this notion of the informality of information. So to me, this speaks to this kind of prevalence of ambivalence. The informality of information online has a relationship to ambivalence, which is a very present experience of of being on the Internet.
Whitney Phillips:Yeah. So when people use the word ambivalence just in everyday conversation, they often are it's synonymous with, like, meh, like, I don't really care. So where do you wanna go to lunch? And you're, like, I don't know. I'm in I'm ambivalent.
Whitney Phillips:That's not actually how the word is defined and language changes and adapts and I'm a big I'm a big fan of language doing what it does. But in this case, there's something really, I think, useful about the term ambivalence as it is actually defined. And the root of the Latin prefix of the word ambi means both. It means 2. And b I z, it basically means you're holding 2 things simultaneously that are opposed.
Whitney Phillips:Communication is very very informal, but it also takes place in the context of very formal and serious issues or you have something that's really fun because we're having fun in a text thread or whatever and we're making sort of silly jokes, but at the same time it's really serious or really harmful potentially to, you know, other groups of people. And the Internet just ends up really eluding easy classification of one thing versus the other thing. Almost always, it is both things.
Georgia Hampton:I think this place versus lack of place is also interesting here because as you said, you know, it's kind of weird to find out some really intense world news that could potentially affect you leaving the grocery store or on your couch or in the bathroom or at the dentist or whatever and having access to the entirety of the Internet in the computer in your hand makes that that barrier just never exist.
Whitney Phillips:There's just such a juxtaposition, such a clash between what we're seeing and what else we're seeing and where we are and what's happening that we don't really know. We short circuit, don't necessarily know how to respond. And and so, again, it can lend those tools and those dynamics can lend itself to really problematic responses or really numb responses or just really weird responses because we so many strange things happen on our devices. It collapses so many areas of our life that maybe we don't even appreciate how emotionally odd we find ourselves, like, the positions we find ourselves in because those juxtapositions are so intense.
Georgia Hampton:I find it very interesting that something like the Liza Minnelli Outlives Twitter account is just like a regular person or, like, these meme accounts are just regular people. They're not necessarily journalists. They're often very much not journalists or news organizations. So I'm curious what are either the risks or potentially benefits of these, like, unusual sources, these almost ironic sources of news breaking.
Whitney Phillips:So one of the trend lines is an increasing distrust of mainstream news organizations to begin with. It's not just that news organizations can be a little bit slower. If they're doing their job correctly, they should actually be a little bit slower because they need to vet information and do all the things they need to do. So it's not just that they they sometimes will be following the breaking news, posted by, Liza Manelli Outlives, but it's also that a lot of people are disinclined to believe what they say. And so they're gonna be more naturally attracted to or already are plugged into meme accounts or influencer accounts or other kinds of accounts that aren't, you know, that aren't mainstream news outlets, and so it's sort of self sorting that these students are, my experience, many young people, not all, certainly the ones that filter through my classroom, they're both encountering alternative sources of information on social media, but they're also seeking those alternatives out because there's something about the mainstream news media that they just don't necessarily trust or they approach mainstream news with more of a distrustful kind of impulse than they would even with, like, a meme account maybe.
Georgia Hampton:Why do you think that is? Why do you think they lack that trust?
Whitney Phillips:I mean, institutional trust has taken a nosedive really across the board. It's been happening for years now. Social media just is is has accelerated in many ways the the sense that, well, we can get our information from alternative sources and those sources are not believed to be biased. You just see people having a different relationship to information. Seeking out information in new ways that sometimes can be great and sometimes can be really problematic back to the ambivalent conversation.
Georgia Hampton:So thinking of of trustworthiness, does this then suggest that a meme account, the Liza Minnelli Outlived Twitter account, is a more trusted source, is a more neutral seeming source than something like CNN?
Whitney Phillips:It's I mean, for my experience is that the answer is often yes, and that does not I am not saying that that's because these kinds of sources are more trustworthy, but but many people just actively they don't go to mainstream news outlets. Or if they see something on mainstream news outlets, then they're gonna go fact check it by going elsewhere on social media to see if these other accounts are also talking about it. So how it is and why it is that that you see people move away from those kinds, those sources of institutional trust, that's the topic of 500 dissertations. But in practice, you know, you then see people receiving and actively trying to seek out information from places that are not NPR, for example. That they would look more to these other sources or even just their friends to confirm information because just because you see it posted by a a news source doesn't mean it's true as some people have come to believe, at least.
Whitney Phillips:That's their sort of mindset.
Georgia Hampton:So in in light of what you were saying about this overwhelm of experiencing things online, There is this kind of general feeling of hopelessness, of of of numbness, but with a twinge of hopelessness. And I I wonder how that humor angle can be seen as as this valuable balm, this this almost radical either rejection of that hopelessness or, like, nah, whatever. I guess we'll just deal with it.
Whitney Phillips:Yeah. Humor can really I mean, humor is fundamentally ambivalent. That's just what if you had to characterize humor, it's it's an it's an ambivalent communicative practice just across the board, offline, online. So I would say yes to both of those different options. But in addition to that, humor works in a particular kind of way online because you're just you are inundated with a series of punch lines that it's easier to kind of just take content as that, as content rather than fully embodied experiences, long form videos, real people, that things get easily flattened into just a punch line or something that's trollable or something that you don't realize could do harm if you engaged with it, if you amplified it.
Whitney Phillips:So online humor can often, I mean, it can be a great way to blow off steam and connect with friends and and do things that make you feel connected because that's what humor helps us do is to feel connected with each other. And at the same time, that often happens at the expense of other people. Mhmm. So it's helping us feel better. It's helping us feel more connected and less nihilistically doomed, and at the same time, it can contribute to sort of an overall disconnected and sort of, nihilistic response because it's just it's treating issues.
Whitney Phillips:It flattens them to content and then that, of course, is what contributes to the kind of stress that then makes it really hard for us us to respond in slow, quiet, contemplative ways and actually down regulate when we need to do that.
Georgia Hampton:Has this kind of experience happened before? Like, have we have we gone through in the past a technological transformation like this in terms of how we consume and engage with news, with media, with our relationship to the world events that shape our lives.
Whitney Phillips:So one example that I think is pretty instructive and really helps us to sort of understand really what is unique about this moment in terms of consequences for our politics and for our overall well-being is the copy machine. So the copy machine when when you first start offices around the United States first start seeing copy machines sort of appear, in in mid century and but they were pretty rare and they were confined to offices that were, you know, white collar spaces. So it was only a certain kind of worker who was who had the ability to to use a copier And, of course, the first thing that people did when copy machines were in were introduced into their into their offices was to start making gross disgusting jokes and, like, rude things and racist things and, basically, they were just doing memes and there would you could see iterations of different jokes that that people would, I mean, and they had to do this is all analog. This is a copier. So you would, like, take a thing that your friend had shown you and then you like draw on it a little bit and then you copy it and then you send it to somebody else.
Whitney Phillips:So people were absolutely doing a lot of the kind of remixes that we see all the time online. But when you're talking about that process, that those dynamics in offices in 1964, it's all restricted to what you could hand someone with your with your hands.
Georgia Hampton:Right.
Whitney Phillips:That you had to be able to physically get a piece of paper to another person. You look at then how the same kind of dynamic plays out online, especially in 2024. There are very few people who can opt out of digital spaces. And so the ability for information to travel, for jokes to travel, for things to get out of hand, for people to be just overwhelmed and inundated with stuff they're not even asking to look at, that is just light years different from what it was with the copiers. Even if the the idea is still there and the dynamics are still there, it was just limited.
Georgia Hampton:With this copy machine example, what is the lesson we can learn from that, from that experience?
Whitney Phillips:That basically people like to play, and play is such, an important human trait and it is what connects us together and it what it's what helps us get through difficult times, and because we are talking about ambivalence, it's also the thing that drives us apart, that can alienate other people, that can ultimately make us feel separate from the world, and that is just particularly true. It's like hyper true in digital spaces, but play is always something play and laughter something you have to hold lightly and and think about in this ambivalent way because those are the consequences.
Georgia Hampton:Yeah. So I mean, thinking of play, what happens when the thing we're playing with is world news?
Whitney Phillips:I mean, it it often it takes a tragedy. It takes lived experience. It takes the body, both our own bodies when we're responding to something and the recognition of others as bodies with parts and minds and feelings and pain and it flattens it into content. There's social capital. People share things quickly in order to be the first of their friends to break the news that those things are part of what we do and have become really, really normalized and and in many cases are fine not problematic, but that's also what makes it really hard to then fully be in and process big moments because if you're thinking about a big moment more as like how do I make a meme of this or how am I going to tell a joke about this or, you know, thinking about not the consequences or not the lead up to what happened, but just to the sort of trolley punch line.
Whitney Phillips:It just it sets us up for not thinking what happens as a result of our engagement or our play, and it also lends itself to not paying attention very closely to our own bodies and, like, where are our limits and when do we need to step away?
Georgia Hampton:Is there a a solution? Should there be a solution?
Whitney Phillips:Oh, there should be a solution for everything. I mean, it's again, the this is both I profoundly truly believe that this this recurring point about ambivalence is really helpful, and I also recognize that it's very unsatisfying. To fix the biggest problems of social media would be to take away the incentivizing that makes it make sense to flatten things into content to, you know, do harm and not think about the consequences. Like, that is just how our social media landscape works. We have to figure out how to navigate this and the first step is to kind of make peace with, well, what's actually going on and the answer is everything all at once.
Whitney Phillips:Because we're not gonna get clear answers. It's a reminder we have to take care. It's just becoming better acquainted with your own body and listening to the signals that it's giving you that it cannot take in any more information and then figuring out how to care for yourself.
Lia Haberman:So it sounds like touching grass actually might help.
Whitney Phillips:It's you know, there are there are I I give to my students many different options and going outside and and talking to a tree or touching a tree or touching the ground is on that list. So, yes.
Georgia Hampton:Thank you so much, Whitney, for taking the time to talk to me about this. Where can people find you, more of your work?
Whitney Phillips:So I write on Substack at popular demonology. That's the name of the Substack. And otherwise, I keep a pretty low profile on social media, so you won't be finding me there. But I do longer form writing because I need time to sort of space, space to process and think through things. So that would be the main place, but I don't know.
Whitney Phillips:You can like see where I sit in my No, not physically, but you can go see my landing page for my university, and then it lists all of my different work. If you're curious, I guess, you could see it there.
Georgia Hampton:I always love when topics like this are hard to pin down. It it's frustrating, but kind of in a good way? Anyway, if you have an especially outrageous example of hearing about a world event through bizarre digital means, I gotta know about it, but I'm also very curious to hear from you about how it feels to engage with the news like this. How does it make you feel? Leave us a voicemail, write us an email, send us a voice memo.
Georgia Hampton:You know where to find the info about that. It's in the show notes.
Mike Rugnetta:That is the show we have for you this week. We'll be back in the main feed on August 28th with a recording of our XOXO live show. Members, keep your eyes and ears peeled for extended cuts of both Whitney and Leah, as well as various and sundry other goodies in your feeds. If you are interested in helping us continue to make this show and listening to any of our side shows, like posts from the field, slow post, and never watch, alongside extended segments, bonus segments, and an ad free version of this show, you can head on over to neverpo.st to become a member. The idea, the teacher said, was that there was a chaos left in matter, a little bit of not yet in everything that was.
Mike Rugnetta:So the poets became interested in fragments, interruptions, the little bit of saying lit by the unsaid. Was it a way to stay alive? A way to keep hope, leaving things unfinished? As if, in completing a sentence, there was death. Excerpt of Ars Poetica, The Idea, by Dana Levin.
Mike Rugnetta:Never posts producers are Audrey Evans, Georgia Hampton, and the mysterious, doctor first name, last name. Our senior producer is Han Feutto. Our executive producer is Jason Oberholtzer, and the show's host, that's me, is Mike Crignetta. Never Post is a production of Charts and Leisure.