Great piece by @will-davies.bsky.social on TikTok, "clustered publics" and their role in far-right resentment. (I've found this shift profoundly challenging to respond to as a journalist. Ignore it and trust what I write reaches readers anyway? Dive in? Something else?) www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
thanks! Examining these 'publics' from within is also fraught with methodological/epistemological problems, as I mention in the piece. Beyond tracking memes or specific influencers, it's impossible to say what is typical or representative of anything.
There's only one way to find out for sure. You have to make some dance videos
or start sitting in my car moaning to my phone about how London is "so over"
📌
We always had enclaves who believed fairy stories about what "the loony left" were up to, via the Sun and Mail. And Tory politicians who knew how to reference that world without dipping too far in to it (see various PPBs that cited the books Labour councils were putting in schools).
I discuss in the piece what's different. Those enclaves were a) much bigger b) visible to the rest of society c) determined by editors not algorithms. We now live in a mediasphere whose specific trends, niches and resentments are, to a great extent, invisible to everyone else.
I think the real difference with on-line culture now is the addition of bogus cinema-verite footage thanks to digital manipulation or (now boosted by AI) outright fabrication. Generations that grew up thinking that wobbly, chaotic images were more "real" and authentic of actual crisis buy into that.
But it's a moment that could pass. I remember Orson Welles looking back on the "War Of The Worlds" incident, saying he was concerned audiences were less sceptical of the new medium of radio as they were of the press. As the digital world matures it will grow to doubt the online videos just as much.
The "breakdown of formality/normality" is a thing in all pseudo-documentary style from the golden age of TV news authority, see Peter Watkins "Punishment Park" for the moments when it "all goes too far" and the director loses his pretence of detachment.