After a brisk walk around the neighborhood venting about LGBTQ+ exclusion and oppression, our friend stood with my wife and me on our porch to finish a thought. Just as snow was starting to fall, he said, “That’s why I read history: it helps me see that things haven’t always been this way.”
My thoughts stopped in their tracks. I had never heard that particular observation about history before. I’ve always heard things like “history repeats itself,” or that there are generational cycles and patterns that you recognize from history. To think that history might actually reveal how things weren’t always this way is a crack in my understanding of everything—and while in reality, it’s probably 99% bad things on the side of "how it used to be" (like how chattel slavery isn’t currently legal in the U.S. but it certainly was in the past)—even just a sliver of hope is strangely powerful.
For example, history provides us with examples of cultures that are not only comfortable with, but often celebrate or honor gender identities and gender expressions that fall outside of the cisgender binary. Current U.S. politics have decided to demonize gender-nonconforming people (transgender, nonbinary, gender fluid, two-spirit, and other identities), but history tells me that this doesn’t have to be this way. It’s not a requirement for cultures to be transphobic, it’s not even necessarily common to be transphobic (it seems queer phobia is largely the fallout of colonialism). It wasn’t always this way. Therefore it doesn’t have to continue to be this way.
I realize I’ve already brought up some thoughts that may seem spicy. We’ll keep transphobia on simmer awaiting another week’s topic, though I hope this intro has already gotten your wheels turning.
Today, let’s keep exploring the idea that things haven’t always been this way, and they don’t have to continue to be this way. We have some really big systems affecting our lives, especially in our technology. Sometimes it seems like patterns in technology are inevitable and unchangeable, but I have a thought exercise to try, so let’s see if we can show that things don’t have to be the way that they currently are—and try to find the smallest possible change that would have a large impact.
Videos and the Attention Economy
Examining systems is very difficult to do, because they often occupy an invisible, environmental space (see Marshall McLuhan’s exploration of environment and anti-environment). An easier starting place might be in examining the incentives inside the system—what motivates people within the system, or how does the system reward behavior? YouTube, for example, is considered to be the second-largest search engine in the world (next to its parent company’s Google search). It has long been lauded as an education platform, because there is a vast ecosystem of creators, museums, colleges and universities, academics, and professionals in any and all fields who post phenomenally instructive or educational videos. The problem is that you have to work to get that kind of content to reveal itself from the mess of MrBeast-style videos.
I’m heavily biased towards YouTube because I have watched it almost daily for years and have created videos on the platform. Given this bias, I’m especially interested in poking at the “system” to understand where it might be harming humans in its role in the attention economy, which devalues and harvests our attention. Let’s ignore YouTube Shorts because I find that to be the easiest and most uninteresting critique of YouTube, since short-form content does not lend itself well to education or long-term retention of information. Instead, let’s look at a metric that is near and dear to the heart of content creators: View Duration. This metric tells a lot about a video’s effectiveness at keeping attention and can indicate the usefulness or the value of the video over time. I think this is where we can start to unpack how YouTube’s system is more harmful than helpful.
The retention graph can become a game to many creators who use it to inform how much they should cut out of their videos in the future, because shorter videos tend to retain more viewers’ attention. It’s much easier to create many short videos with very thin content, than to create a video of rich information that isn’t “digestible” in a single sitting. If, let’s say, the mission of YouTube was to lean into the side of educational content (rather than competing with short-form interruptive content like TikTok and Instagram), what changes could be made to encourage a kind of learning behavior in viewers?
I think one change in the way advertisements are shown could immediately help this. Normally, you get ads no matter what—the only exception is if a creator has both been granted the ability to monetize their content AND has chosen to turn off advertisements. What if rewatching a video turned off ads? In my experience, long-term content is still only effective if I can watch it again to reabsorb everything and start to unpack the topic. If YouTube incentivized viewers to re-watch videos, instead of always pushing to watch something new, it would drastically change both viewer and creator behavior. Viewers could return to videos more easily to take notes or remind themselves of what they learned. Creators could focus more on depth rather than on structuring for attention hacks like “5 ways to do XYZ and the last one will surprise you.”
YouTube can already segment videos based on the kind of content so that not every video behaves this way (music videos, for instance, might be a content type that still gets ads on every play), but the videos that do encourage better attention habits and/or learning in viewers could be grouped into this feature. They could even go so far as to encourage creators to participate by offering higher ad payouts when audiences re-watch videos. Allowing creators to self-identify as an education channel (or at least video-by-video) would be enough to not put any "strain" on YouTube for validation and the risk to the creator to break the mold would justify the higher payouts.
That’s one change, for one type of content that could drastically impact a huge amount of people (millions if not billions). And it probably wouldn’t affect the platform’s bottom line too much if at all.
Cyborg
History can help us recognize bad patterns and it can also illuminate the flawed logic of assuming everything is this way because it has to be. This applies to the social technology of interacting with other people as well as with more discrete digital technologies. When I start noticing these huge systems that are completely out of my reach as an individual, I often feel hopeless and powerless.
However, history is full of unnamed people taking small actions that end up creating completely different realities. We are the people between the lines, just like all of the people who have been in between the lines of histories gone by. Even the named historical figures didn’t necessarily know that they would be memorialized as prominent people. This shows me that it doesn’t matter whether I get the credit, what matters is that I added my contribution to the tension that becomes larger-scale change.
We probably can’t change YouTube, but we can take a look at the product we make at work (“product” is a very loose term here). We probably can’t reverse the harm done to our transgender populations, but we can make an effort to use their preferred names and pronouns. We probably can’t change everything that’s harmful about our world, our politics, and our systems, but we can change something—we can always change something.
We are social creatures and we have outsized impact on our social “networks”—the people we know and interact with personally. Let’s see what we can change with our very small, intentional actions.