Today’s bad idea is one with a very recent history but also a long backstory: David talks to author and journalist James Marriott about what happens when the written word gets supplanted by video and when videos get shorter and shorter. Did the rot set in with television, with YouTube or with TikTok? Is short-form video a symptom or a cause of our shrinking attention spans? What does it mean to have a TikTok prime minister? And is there any way to get people reading again?

Some great discussion but ultimately they spend far too much time waxing cynical about the potential of mediums they are not organic to.

It is mildly embarassing that in this entire discussion the politics and world view of the people who control the algorithm are never honored as the vastly distorting forces they are.

Another thought, they keep bringing up Marshal Macluhan and his thoughts on media, and then also reflecting how paradoxes in the way media changes keep occurring together in twin, i.e. as media gets more fragmented some media becomes longer and longer and more rambly (joe rogan is given as example). They chalk this down to merely the return of the communication of information from written to auditory, a medium that requires repetition and I am not so sure.

The thing Finnegans Wake that stood out to me most was how Joyce would almost always imbue characters and elements with some element of both extremes, if a character is strong they are also described as possibly very weak, if they are described as a coward what is perhaps being said is that they are a hero, and up is in some ways the very essence of down… as a dream language should function arguably but also… there is something infuriatingly magical about this.

It would seem like this kind of approach to language would annihilate any meaning… and yet it doesn’t. Joyce talks in terms of bandwiths of possibility and invokes them without needing to locate a possibility necessarily within one specific possible realworld manifestation of it. This doesn’t mean that Joyce doesn’t give shape to characters or entities within those bandwiths, the width is polyphonic to invite alternative perspectives not annihilate any single one perspective or unique identity.

I don’t think Marshal Mcluhan or the people in this podcast understand that about the ideas that in many ways came out of or were heavily inspired by Joyce and Finnegans WAke.