Out of the Software Crisis

Epizode

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  Parasocial media: why influencers really aren't your friend 28.09.2026 19min

  An essay version of the video is below. You can subscribe to the audio-only podcast feed over on Apple’s Podcast app and other apps if audio is more your speed. It’s also available as a raw podcast feed if you want to subscribe to it directly in the podcast app of your choice. For fans of video, there’s both the YouTube channel and the TikTok account. Overview # The “parasocial” illusion that’s created by social media platforms helps deceive and misguide you, the audience. Video # Audio # Why influencers really aren't your friend Download audio Parasocial media # Those people aren’t your friends. By those people I mean social media influencers and similarly popular accounts on your preferred social media platform. Obviously online friendships are real. I’ve based my entire career on the relationships I’ve built online. None of my work over the past 25 years would have happened without the mutual connections that you can build on the various social media networks. And those friendships are as real, as rewarding, as the ones I’ve formed in “real life”. They might possibly be better because I have a problem with eye contact for various neurodivergent reasons. It’s quite a bit easier to communicate with people in text or mediated through a computer in some other way without having to think about looking at their eyes. So I’m hugely grateful to the relationships I’ve built on social media, but that isn’t as much the case with social media today as it was when I started. I benefit from the fact that the social media experience twenty years ago or even twenty-five years ago, when I first started blogging, is very different from what passes as social media today. This is a bit of an informal series on how the design of social media – the technical side, the media design, the format of it – affects the way we get our information. I first covered the limitations of short-form video like TikTok. There are plenty of limitations to the form, but I focused specifically on the length and how that forces you to use editing to create an impression of an argument, as opposed to making an actual argument. In the last essay I focused on the context collapse that exists in most social media, but I focused specifically on text-oriented media such as X, Threads, Bluesky, or Mastodon because on those platforms it destroys our ability to deliver the specialised discourse that is needed to cover difficult topics. This time, it’s the false promise behind the term we use to label the platforms where we find each other: social media. Because that’s where things get dicey. I’m not focusing on anxiety or mental health or similar issues in this series, but instead on how it affects the way we get our information. When it comes to social media the asymmetry that now defines it wasn’t there at the beginning. The asymmetry I’m referring to is what danah boyd, an academic I’ve referred to before, called the parasocial nature of the current social media networks. In a recent paper she has argued that these networks have long since ceased to be “social” and are more properly parasocial networks: To more effectively interrogate what we are witnessing, we need to stop presuming that these tools are “social media” and begin recognizing that they are now “parasocial media.” Doing so raises new questions about digitally mediated sociality, not to mention the politics and governance of these platforms. Many social interactions on these sites have become largely an illusion. They don’t exist to build a symmetrical, two-way relationship between people. They’re there to give you the illusion of interacting with anything ranging from a minor celebrity to a major celebrity. You might talk to somebody on social media who has hundreds of thousands of followers, and…
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  Why is social media so humourless? 22.09.2026 17min

  An essay version of the video is below – not just a transcript but a text that I’ve rewritten thoroughly to work as text. You can subscribe to the audio-only podcast feed over on Apple’s Podcast app and other apps if audio is more your speed. It’s also available as a raw podcast feed if you want to subscribe to it directly in the podcast app of your choice. For fans of video, there’s both the YouTube channel and the TikTok account. Overview # Why do jokes fall flat online? Why is it so easy to get into trouble by saying something you thought was fine, but others found offensive? Turns out this is because of a basic feature of how these social media networks work. Video # Audio # Why is social media so humourless? Download audio Context collapse in social media # Have you ever made a joke on Facebook, or some other social media site only for land like a lead balloon? It might have worked for your friends – your pre-existing circle on social media – but as soon as somebody re-posted it or boosted it out of your circle, somebody utterly humourless reacted badly and didn’t get the joke. They got offended and angry about silliness merely existing. There’s a reason for that, and it goes to the root of most of what’s wrong with social media. Not everything that’s wrong, but it is one of the core problems, especially in short textual media. As I’ve been getting into doing videos and podcast episodes and thinking about the role that social media plays in my media landscape and my contributions to that landscape, I’ve been revisiting some of the research I studied and read about in the past. And it turns out there are reasons why the social media experience is so toxic for so many of us. In the last video I addressed many of the issues that affect TikTok and other short-form video. It gives you the impression of an argument as opposed to letting an argument unfold. The constraints imposed by the duration, by the screen size, limit the level of detail you can deliver in a video, which affects the argument they can deliver. This obviously is not great, since this is where much of our political discourse is taking place. But short-form textual social media – the ones that are all modelled after Twitter – aren’t much of a positive influence either. They have a lock on the journalistic class, the political class, and on quite a bit of academic research. People of influence tend to disproportionately get their information from these networks. Whereas the public tends to get them from videos – short and long. They are the first step in for modern information distribution. An academic who wants to promote their paper will start by posting about it on X, or Bluesky, or Mastodon. Politicians make their announcements and commentary on X and then on video. Reporters rely on these sites to discover news and scoops. These social media networks all have the issue where you can quite easily ruin your entire career – or at least your day – by saying something completely and perfectly innocuous that gets interpreted by somebody else as offensive. Sometimes these things are offensive, but you’re used to voicing them in a more forgiving environment. So when you switch to social media, you don’t adjust your language and tone. You don’t code-switch. You don’t change your vocabulary and approach to suit a more public audience. You might not even be aware that a more public audience was possible. Most of us only have our few followers and friends and people rarely notice our nonsense. But sometimes people do notice and it’s rarely pleasant. There’s a name for this: context collapse. It originates with the sociologist and psychologist Erving Goffman, but I personally first encountered it in the papers, essays, and talks, and books by danah boyd who is…
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  Why are short videos bad for learning? 17.09.2026 20min

  An essay version of the video is below – not just a transcript but a text that I’ve rewritten thoroughly to work as text. As is an audio version. You can subscribe to the audio-only unlisted podcast feed here if audio is more your speed. Overview # In this opinion piece – very much my opinion based on my experience and practice, not on academic studies – I explain one reason why short videos, such as what you get on TikTok, are bad for learning and information. Did I mention that this is my opinion? Well it is. Don’t go all “well, that’s just your opinion, man”. I already told you so. And the same goes for the academics who suddenly find themselves filled with the urge to debate me on how montage or Tarkovsky have been understood in academic writing over the years. In. My. Opinion. Video # Audio # Why are short videos bad for learning? Download audio The TikTok Problem # TikTok and its copycats have come to define how much of our societies consume information. The information that reaches us is bounded by the nature of the media that convey it. By emphasising dubious theories that misrepresent neuroplasticity and “brain changes” we’ve managed to downplay that these platforms are doing exactly what they’re designed to do. Their form and design direct how we experience “facts” and how we learn. I like to blame the Russians. Not the current lot. Older Russians. Though, if I’m to be fair, they more described the problem than caused it directly. Specifically, I tend to blame Eisenstein and Tarkovsky. Eisenstein was one of the early pioneers of cinema and was the first major filmmaker to come out of Russia in the immediate aftermath of the Soviet revolution. His contribution was the concept of the “montage”. As legend would have it – probably untrue and apocryphal, but it’s a good story – early Soviet filmmakers struggled with shortages. That meant that they had a harder time of constructing films using the method that had been the norm in early cinema: a series of long takes spliced together, as you would if you were recording a play. They had to work with scraps of film. So, as legend has it, they resorted to splicing together short bits of film and discovered that spliced end result worked very differently. As he described the concept in his book (I think, it’s been twenty years since I read it, so I’m probably both misremembering and paraphrasing it badly): If you record a long take of a man walking to a dinner table, looking down at the food, and licking his lips, you are very directly telling the viewer that the man is hungry and is about to eat. But if you edit together a shot of the man entering a room, a close-up of food on the table, and a close-up of his face as he licks his lips, you are giving the viewer the impression of the same without actually showing it. You never actually visually show the man responding to the food one the screen at the same time. And if you change the shot of the food to the shot of another person, you transform the impression into a sexual one. Same core elements and shots, but because you aren’t directly telling the story visually – you’re implying it – you can transform the impression just by changing one shot. The meaning, the scene, and the whole is constructed in the mind of the viewer without having to go through the effort of doing the thing itself on screen. This is labour-saving, but it also means you can tell the story without having to show the story in detail. The counterpoint to this approach came from another Russian – Tarkovsky – who made Solaris and Stalker and quite a few other movies. He believed that the montage was a bit of a deception. (Again, paraphrasing as it’s been almost two decades since I read his book as well.) He saw the strength of film as being its time…
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  Getting out of your own way when making video 14.09.2026 9min

  Overview # Essay version of the video is below. You can also listen to the audio-only podcast version and subscribe to the unlisted podcast feed here if audio is more your speed. How do you get out of your own way when making videos or media? Download audio Let it be messy! # How do you get out of your own way when you’re trying to make media? It isn’t easy. If you aren’t used to it – if, for example, text is your primary medium – this shit is quite hard. I don’t know how many takes I’ve tried, or how often I’ve recorded videos only to find them unusable. This isn’t even my first attempt at this particular YouTube channel and starting something here. Video is not easy. There’s a reason why it often requires an entire crew for it to look good. There are people who find video to be an easy fit to how they think. They process the world using vlogs and “tic tocs”, much as I process my experience of the world using text. Text is how I think. I write even when I don’t have to – even when it’s not a part of an overall business or freelancing strategy. Video is quite unnatural to me, and it’s taken me a while to figure out a process that I don’t completely hate. Even so, I threw away a couple (or a dozen) of videos because they didn’t work out. The question for this essay is: how do you get a get out of your own way when you’re trying to do something that’s new, that doesn’t fit your normal mode of thinking? When you’re working in a format that doesn’t work with how you usually think? The best advice I got was a little bit too simple, but works overall. ‘Just let it be messy!’ This actually goes back to when I was teaching twenty years ago. If you don’t know my background, I have worked at the crossroads between technology, publishing, and media for twenty-five years. So I have this background where I’m aware of the – not just the technical side or the practice, but also the theoretical context. It doesn’t help! It doesn’t make this easier. Doesn’t make sitting in front of a camera and, well, avoiding an anxiety attack any easier. For some reason I don’t mind recording audio as much. I can handle recording and even the sound of my own voice, but as soon as I’m on camera it gets a bit more stressful. The core problem I’m facing is that as a consumer, as a reader, or watcher of video, I have taste. I have skills as a consumer. It’s one of the reasons why, if you didn’t start writing regularly when you were young, and try to start writing later on when you’re an adult, one of the things that gets in your way, is that you actually have a well-honed assessment of what kind of writing you like. That gets in your own way because you can tell as soon as you start writing that you aren’t delivering the same quality or the same structure. Your writing isn’t convincing like the writing you prefer as a reader. So this mismatch between your skills as a reader and skills as a writer can cause a sort of mental roadblock. This applies to most creative fields – design, photography, and so on. If you have got an eye, but you don’t have the hand-to-eye coordination or the skills to create a composition, you’re going to have a hard time starting. I actually worked for a very brief period of time in TV. And I went through the earliest version of what later became Iceland’s film school. I helped many work on video and I can tell that what I’m making now isn’t as good as I’d like, which might confuse some because they look at it and go: That’s fine. It’s at least as good as the other nonsense I watch. This is why I should just get out of my way and let things be messy. I’m going to try and not obsess about that slight noise disturbance that I keep hearing in the audio setup that makes me paranoid and worried that something in all of this is cau…