27 May

This graph is so interesting, you can read so much of our current lives in it. Notice how older Australians (the red circle) share an information space (mostly TV) that creates for them a feeling of Australia as a shared, public experience. TV is connected to our other institutions, it’s regulated. So what you see there is both widely shared, and also tested by expertise. The blue circle is the tsunami already coming. Younger Australians get most of their news from social media. Completely unregulated, often shaped by very nasty people. This is why we saw such resistance to Covid action in this pandemic, political libertarians overseas used social media to weaponise younger Australians. This isn’t to say the old are better, or that TV is better. I rarely watch TV either, it’s mostly rubbish. I don’t watch TV news. But it’s at least a shared public space. Social media fractures that into thousands of non-communicating pieces, none of them connected to society’s expertise in any meaningful way. It’s a bullshit machine, a very dangerous one.