Our Journey, Day 83
Today I'm going to read the 1948 Life article called "The 102 Great Ideas". I might even try to track down some of the other articles mentioning the project that became The Syntopicon. It's a bit amazing to me that popular magazines such as Look and Life made the effort to tell their readers about this project. I suppose it's possible this was motivated by a Cold War era desire to aggrandize Western culture. But I'll wait and see.
The idea that there might be a large enough audience for news and information that elevates people's understanding, rather than dragging them down into the mud or partisan bickering, is sort-of cool. Seeing something like this in a popular magazine makes me feel a bit better about America and gives me a bit of hope. It's also a reminder of how far American pop culture has fallen, since I don't think that even if someone did such a project now, there would be no article in Life. Maybe in Wired, although it's been years since I've read anything memorable there either.
My father regularly sends me gift subscriptions for the holidays, to The Atlantic and Smithsonian. This has given me the opportunity to watch as, over the past several years, The Atlantic has become progressively less progressive and more partisan. I don't think hopelessly -- at least I hope not. It does seem to have taken a side in the culture wars. Maybe this was inevitable, given the pressure from online alternatives.
I've begun reading more online alternatives than mainstream sources, I have to admit. This was partly an effect of following people I liked as they made the shift. For example, I read Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone and then got interested in Substack when he switched to it (and have never looked at RS since). But I wonder whether being in one's own silo, with complete editorial control and positive reinforcement mainly coming from one direction, has altered the content people like Taibbi produce? I suspect we would never have had the Twitter Files if he still had been working at RS, however. Even The Intercept tried to prevent Glenn Greenwald from writing about the Hunter Biden laptop before the last election. But once again, I wonder whether Greenwald on Rumble is holding himself to the same standards as the old Greenwald (who also used to publish essays in print as well as video).
Maybe writing for print is inherently different than writing for podcast or video. I've gotten into the habit of recording a video of my morning "Journey" posts. I think that's fine, and I'm going to continue that. But I think a lot of the Lifelong Learners content will lean toward text-only. There are some polls showing that Substack readers prefer to actually read, which I think is supported by the low numbers of click-throughs from the "Journey" posts to the YouTube video at the bottom. I can't tell for sure, but I suspect my YouTube and Substack audiences don't overlap that much. It's something to think about, as I continue to explore these self-education topics. How to make form follow function. I thought it was a bit funny that Robert Hutchins was complaining about the decay of American education over seventy years ago, in the introduction to the Great Books I wrote about yesterday. I also felt aa bit validated when he said the series had no scholarly explanations; that the texts should stand by themselves and readers should make their own decisions. I've been approaching my primary source anthology this way, hoping that the set of sources I've chosen will subtly suggest an interpretation but not force it on the readers. I'll get a better sense of whether that's working, as I read more of the midterm essays they just turned in.