Transcripts For CSPAN2 Jason Steinhauer History Disrupted 20240708

Counselor on the National World war two museum in 2020. He founded the history club on clubhouse, which he hosts regularly the club has more than a hundred thousand members and averages 2,500 participants per week. Jason has twice traveled overseas with the Us Department of state as part of diplomac diplomatic exchanges between the United States and the European Union meeting with government officials scholars and students to discuss the effects of the web and social media on public understandings of news history and information. He has spoken at events across the United States and europe and appears frequently in the media a native new yorker. He is a long surface suffering, new york jets fan. Im so sorry for you and our moderator todd. Is it tharinger . Yes. Thank you. Todd. Theirringer is the Vice President of the harvard club of washington dc and organizes weekly events that are open to everyone. So after after this event, maybe you ask him about that. He is also the executive director of a healthcare nonprofit so you can ask him about that, too. If you have any questions as i mentioned, please hold them for the q a at the end of our event and without further ado. Im going to put my mask right back on and pass it over. To jason and todd all right. Well, thanks everyone for coming i tested this morning. Im covid negative. So unless i picked it up somewhere walking between home and the store. I should be good. So ill stay mask off for now, but i appreciate everyone being here with mask on and everyone getting vaccinated and doing this in a safe way as possible. And yay science, so thank goodness for vaccines and all the treatments that are now available to help us get through this pandemic. I want to talk about the book obviously and well get into all that but i actually kind of want to start with a little story because i was thinking about this yesterday and its kind of funny so i am jewish and i got bar mitzvahood. Last century i wont specify the year because that would reveal something about my age which im still grappling with, but it was in the 20th century and my bar mitzvah because my birthday is in december, my bar mitzvah was actually an early january so its actually this week. Number of years ago that i got bar. Mitzvah. And for people who know jewish tradition and jewish ceremonies the bar mitzvah is a big deal, right your whole Community Comes out your whole family comes out youre in synagogue and theres literally like 25,300 people around you celebrating you throwing candy at you singing and dancing whatever. Well the night before my bar mitzvah. There was a huge snow storm. And so the morning of my bar mitzvah, everything is covered in snow. The roads are totally impassable. So we get the synagogue and there are literally like 20 people there for my apartment four of my friends made it for my school and then like a couple of people from the congregation and none of my extended family and like no one else so i was thinking about that in context of this event. Its like kind of like a dont do invention early january, but be of course if like no one came to my buttsva, of course, like, you know, theres gonna be a covid and snow and no one will come to my book release party, but you guys are here so you guys are the equivalent of the people who made it to my bar mitzvah all those years ago the funny thing about this story though the sort of asterisk is that we have this family friend named harvey who weve known all our lives my parents have known him since before me and my sisters were born and harvey did not come to my bar mitzvah and afterwards we assumed it was because of the weather, but he later revealed to us years down the line that actually no he just forgot so he he promised that. Come to all of my events subsequently making up for the fact he didnt come but of course hes not here. So. Harvey thats over, too. He didnt come to my wedding either so hes over three. But anyway, no, i really appreciate you guys being here and having done events at the library of congress for years. I know how hard it is to do events in washington in the wintertime, even when even when there isnt covid so were here because i just amazingly wrote a book. Its funny when you listen to someone read your bio and it takes them about a minute or two to go through all these things that took you 25 years to do and youre like man. That was a lot of work to just get like a one paragraph bio but this small little book which is 160 pages. It turned out took me about five and a half years to write. I began having the idea for this book when i worked at the library of congress and when i worked at the library of congress. We had at the time a senior scholar position in astrobiology and the guy who held that position was a guy named David Grinspoon and david introduced me to this world of science communication and for people who arent familiar with science communications, basically a subdiscipline of science where scientists and science communicators think about how scientific information gets communicated through various media and how science can best affect Public Policy and public conversation and theres a whole infrastructure around science communication. There are fellowships. There are institutes. Theres lots of funding and so its just sort of seemed to me that history should do the same. There should be something called history communication. There should be something called history communicators. So id suggested this to some people and some people thought i was crazy and some people thought that oh, maybe this is a good idea. So a bunch of us got together and started talking about this and we had some workshops. We had some brainstorming sessions. We actually developed a history communication curriculum. Theres now actually a history Communication Lab at wayne state university. And we had history communication fellowships at villanova. Maggie was one. Shes right there in the back. But the more i thought about it and the more i looked into it the more i thought there was actually a bigger story here to tell about how the web has actually changed the way we communicate history how its changed. What histories we know and which histories we dont know what histories we learn about. What histories we dont learn about and i just felt like there was enough there that it merited a book so i began taking notes and i began collecting articles and then i got a new job. I moved cities. I got married. We bought a house so i put it all down and then in 2018, i kind of came back to it. I went to the library of congress. I wrote the first draft in 2019. I wrote the second draft in 2020 and i wrote the final draft in 2021 and that led to this book in now early 2022 what is to me still kind of astounding about the book is that when i turned in the manuscript it was this big long word document and then i got it back and it was like this little tiny book and i was like, maybe i should have not edited out so much, but originally there were 80,000 words in this book and the finished version has about 50,000 so i cut out about 30,000 words because the book was kind of going in a lot of Different Directions and i felt like i just needed to be a little bit tighter in order to tell the story. I wanted to tell but im really excited about the end product. I think its a good book. I worked really hard to make it a book that people would actually want to read its written in sort of a journalistic style. It has sort of a narrative structure to it. Its chronological in some senses, and im excited that people beyond the history profession are reading it. Ive heard from journalists and people in tech and other government officials who have been kind of captivated by it and want to know more about it. So im excited for this conversation excited for all your read it and im excited to hear what you think about it because it was written for you. A shady asked if i would just read a little bit from the book and im just going to read a really really small part because what ill read kind of sets up the whole premise of the book and it will segue into tata and i having a conversation about it, which we will then bring you into the conversation as well. But really . This book is set up in a way so that it introduces an idea and that idea is a history and well talk about what that is. Just like theres ecommerce and etrade. I suggest that theres something called ehistory. And it talks about sort of these value structures that are in opposition the values that sort of underpin the traditional practices of history and the values that underpin the web and how those two sets of values clash and why that necessitates this thing called a history. And then the book then takes you through a series of case studies wikipedia Twitter Facebook instagram, which shows how these clashes of values play out and why certain he history that conforms to a set of values and conditions becomes visible in your feeds and why other forms of your history that dont conform to those you will never see and at the end the last chapter is actually called does history have a future and the question is will this kind of ehistory eventually lead to the end of history as we know it. So let me read a little bit from those two chapters and thatll segue perfectly into conversation with time. So this is from chapter 2. E histories solves a problem namely. How do you transpose the study of history into web and social media . The problem exists because at heart the values that underpin the professional discipline of history are at odds with the values that underpin the social web. Professional history is an expert centric always evolving intellectual pursuit that is timeconsuming and and rests on its intrinsic value. The social web is a usercentric datadriven commercial enterprise that is instantly gratifying and privileges extrinsic value. That clash creates the conditions for ehistory to emerge. So thats kind of the premise of the book. And not to spoil it for you, but ill read a little bit from the last chapter. With each new platform and media trend that emerged capturing money in public attention new forms of ehistory emerged with them Wikipedia Pages on this day factoids history and pics tweets twitter threads by historians instagram posts from history cool kids and war themed accounts news were the opeds podcasts clubhouse rooms. Tiktok videos Youtube Channels and content about the past created by machines all compete for our online attention under the name of history. Some ehistory is created by professional historians. Others by journalists hobbyists teachers teenagers political operatives hostile foreign actors blockchain users and competitional programs some ehistory has educational intent some has nefarious intent all are driven by agendas be it the promotion of a person a brand in ideology a discipline or a set of values. Different ehistory rely on different mechanisms to achieve visibility and influence crowdsourcing digital nostalgia virality. Visually arresting newsworthy storytelling or via ai but the most visible and influential ehistory tend to mirror the values of the web itself. The chief result has not been a more sophisticated understanding of the past among nonhistorians that rely on the social web for information, but rather the embedding of the values of the social web deepdoor into our lives the characteristics of the history coming to represent all history online and offline. So thats kind of. The book in a nutshell and my friend todd. Yes, im ready. Okay, so wed love to hear what you think. Um, yeah. Well, ive thought of a few questions, but let me start by asking you to define a word that you coined in your book e history. What is the exact definition of e history and i have a followup to that concept. If someone reads something online and they printed out and it becomes say a book form. Is that still history . Yes, so let me actually read from the book so i dont. But butcher my own definition so in the book, i defined a history as discrete Media Products that package in element or elements of the past for consumption on the social web and which tried to leverage the social web in order to gain visibility. Ill read that one more time. Discrete Media Products that package an element or elements of the past for consumption on the social web and which tried to leverage the social web in order to gain visibility. So i sort of see history like i said as a product of a particular moment in time. Basically, there are these platforms and people post on these platforms because they want their content to be visible that includes content about the past and so eh history is the solution that people have come up with in order to make history content visible on the social web whether it be on twitter or wikipedia or whatever. And in the book i talk about different mechanisms by which people make those content visible. And i argue in the book that e history is necessary because of this of values between sort of what we think of as traditional history and the values at the web sort of engenders or prefers. So i guess in the same way that theyre ebooks and theres ecommerce there is a history and i suppose if you if you do an ecommerce transaction, then you print out the receipt its still ecommerce, right . So i think its about the transaction. Its about the mechanisms. Its about where the transaction is happening and what is being prioritized and what is being valued in order to make that transaction happen. So i know 10 years ago there 15 years ago when i looked up something on the internet. I automatically thought it was true. I figured if its online and here it is. This is this is the facts there. Cant be anything else and then in the past say four or years based on. Political things that have happened in the us now, i doubt what i read. Now. I say i always sort of think if thats true. What role does ehistory play in . Maybe convincing someone that what theyre reading is is true. Yeah, so this concept of truth is tricky right . Because what you truth can be historically located in other words, whats what is sort of understood to be true in one historical moment. Can then be disproven in another historical moment . Right . So i think the word that i prefer to use is accuracy. And so one of the things that i talk about in the book are the incentives inside the social web and at this moment the social web really privileges visibility and signals of power. It does not privilege accuracy, right . So if you can make your content go viral and then you will get rewarded inside the ecosystem regardless of whether youre content is accurate or not. And so one of the things i talked about at the end of the book and ive been talking about as i start to do lectures and stuff around. This is can we design a better set of incentives for the next iteration of the web so that we do privilege accuracy as opposed to things like virality. Right but to your point, i think what i want to do with this book is i want people to get a better understanding of why theyre seeing certain content in their feed. And the reason that youre seeing content in your feed, its oftentimes has nothing to do with accuracy. It oftentimes has nothing to do with truth has to do with other factors those factors could include for example in the book. I talked about the concept of newsworthiness, right and how a particular piece of history if it happens to be able to be pegged to an item in the news that might raise it to the visibility your twitter feed or on your facebook page. Now, theres no guarantee that that piece of history you see is going to be accurate or that its going to be by a historian and there are plenty of examples in the book where its that those things are being created by disinformation agents or by russia today or Something Like that. But the fact that they can peg it to a news hook and get it into the news cycle makes it so that you see it and that you dont see other things right. So i think just a very basic Media Literacy message in this book is to better understand and ask yourself. Why am i seeing certain pieces of information in my feed at this moment in time . And oftentimes that has nothing to do with truth has nothing to do with accuracy. It does nothing to do with rigor or sophistication it has to do with other sets of conditions. And those are the conditions that i in the book. Um when reading this book i had to think about my own education. I consider myself a very educated person but oftentimes things will show up in my feed and i have no idea what the subject is and then i realized well, i dont know anything about this history. So if i have time ill google that subject and then im overwhelmed with information. Im not able to come to a decision about what i just read whether it was true or not. What what does a consumer do or whats the impact on the person reading that if they think they they dont know the history and then they read something and theyre not quite sure if that is true. Are you are we really being educated by this system or are we . At at the same spot we were before we read it. Not really knowing history, right . So this is a great question. Its one of the things that i wrestle with in the book. So one would think that with all this history content out there online we would know more but theres just no evidence to support that and you look at studies and you talk to people anecdotally and you look at all the data thats out there. There is no evidence that points to the fact that we understand history any better just because we see so much it on our phones. And so i would have loved to have written that book. I would have loved to have written the book that says theres so much eh history out there and you can find all these history Youtube Videos and all these history twitter feeds and boy doesnt that mean we all know history better, but i just couldnt find any evidence to support that and if someone can find that evidence, id love to see that book. Theres been so much written about these sort of deluge of information that we take in every day. And theres the scholars by the last names of the home and hensley whove written a book called going viral and i reference that book a lot in my book and they have this this concept called satisficing and they say in a in a situation where theres information overload, and theres so much information web users tend to satisfy in order words in other words. They find a piece of information that is sort of good enough and they just stick with that because the effort that it takes to go further and dig deeper is to laborious. And so theres a lot of satisficing that happens on the web and theres a lot of satisficing that happens when it comes to history people see a Youtube Video or a tweet and the effort to dig deeper to learn more to go get the book to look in jstor to find a historian who works on the subject. It is also overwhelming that basically the tweet ends up satisficing and it ends up being a standin for history. Right and i found this over and over and over again when i talk to people and when i looked at studies and thats why i say at the end that we may have a greater awareness of certain pasts. We may know one or two more historians on twitter than we did 10 years ago, but being aware of something is not the same as understanding something and so if we have more awareness of various past, thats good thing. Its good for step. But it doesnt equate with actually understanding the past any better and a lot of it is because we sort of engage in this practice of satisficing on the web and that applies as well to journalism and science and other things but in this case a particularly applies to history, its also one of the reasons why i think theres a real danger in just relying on the social web for your primary source of Historical Information. And thats one things i talk about in the book as well. Is that there is this perception that because theres so much ehistory out there that we dont actually need history classes and that we dont need history books and maybe we dont even need historians and unfortunately the numbers over the past 10 to 15 years are kind of bearing that out history degrees are down by 33 the largest drop of any degree in the United States. Theyre similar trends in europe as well. History classrooms are increasingly empty. History departments are being hollowed out people are retired and theyre not being replaced funding for history is heavily. And if you look at history departments or history museums, theyre all under tremendous funding crunches and when i was working at the lepage center, i literally only could find two places that funded history consistently the National Endowment of the humanities, which is also always in danger of being cut or the melon foundation. So its not a coincidence. I think that history is suffering these pressures and these headwinds at the same time. There is so much history out there because i found as i did my research that so many people feel like because i can learn history on my phone quote unquote. We dont need to actually have history classes. We dont need professional historians. We dont need to support it with funding but this book i think at least i hope sort of disproves that myth because were not actually learning anything with the history. It turns out were becoming more aware of things, but were not actually understanding things. I have a question. So i recently watched a movie about a russian history and it was sort of a love story that was telling what happened during the revolution. When i finish that movie and if i were to have a conversation with you about the Russian Revolution in my mind would be what i saw in that movie. Do you feel that what people are getting say in their feeds or online is similar to what type of history they might get if they watched a movie. Or is it theres some element of storytelling versus history and do we need to be entertained if we are interested in history . Yeah, thats a great question. So this one of the studies that came out recently was by the Frameworks Institute and it found that more and more people are relying on movies and social media and news stories to get their history, right so theyre not reading books like mine or books that are in this store, but theyre going to the movies and theres satisficing theyre saying this is enough. I know enough about the subject now. And obviously this feeds into the sum of stuff. Weve already talked about but in particular i have a whole chapter in here called the storytelling past and whats really interesting is how over time. Storytelling has come become conflated with history. And there are reasons for that. There are historical reasons for that which i talked about in the book and one of the reasons for that is because so many journalists have now gotten into the history business and as storytelling has become such a popular and dominant conceit inside journalistic circles. It is now bled over into historical writing particularly popular historical writing. And so you hear a lot of journalists talk about history as storytelling and that is now creeped into the public consciousness. Whereas those two terms become conflated. I personally think i have a lot of misgivings about equating those two terms right number one. As much as a good story can entertain it can also mislead. So we have to be careful when it comes to stories right . You can tell really powerful stories that can get people to believe nationalistic xenophobic racist other kinds of terrible ideologies. So stories can work both ways. So the fact that something is storytelling and invokes history is not always a positive thing to lead to some of these terrible outcomes. The other thing is though, and i talked about this on a podcast recently, you know, my grandmother was a holocaust survivor and and one of the interviewers on this podcast said to me. Oh, well, there must have been so many stories about the holocaust that you heard and and i said to him actually my whole childhood was about not hearing stories because my grandmother never won talk about the war. That doesnt mean i didnt know history. It just means i didnt hear her stories, right . So theres a distinction between those two things and i think when those things get conflated it gets tricky and it also again leads to some of these satisficing moments where you feel like, okay, i saw the movie i know who the main characters are according quote. I know what the moral is at the end quote unquote and so i dont need to go any further and history at its core is not a fairy tale. It doesnt have lead characters, right . Its a messy complex. Dynamic inferno of what happened in the past and that doesnt always lend itself to a good story. So invariably when people do turn history into storytelling oftentimes things are flattened things are distorted the importance of certain characters is elevated in order to make them more appealing or more dramatic. And again, this gets the accuracy question. So movies can be an entryway, but they shouldnt be your endpoint. There is a part of your book where you discussed historians the rise of historians of the rise of the profession of history being trained as a historian and you also discuss how journalists have taken on the role of historian. Where say a hundred years ago a journalist would never necessarily be trusted in giving their version of history. So how and perhaps you dont know this question, but at what point did journalism and history combined where the journalist takes on the role of historian . Yeah, so this is i have a whole chapter in the book called the newsworthy pass and i know there are a few journalists here, but theres theres a little bit of criticism for journalists in this book, but thats okay journalist, criticize everybody so they can take a little bit of criticism. Its really interesting to look at the history of journalism, right because it turns out and theres a great book on this by a scholar named Thomas Schmidt who i believe is at uc, san diego. It turns out that. When journalists in the 1960s and 70s and early 80s were facing stiff competition from television. They actually invested in working with screenwriters and script writers and others in creative fields to make their journalism more storytelling centric. Right. So this was a concerted effort by the journalism profession because they were worried about losing readers and subscribers to television. And so they wanted to make their journalism more like tv. And that has led to the growth of sort of these Human Interest stories right where theres a main character. You start the story with a individual who is on a journey or is trying to overcome some struggle and then you zoom out to a wider frame and its a whole conceit right . Its a whole week. Were familiar with this now. But that wasnt the way journalism always was this is a historical thing, right . So if you go back and look at the history importance of history. Yes, right you could see how this evolved right as part of that. What got to be considered journalism grew and expanded. So it was not just solely about who what when where and why but now was about characters and individuals and and and slowly but surely that has then grown to encompass historical stories and historical individuals. I sort of make the point in my book that at the same time that journalists were decrying those who would call themselves journalists, but didnt have journalism degrees. They were doing the exact same thing to history. They were writing Historical Books and doing historical projects and calling themselves historians without having history degrees. Right . So its its sort of like talking outside of both sides of your mouth a little bit. But basically i make the argument in the book that history has been good for the business of journalism. And so as its proven itself to be good for the business of journalism by giving journalists more stories to write more characters to dig into more storytelling scenarios to set up more examples of what can be considered news more content to fill web pages and to put out in social media feeds then the more journalists have waited into this territory. And there are some journalists who do it really well and there are some other journalists who dont do it as well, but its something to be aware of when we as consumers are looking at bylines and asking ourselves, okay. Why am i seeing this story in my feed who wrote this story . Is this person a historian . Is this person of journalists . Is is this genre of journalism is this sort of more in the storytelling genre or is this in the sort of explanatory analytical genre and just being sort of aware of those things as you consume information i think is is important. So how and when it happened its been a gradual evolution, but i do think that theres a story in here thats gonna be interesting for people because people probably havent thought about journalism in that way. No, yeah, i think youre right. I think people still think of this is a journalist. So this is just investigative reporting but at the same time it they are sort of choosing what parts of history they want to include in their investigation. So they are creating history in their whatever their investigating. Well, i think also we we now take for granted some of these things like the storytelling nature of journalism and the fact that journalists write all these history books and do all these history articles and it sort of interesting to realize that that wasnt always the case, right . This was the evolution out of a particular time and time and place and an evolution at a particular needs and expansions of journalism both the business side of journalism and the editorial side of journalism and so again part of this book is just sort of better understanding how and why these phenomena emerge and why youre seeing certain things in your feed at certain times, and this is a question and maybe this will be my last question for you. The internet is really a business. And so what we what i have to reading the book what i determined, is that somehow there is this way of trying to what would be the right word maybe . Figure out a way of how we can earn money from something. And perhaps the the history is a way of of figuring out how to earn money but where it wheres the coming from like how yeah, can you explain that part . What is the commercial connection with e history . Right . So one of the things i talked about in the book, is that how the major platforms are all basically advertising businesses, right we give them data about ourselves and they turn it into ad revenue. And they service us ads and they take signals from us and they try to use that to target us better ads. So at heart Google Facebook twitter, these are commercial enterprises. And so when you engage with all of those entities you are engaged in a commercial enterprise whether you like it or not. So for historians who want to educate want to stimulate democracy want to contribute to social justice. Thats all great, but youre doing it through a commercial enterprise that at its heart is about transactions and getting you to give them more data so they can serve you more ads. So i talked about in this in the book that at heart e history is always a transaction, right . Theres always some sort of transaction at the heart of it whether its a click or a link to Something Else or a platform taking your data or a platform interpreting a signal from you that youll read such certain content. And so its gonna then serve you similar content or related content, right . And so thats why i say that the the sort of commercial datadriven aspect of the web is invariably a part of ehistory whether historians and educators like it or not and all eistory at some level is a transaction transaction and to your point. On the web because of the way the web has been built. Everything is about the extrinsic value in other words what i mean by that. Basically on the web content doesnt have value unless it gets seen by somebody and the more it gets seen the more valuable it becomes right. So if youre making a history on the web if you want to gain influence and you want to have your information be publicly valued information, you have to make sure it gets seen. Otherwise, it has no intrinsic value. And so part of the challenge for people like myself who want to communicate history online is you have to figure out a way to make sure your content can be extrinsically valuable to Something Else and that could be having a large number of followers generating a large number of clicks. In my case on clubhouse. I have 100,000 members in my club. So that gives my history information much more value than if i had five members in my club, even though the accuracy of information would be exactly the same right . I could give the exact same lecture and give the exact same sophisticated answers to the same exact questions. But because i have 100,000 people in my club. It is more valuable online than if i had five. Right. Thats just how the web works. Everything is tied to extrinsic value. And so this poses a challenge for historians who arent working on topics that are not immediately an obviously valuable, right . It is intrinsically valuable to know about indigenous populations in bolivia. But on the web, it has no extrinsic value in other words, very few people. Especially United States would click on that. Theyd be very few people who would follow that account. So that history even though its accurate even though its rigorously researched even though its sophisticated even though its important to know and we can agree. Its important to know on the web it would gain no attraction. So this is the conundrum of e history, right . It has nothing to do with the accuracy of the information or how important it may be to peoples lives it ultimately comes down to it being a transaction inside of an ecosystem that has certain things that have privileges and other things that it does not privilege. And so thats ultimately the main message that i want people to take away from the book when youre seeing something online. Its because of these other factors it has nothing to do with the accuracy of the information or how important that information may be. And so i would like to envision a future of the web where things like accuracy are privileged over eyeballs. And where the number of members or followers in your club or on your twitter feed dont matter. Where theres other ways to elevate and lift information into the feed. But to do that we would have to design a completely different incentives for the web and currently the incentives we have dont do that. You see i feel like i have just said a mouth. Yeah, people are lines are probably spinning. Yes have this makes sense . And i promise if you read the book, itll make sense. But this is why it took me five and a half years to write this because this was really complicated and imagine trying to look at the entirety of the internet and trying to distill it into 160 pages. So i understand that people have lots of questions and bretts being like oh what but i promise itll make sense once you read it. So maybe we should get people here. Lets do it. Yeah before i come up with more so the way were going to do this is because cspan is filming we do have a mic and we want your question to be on camera. So if you want to ask a question, keep your mask on just come up here. Ask your question and go back to your seat. But that way well people who watch this on cspan later wont be like, what did what what question is answering. So thats the thing. So if you want to raise your hand or just come up to the mic. Itd be great. I guess one of the things that i keep thinking in particular because like i am from colombia, right and i belong to several identify with several groups that are not perhaps part of the dominant paradigm. Right. I am a woman of color. I have a disability. Im from latin america in particular colombia. I grew up in washington dc at a time when the war on drugs was raging colombia. And i mean, i i cant wait to read the book, but of course i have watched history favor the powerful all my life. I have watched revisionist history, you know. Like determine the future all my life right and like to me it seems like i guess the question that i want to ask you is this doesnt history always belong to the powerful doesnt history always belong to the elite and the people who can pay to have the story told the way they prefer. Isnt isnt history always favoring those who can pay to have it palatable to them. Isnt that true of elizabethan history and you know, and and if theres a sense in which the story is merged with history anyway, if thats true to some extent which is what im putting out there, you know, if its true to some extent that we couldnt have known the greeks without the myths. I mean how many people are really going to read through cities . I did but how many people are gonna right if its true that we needed those myths in order to be able to to really understand the greeks better if we need shakespeare to some extent to be able to understand elizabethan history better if perhaps we needed 100 years of solitude. To be able to stomach some of what happened in colombia if thats true. Is there some way in which the story can work . A history assuming history is even really true. Is there some way those two can Work Together to to in some way like to to create a truth that that perhaps has validity that that is an entirely separated from accuracy. Not this makes any sense, but i think you know where im going with it. Ill give it a shot. I think theres i think theres a couple of conflations that tend to happen we talk about history, right . So i think what you may be referencing in the early part of your comments are. National narratives right, and so National Narratives oftentimes interwoven with mythologies about nation states because in some ways nationstates can only exist if there are National Myths underpinning them. Right there was no United States before the 1770s and 1780s. So to create a sense of nationhood a new National History had to be written and that history included. Several myths including about columbus for example right people were celebrating columbus day in 1792 as it was a 300th anniversary of the United States, even though the United States didnt exist until 1776 and 1787. So it doesnt make any sense, but it was a myth, right and the same happened when india became an independent nation. There was a whole new National History that was written to underpin the creation of a new nation state. And oftentimes those National Narratives have left a lot of people out. Right, and so one of the things were reconciling and reckoning with any United States over the past. 15 20 years is how do we write more people in to the National Narrative where they hadnt been there before and thats to your point about women and people of color and the good news is that there have been professional historians working on this for literally the past 50 years. The problem is people arent taking history courses, so theyre never reading those books and theyre never encountering those professional historians. And so if the last history class you took was in eighth grade or 11th grade then i have breaking news for you. Youre understanding of history is going to be overly simplistic. And its not going to include the panoply of stories and diversity of voices that currently exists inside historical scholarship. The problem is no ones reading historical scholarship. No ones taking history courses and i make the argument in the book that ehist history is part of that problem because people are satisficing for history and not going to the books and not engaging with the professional scholarship where a lot of this stuff resides. So thats i think one part of the question. I think i do talk in the book about how one positive of the social web has been that people have become aware of more pasts than they were aware of before people are aware of the Tulsa Race Massacre where they never were before people are aware of more indigenous scholars and activists than they maybe have been before. But i would posit that awareness does not equal understanding and understanding is the next step right . So if you really want to understand history, you have to go deeper. Im aware of gravity. I dont understand how it works. Right so i can be aware of lots of things that i find online and lots of different voices that i see in my feet, but we want people to have a better understanding and to do that you have to go further than just the twitter feed. So thats part of how it would answer that too. And then the last thing i would say, you know. I think there is this sort of belief that history is always written by the victors. I dont know where that came from. Originally. Itd be interesting to trace that back. But as someone who is jewish and knows first hand that weve been on the wrong side of a lot of conflicts where weve lost a lot. We had a lot of history growing up and theres a lot of jewish history out there. So again, you know, theres a whole rich diverse field of africanAmerican History latinx history like you name it. Its out there. It just takes a little bit of effort to find but to your point. It needs to be better interwoven into the National Story that we tell ourselves. And i think that is incumbent upon all of us to have a part in and i actually worry that he history doesnt help us with that. Right because it just sort of flattens everything to these surface level. Pieces of content online that we see for a moment in our feed and then move on and we dont actually take the time to understand it so you know, it would be great if we all better understand the role of women in the American Revolution in the american war of independence, but how many of us can actually say that we do understand that . We may be aware that there are women who were active in the in the war of independence or the civil war but to get that level of understanding you have to go deeper and i worry that eh history actually doesnt have that effect. It doesnt actually make us go deeper. I found no evidence that it actually makes us go deeper. And so id like us to go deeper and id like there to be a future version of the social web that incentivizes us to go deeper. And so we need to build that because the current one doesnt. Was that did that get okay someone relevant to the question that you asked . That was the hard question. That was a hard question, but i expect that from catalina. Shes tough. I will have an easier question. I think. Were all excited to read this book you mentioned there were 30,000 words that you cut. What can we expect . From that really all right. Well, thats my friend and mentor jeff lofton with that question who is just an ubermensch. So i have a newsletter. Jason steinhauer. Substack. Com and on my newsletter. I am starting to write pieces that are excerpted from the 30,000 words that did not make it into the book as well as sections of the book and other ideas. So i encourage you to sign up for the newsletter if youre so inclined, its free you can. Pay for a subscription if you like, but its free to just be on it. I actually did a lot of research about historians on twitter. And i had a lot of that in the book but ended up taking it out for a variety of reasons. It just sort of was going off in tangents and it wasnt sort of advancing the story. But theres some really interesting statistics about historians on twitter and which historians become visible on twitter and which ones dont and why also like when historians joined twitter turns out actually 20152016 and 2017 where the most active years for historians joining twitter, and thats not a coincidence because it was also with the rise of President Trump and so there was a direct connection with historians speaking out against trump in his worldview and their engagement online with progressive activists on twitter and other spaces, so i thought that was interesting but it didnt quite make it into the book. I had a lot more in the book about journalism, which didnt make it in about the Business Models and the incentive structures and journalism and how that leads to the production of certain history content and history ops which didnt make it into the book and i actually had a whole chapter on science communication, which i took out part of which actually was in my newsletter this summer which i know maggie read because she shared it online, but there was a whole chapter in there about how science Communication Works online and how some of these same dynamics that apply to history also applied to science also some stuff about antivaxx campaigns and how those have been instigated by foreign actors and disinformation agents. Theres also a part in the book that talks about disinformation agents and how they use history. And how they use historical memes and how they target people with Historical Information in order to rile people up or divide or lead people down rabbit holes, so there was a lot of stuff that got taken out that i thought was interesting but ultimately just didnt really advance the narrative of the book and this was a great exercise in editing and honestly, i think the biggest reward for me in writing the book was just becoming a better writer and going through that process of editing and refining and taking things out really made me a better writer and i think youll see that on my sub stack and hopefully youll see it in subsequent books that i might write. So thats thats kind of the digist of it, my friend. Other questions well, ive explained it so clearly that no one has any other questions. So this has been really interesting and i have will admit. I havent had a chance to read the book yet. My niece stole the book and didnt and took it. So anyway get it back from her which made her a great instagram post. But yes, um, but im really intrigued by what you said about people not going to historians for their history and sort of getting from other places. And im reflecting on my grad School Experience and thinking about the number of times. I picked up a book on a topic that i thought was going to be fascinating and it was the dullest book. Id ever tried to read about it. And so im curious about sort of what you think historians need to be doing to try to help make them be that source because i can see why journalists became historians in many ways if the writing was easier to read and more enjoyable experience than slogging through some historians. This isnt all historians. But like i just i feel it. So, im just curious. I know i know and i dont mean to be i i this is a Family Member but sisterinlawson, but i just really thinking about that that like how do we you know is public history the bridge to this is it . Like what is the thing that we do there . So yeah, so what can historians do to try to help their case i guess is what im wondering. All right, thats okay. Take the dagger out of my chest. Well, first of all, theres no rule that says history has to be enjoyable. Right and so history is oftentimes difficult and you know reading holocaust history is not particularly enjoyable, but its important. So again incentives that are built into the ecosystem, right . We we have to be able to read things necessarily dont bring us pleasure or that dont tell a good story now that aside i will say this again with incentives there are not a lot of incentives right now inside of academic publishing. For professional historians to really hone their craft as writers. And thats you know, i took an extra year to rewrite this book to make sure it was in a journalistic style that people would read but that is not a luxury that a lot of people have inside of academia. Particularly if you are teaching a full course load. Mentoring students serving on committees trying to get tenure also grappling with the fact that enrollments are declining and theyre trying to cut your funding and you dont know if your departments going to have the same number of people next year as it did this year . So there are a lot of pressures on academics and academic publishing an academic cvs in general tend to reward you for having stuff on the cv as opposed to the quality of stuff on the cv, right so if youve seen academic cvs, theyre often times 12 to 15 pages long every conference presentation. Youve done every article that youve done every book that youve written. You want to stack it up because the system rewards you for that it gives you job security it can give you tenure and it can make it such you never have to look for another job again. So i think that theres some structural things that dont always allow historians to focus on their craft in the way that maybe journalists get the opportunity to do or independent writers get to i mean David Mccullough and Rick Atkinson can sit around and really work on their craft as writers. Theyre not teaching three courses a semester. Theyre not grading papers. Theyre not sitting in four hour meetings about this or that administrative item inside of an academic classroom. I would also just add to that that there are some really good historians who are writers out there. Its just can sometimes be like really difficult to find them. And so i think one thing that historians can do is we can make it easier for people to find our stuff. And that though requires adhering to the mechanics of the social web in other words you have to work within the twitter ecosystem and the facebook ecosystem and the google ecosystem to get people to find your stuff, which means you have to kind of work with the devil a little bit. And then hopefully well lead to people reading your books. But again, i go back to the fact that so far. Theres not a lot of evidence that thats happening. So thats why i say itd be great if we could design a new set of incentive structures for the web where the web would surface that stuff for us more easily based on a different set of incentives and assumptions than the way the web currently works. And let me give you a very concrete example of this. Im active on clubhouse. I have 100,000 members in my club. Okay . So in the early days of clubhouse, i was actually involved in some conversations where they were trying to figure out how the algorithm would work. And one of the assumptions that clubhouse made i will not saying anything that i shouldnt say right now was that the more people who were on a stage in a clubhouse room. The more visibility the algorithm would give to that room. Because the assumption was that if more people are on stage and more people are staying on stage. Then that must be a more engaging room. Now i push back on that and i said wait a second. What i do is i have oneonone conversations, right . So youre telling me that youre not going to make as visible a conversation where one person is interviewing another and youre gonna prefer conversations that have larger stages that has nothing to do with the quality of the content the the accuracy of the information. The depth of the scholarship it just has to do with an assumption in your head that more people is better. Right, and so these types of assumptions are interrelated across the web on all these various platforms and that disadvantages certain types of content and certain types of people and certain types of dynamics. And so thats part of the reason why youre not seeing certain information. And so i want to have a different set of incentives baked into the next iteration of the web and i want those conversations to not just be among engineers and venture capitalists, but to include historians and sociologists and philosophers and other people so that we could say okay, if you design the algorithm that way this is whats going to happen. Its gonna prioritize certain conversations and its going to vary others and are we okay with that . That makes sense. This ones going to be a hard one. This guy is actually a really smart professor, but thats youre just torpedoing me. So i really like all the questions that are about storytelling and about how to move from storytelling to history. The best popular historians cultivate a taste i think for accuracy and complexity and thats something that i think is is lacking to actually the reference to shakespeares really great because one of the things that you learn when you read shakespeare is that theres so much subversive depth under the entertaining surface like henry the fifth is a great leader and a total creep romeo and juliet are inspiring and completely nuts and its the the way that that an author of that caliber can sort of pull people from entertainment to accuracy that he can cultivate a taste for accuracy. And so i guess my comment is the i mean im interested to read your book tremendously so but i think the situation is actually worse than what youve described so far because it seems like not only is accuracy a buried standard where theres a way in which the net is is cultivating a certain kind of audience. Its its appealing to certain motives that render accuracy in a way repulsive. I mean i saw i heard i didnt realize this. I only heard it recently that facebook. Elevated stories that that elicited negative response and modicons five times over other stories in order to give an advantage to stories that were polarizing because thats what drew more engagement. Thats what elicited thats what got people to stay online longer and therefore see more ads and in front of them, so theres a way in which taste the internet is is cultivating a taste which is in a way against accuracy, so i wondered what and were sort of stuck having to play this game. But how do we cultivate a taste . That youre going to have to answer this and come up with a solution. So im letting you know. How do we how do we cultivate a taste for ill be my next book, right . Yeah, how do we cultivate a taste for complex complexity and accuracy when really what most people get a big thrill out of is feeling outraged. Im glad theres no small questions jeff. You want to come back and ask a softball . I was surprised when i went back and looked at some of the origins of these platforms. Just how much there was this sort of. Ethos of antihumanities expertise so much at the outset of it, right and im particularly thinking about wikipedia where it wasnt just about creating a crowdsource actedia. Encyclopedia. It was purposely about sticking it to the experts. Right because the the founder and i quote him in the book we basically said like we dont want this to be phds spouting off their knowledge and we dont want this to feel like youre back in grad school like and one of the themes i talked about throughout the book. Is that a lot of eh history succeeds online because it purposely positions itself as an antidote to history. Right, so in other words because theres perception of history and historians as being sort of boring and out of touch and this that of the other that elizabeth just articulated a lot of the history purposefully sets itself to be the antidote to that as a way to get you to click on it. So like not your typical history or the history you didnt learn in school or you know, theres actually like a podcast that calls the history that doesnt suck right so its all about being in direct opposition to humanitys expertise in some ways. And so i guess my my answer to like what we do about that. Is that if we recognize that that is a historical phenomenon that emerges at a particular time and place then that also gives us the power to create a New Historical phenomenon that emerges out of a new time and place and that new phenomenon. Would emerge out of the last two decades where weve seen the dangers where all of that leads and we collectively get together and roll up our sleeves and say were going to design a different ecosystem. That is better that does privilege accuracy that does give more weight to particular areas of expertise such as scientific expertise or humanities expertise because we feel like that is better for society, and we feel like that is something that benefits all of us. And the one thing that social media platforms are most sensitive to is their users because again, theyre all based on extrinsic value the number of users the number of clicks the number of people on the site at any given time. So we have a lot of power as users that we dont always exercise. And so i think we can find ways to change our behaviors on the platforms that would force them. To rethink how they write the algorithms and what types of information they privilege. And i know it sound it feels challenging because these things are now so pervasive and everywhere in our lives, but we always have to remember that ultimately. If these platforms dont have users they dont have any value. And so we do have a lot of power in our hands if we can mobilize it and if we choose to use it. Where winding down here, but well get we can squeeze in maybe one more and then well all right have to have a part two or something. So going along with that same point so much of what we experience on the internet does come down to a handful of deciders Facebook Google youtube within these platforms, you know ebay amazon and even if there are group of educated people in this room people who read your book how i just im very skeptical of the fact that people could become conscious enough to change their own ways when the reason that those algorithms are built is to target emotion. Its to make you keep reading its to make you want to stick around. Its the infinite scroll. So how do facebook and youtube and all of these other platforms . Come around to a more humane way of thinking and building their algorithms because part of what weve seen over the years is a radicalization that comes from the facebook groups a disinformation campaigns. That didnt get stopped from people within the United States and abroad and nothing seems to have truly changed even though theres more awareness on a elite of that problem. So i think one of the things that i write about in the book is how you know algorithms have kind of become like the boogeyman right . Its like ooh the algorithm right . Well if you look at a thing like facebook in the early days of facebook it was a little bit of a combination of like frenster which was like, you know finding your friends online a little bit of combination of like hot or not, right . Whos this persons picture and then like poking people on walls. And then what happened was . Camera phones got better. And mobile service got better and we as users started posting photos to facebook. A lot so much so that over 50 of the content on facebook at one point was people uploading photographs. So what at facebook to they refined the algorithm to make it that youd see more photographs in your newsfeed. And that also helped them sell more ads because it allowed them to create more wider more graphic ad layouts where people would see the ads interspersed with the photographs in their feed. And i talk about this in the book. Why do i bring this up . Because the algorithms are a dialogical process right . Its us giving them information and telling them what our preferences are and then they refine and finetune in order to keep us on the site longer and sell us more advertising and it becomes a cycle. So i feel like this is my opinion people can disagree. That we still have a lot of power in this because ultimately theyre looking for signals and cues from us about what will get us to spend time on the platform more. And the more time we spend on the platform the more data they can extract from us the more advertising they can sell the more revenue they can make so we need to send different signals. And i recognize the skepticism that we can do that but there was a lot of skepticism in this country that confederate monuments would ever come down and now theyre coming down all over the country. So change is possible and that is one of the stories of history if you understand and study history you recognize that change is possible because while some things stay the same a lot of things change and they change because of human beings and their actions and different ideas in different books in different words that get into the mainstream and people adapt those ideas and things change. So i dont think its just a question of theres a few people sitting in back rooms with levers who are controlling everything that were doing we have ownership of this we helped to make this universe. It was our actions that allowed some of this to happen that gave all the data to the platforms that they have been exploited and built into their algorithms. But because we had a hand in making it we can have a hand in unmaking it. And i have to believe that its true and i have to believe that its possible. Even if i probably spend the rest of my career working on it. I have to believe that its true and i probably will spend the rest of my career working on it, but i hope that in 2030 when i do my next book talk at lost city books. Were looking at a very Different Social Media landscape that we all had a hand in creating because we were much more intentional about it and much more thoughtful about it than we were when all this stuff first arose. Sounds good. Weekends on cspan 2 are an intellectual feast every saturday American History tv documents americas story and on sundays book tv brings you the latest in nonfiction books and authors funding for cspan 2 comes from these Television Companies and more including charter communications. Broadband is a force for empowerment. Thats why charter has invested billions Building Infrastructure upgrading Technology Empowering opportunity in communities big and small charter is connecting us. Charter communications along with these Television Companies support cspan 2 as a Public Service cspan has hundreds of programs on first ladies, including archival footage interviews and book talks. Heres a look at one of our programs. I feel quite sure that what the American People like is knowledge. I feel quite sure that. The American People if they have knowledge and leadership can meet any crises just as well as theyve met it over and over again in the past. I can remember the cries of horror when my husband said we had to have 50,000 airplanes and a given period but we had them. And the the difference was that the people were told. What the reason was and why and i have complete faith. In the American Peoples ability if they know and if they have leadership. And no one can move without some leadership. And for the time being you feel that we are bereft of leadership. Yes. Take a closer. Look at the spouses of our nations president s their private lives public roles and legacies watch all of our first ladies programs online at first ladies dot cspan. Org. Our weekly series the presidency highlights the politics policies and legacies of us president s and first ladies this week Caroline Kennedy and First Lady Jill Biden are among those remembering the work of Jacqueline Kennedy in the 1961 founding of the White House Historical association. The associations president Stewart Mclaren shares highlights from the 60th anniversarys november 2021 gala event held at the metropolitan museum of art in new york. Telling the rich stories of white house history has been the mission of