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 <