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Experian welcome the New Books Network.
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Hello everyone and welcome to Academic Life. This is a podcast for your academic journey and beyond. I'm the producer and your host, Dr. Christina Gessler. And today I am joined by Dr. Eunji Kim, who is the author of American How Reality TV Upholds the Myth of Meritocracy. Welcome to the show, Dr. Kim.
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A
Hi. Thank you so much for having me today.
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C
I am so glad that you're here and we get to learn about this book from you. It has so many fascinating things that we're going to illuminate for listeners. Before we do that, will you please tell us about yourself?
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A
Yeah, sure. I'm currently an assistant professor of Political Science at Columbia University in New York City and I describe myself as a little bit of an unusual political scientist in a way that when you hear someone being a political scientist, you might imagine that this person studies legislation or Congress or presidency or electoral politics. But somehow most of my research agenda and the book that we're going to talk about today are focused on very non political aspect of American life. For instance reality television in this case. But in many other areas of my research I study very unusual political science things like cop TV shows ranging from NCIS to Blue Blood and Chicago PD to restaurant reviews online to study racism. So I think that kind of shows where my heart is basically meeting Americans where they are and really thinking through what do they do on a day to day basis. Because most People are not that interested in politics and watching or consuming news is not their favorite activity to do.
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C
And you tell us a little bit in the acknowledgments about your own journey through higher ed. And here at the academic life, we're curious about how people found their pathway. Did you know this was a field that you wanted to study? Were you always drawn to political science? How did you find your way?
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A
Not at all. So I grew up in a very small island located between. Located near, between the 38th parallel between north and South Korea. So I spent around 16 years in that very tiny, rural small island. And then I moved to Seoul, the capital of South Korea, for my high school. And then, and then I got an opportunity to study in the US on a full financial aid at Harvard. I guess the funny story here is I've never been to the US since I went to college. So that meant all of the stories or the imageries that I had about this country was coming from obviously mass media and particularly entertainment media. So when I was young, one of the most popular TV show in South Korea was a TV series called Love Story at Harvard. It's a TV show about a tragic love story between a Harvard medical school student and Harvard Law school student and very cheesy and the protagonist has a cancer and eventually dies. So it's a tragic love story. But the entire TV show which is titled Love Story at Harvard was actually filmed at ucla. But at the time I didn't know anything about America. I've never been to us So I grew up thinking that campus was Harvard. So you can imagine my shock when I first arrived in Cambridge, Massachusetts when I was 18, expecting the palm trees and sunshine. And Cambridge, Massachusetts was very different from LA for obvious reasons. So to this date I think, I think of that as an example of the media effects in general is that our personal experiences are so limited. And when that's the case, we often turn to mediated information or mass media to understand how the world works or how the world is. And I think maybe that was the kind of beginning of my fascination with media effects or entertainment media. But at the time I had no idea that I would be end up being a political scientist. I thought that I'd be studying economics or maybe working in a hospitality industry or working in consulting. I had many different ambitions, but ultimately I got fascinated by all the intro lectures offered by amazing, amazing political scientists at the time and decided that this is the path I want to pursue. I love all the passion and intellectual kind of aspirations they had about the Big questions our time. And then I was lucky enough to got into a PhD program again on a full ride. So basically I was very lucky to not be paying for any of my higher education as a first generation college student of my family. And perhaps many ways the intellectual journey I had in the US in many ways represents the American dream, which is also the theme of the book. But I also think that I'm also the harshest critic of the American Dream in a way that the narrative of meritocracy that celebrates stories like mine is also the same narrative that prevents a lot of Americans from demanding structural changes.
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C
The book is called American Mirage, and as you were talking about expecting palm trees. Often when we hear the word mirage, we think of someone who has gone through maybe a difficult journey and up ahead they think they see palm trees and maybe a pool of water, and it feels very inviting. And so imagining that that topography would actually be at Harvard gives a whole nother meaning to the word mirage in your title. I'm also from the area of the country where UCLA is and am aware of, just from consuming media myself, how often UCLA is used as a standard stand in for campuses all over, including what used to be a very popular TV show in the 90s called Beverly Hills 90210. And it was difficult to watch it with other Southern Californians without us talking back to the screen saying that's not,
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A
that's not Beverly Hills at all.
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C
As well as most of Beverly Hills in most media representations is actually Santa Monica and other other towns. So the mirage vision in my head is now pulling up all kinds of misleading places that something was filmed and said to be somewhere else. You went to your advisors, it sounds like, and your colleagues and told them that you were interested in looking at American politics at this very granular level of what people actually consume. And you really wanted to know about reality TV and what people were doing. These very people who are saying, I'm not political, I don't watch the news, and yet they were somehow being politically influenced through what we think of as common everyday TV shows. And you were concerned. It sounds like, if I'm reading the acknowledgment section correctly, that your colleagues would say, yes, Dr. Kim, this is poli sci. Because it seems so far outside how most poli sci is done. You talk about how you were not going to pursue the corridors of power, but rather how politics was kind of infused in the veins of everyday people in ways that so far the discipline
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A
wasn't at the same beginning. There are a Lot of skills, particularly when you don't have that much qualifications. You're a young graduate student pursuing a very unusual research agenda. I think oftentimes what you see is the upright skepticism. I actually heard one person telling me that I would never get a job in political science. That somehow stuck with me forever, and I'm glad that I proved that wrong. But I think it was a combination of many things. First, it was a very, very unusual topic that was kind of defined what people think of, like the usual things that we study in American politics. We study misinformation, we study polarization, we study equality or representation, but not reality television. Remember at the time, my third year of grad school, it was before the election of Donald Trump. So reality television was not really anyone's radar at that time. So that was one thing. I think the other really interesting factor that I played a role is that the fact that I was a non American Asian immigrant who wants to study American politics. I think one of the patterns that I see in many of the social sciences, particularly when you're international student or immigrant, is that you tend to study the country that you're from. For instance, if you're a Chinese immigrant, you tend to study Chinese politics. If you're from South Korea, then you study the North Korean nuclear weapon. If you're from India, you study the cost hierarchy in Indian politics. So again, these are the usual kind of the correlation between people's biography and the topics they choose. So I think for many of my colleagues and peers at the time, for someone like me who looks like me, declaring that I want to study reality television is a very American thing, I think people just didn't think that it could work. I remember that there was even one senior colleague even telling me that if I ever want to get a job in American politics, I should fix my accents. So I think these are some examples of many. Oh, sure, many. Some are ways of discrimination or skepticism that I heard early on. But I think the reason why I was able to push on was that I trusted the data. Meaning that at every data I looked at, the picture was the same, which is that most Americans are not watching that much news. And I just couldn't shake off the feeling of if not really that many people are watching news or consuming news, or why are we so upset with studying news in political science? Is it because half of them, their parents are professors and they somehow grew up in the ivory tower very early on and have some assumptions baked in and somehow very detached from how Americans live their life? Day to day like what's really happening? So it was a good thing that I looked at the many, many data before I really committed to the topic. But that gave me the confidence that I think I found something a lot of people are missing. And if this amount of people are watching this amount of television or entertainment media, it must affect the way they think. So that was once I committed to the topic. Then after that it was an easier time collecting data, but it was harder time convincing people to begin with. But after that, that was easier.
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C
Chapter one is called Pictures in Our Head. And this is a chapter where you take us into your evidence that you collected of what you call news avoidance. And it's the this overwhelming evidence, as you as you just stated, that the majority of Americans are not sitting down to watch a formal news broadcast that is specifically about news and the data that the journalists use, most people are avoiding that. You talk about something called the communication ecology of most individuals. And I wrote that down because that phrase seems to encapsulate so much of the driving audiology of this book. And as you're studying this news avoidance, you're also finding out that less than 4% of web traffic consists of people going to news websites. Do you want to dig a bit into this data of news avoidance? Because once you unpack it, it's staggering.
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A
Yes. So this is such a fascinating data point and I'm going to tell you a lot about it. So one of the reasons, one of the most exciting developments that happened to public opinion research or political behavior studies is that for a long time we have to rely on surveys. Meaning that I ask you, oh, so last in the past 24 hours, how often did you go to or did you watch Fox News or how often did you watch the NBC evening? So most of our news understanding or what they consume were coming from people's answer to surveys. However, we know that people do not necessarily give the most accurate answers in the survey. Like the way that a lot of people say that they voted, but indeed they didn't vote because they think that it's desirable to say you voted, even though when you haven't. And same thing happens when we ask people about news consumption or interest in politics. Are you interested in politics? A lot of people will say, yes, I am very interested, even though they are not. So this problem have plugged our discipline for many, many years, except that in more recent years, finally we have this rise of behavior level data. And let me tell you one very catching story to tell you why this is such a fascinating and convenient data in 2014, one of the most popular book of the year of the nation was called the capital in the 21st century. It's by French economist Thomas Piketty and I'm sure you've heard of this book too. And it was the best selling book for weeks and weeks and it was like number one book like through the rip. However, at the time there was also another article that says in 2014 the most unread book is also the Thomas Picides, capital in the 21st century. How would they Know? Once upon a time we assumed that if you bought a book you may have read. That was our assumption. But with the rise of ebooks and Kindles, Amazon now knows on which page you stopped reading. So this article used the ebook the Kindle data to show that a lot of people bought this book, which is why that was the nation's best selling book. But turns out most people stopped at page 10, therefore earning the honorable title of the most unread book of the year. So that incident tells you the discrepancy between the survey data or in the behavior level data. We now observe what people do and web tracking data is one of those examples. Instead of me asking you so how often did you go to the CNN.com yesterday? I don't have to ask. Now we have web browsing history data like every single URL that you visited for the past day or past one month or the entire year or the past four months as long as you consented to data collection. Then we then get to see the URL level traffic and when you visited, how long you stayed in the page, the very granular data. Once we had access to this web browsing data, my community was so stoked that finally we really get to see all the things that people are consuming on a day to day basis. But when we opened the data set, I think a lot of political scientists were shocked or disappointed to figure out how little media consumption goes to any news media right now. And the truth of the matter is 40 years ago or 50 years ago we didn't have that much choices. For instance, in terms of TV at 9pm or 8pm after dinner, your option was ooh, am I going to watch NBC evening News Today or ABC Evening News Today was the agonizing choice between three evening news channels. But in 2026 when you open a TV now there are literally infinite number of TV shows you can watch, or movies you can turn on Netflix or Hulu or Amazon Prime. Name your favorite streaming services and there are just so many Choices. And that abundance of choices means that if you're not that interested in politics, which is most of Americans, you do not have to watch news. When you have so many websites to visit, from your shopping websites to I don't web comment websites to fitness websites, why bother going to newyorktimes.com and read most of the depressing things happening about this country? So I think that kind of gave us a realization and more a clearer picture of what people are doing day to day with this web tracking data is that less than 4% of official web traffic goes to news. And the number is pretty much the same regardless of the time period that we look at is very low. Of course, there are some variations across time. For instance, during the election time, of course, people consume a little more news than before. But most of the time the demand for news is pretty low because we have all other things to do.
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C
And you tell us in this chapter that you're really going into an uncharted theoretical experience. Vance, you want to look at how reality TV upholds this myth of meritocracy. Why people believe so strongly in a meritocracy when all data points to growing wealth disparities and a far more complicated ladder for people to climb to get from one economic bracket to the other, that when you look at the data starts to feel really daunting. And yet when you watch a TV show, you feel really hopeful and empowered, like the American dream is lab and well, and we can all do it. And you're trying to look at this, but you've got what you call this uncharted theoretical expanse. Do you want to talk a bit about how you set up your. Your study? Later on in the book, you tell us about getting in a truck and going to meet people at blueberry festivals and farmers markets and, and being with people where they were. But as you were figuring out how to construct a study where you didn't feel you had many mentor texts to guide you, how did you put it together?
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A
Yeah, I think I got inspirations from a lot of these media studies because I figured that, okay, well, even though the content might be different, that something is very political versus very apolitical. I thought that the fundamental process of how people process mediated information probably is the same. So I got a lot of inspiration from my classic models in political science and the public opinion researchers who really theorize about how and under what conditions media effects will be more pronounced. And those fundamentals really help me to clarify, like whether this is going to be powerful or where should I look for, for instance, let's start with a very basic premise. One of the reasons for any media to have power is that you first have to consume that a lot on a regular basis. And those media will have more power than the media that you only turn to occasionally. That's a very intuitive sentence. It doesn't require any theoretical understanding of it. So that's actually one of the premise of the news media research is that if something's out there all the time and people consume it regularly, it affects the way you think more often. I'm like, okay, well that makes total sense to me. And it turns out, what are the things that Americans are regularly consuming? What? It's not, you know, 60 Minutes anymore, it turns out it is of this popular reality television show. And one neat part of this is the repeated exposure part. Let's say that you're interested in weather, for instance. What are some fun TV shows out there right now, Like Love island, which is another reality TV show, affects the way you think about romance. But the tricky thing is there are not that many reality TV shows like Love Island. It is really unclear or whether just one time exposure to one show affects the way we think about anything. However, what was really neat about reality television show was that it didn't matter which reality TV show that you watched, whether you're watching one episode of American Idol or one episode of American MasterChef, one episode of Shark Tank, didn't matter what TV show you watch, that most of this popular reality TV show, episode after episode, had the same narrative of the rags to riches stories, that if you have any random talent ranging from dancing to making cupcakes to dancing, you can make it in America. And it was a very useful theoretical way to think about it because it fulfills the necessary condition of a lot of people consuming the same narrative on a repeated basis. So that was very useful for me to think through.
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C
As you were digging into this, you found that what this did overall was make people less likely to believe in the importance of social safety nets. Can you say more about that?
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A
Yeah, I think this is a very old idea from sociality and political economy, is that if you think that anyone can move up the ladder and succeed, those people are less likely to support policies that support, that can fix the structural change, structural problems in the welfare system. Because in this meritocratic system, then if your poor is all on you, why should we help you? Because you know it's something about you or your fault that made you poor and not successful. And therefore it is not Our collective responsibility to make you get out of that poverty trap. So this link has always been there and has been shown many times across many different studies in political economy. So I'm not being new or the first person to document this correlation or causation between the two. But I think what's new here is that the idea of meritocracy or moving yourself up in the ladder, a lot of people always thought, oh, there's something about American culture. We don't know what that is. It's just like a air that we breathe, and that's why it's called American Dream, not French Dream or Chinese Dream. We just have this. And I wondered, that cannot be possible. Where is this coming from? And I'm pinpointing entertainment media, particularly Rex, which is reality TV show, as an important source of information that offers that information to mass audience.
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C
People often tell me they can't handle the news because they have stresses in their own life. The news stresses them out, so they escape into reality tv that makes them feel better. And one of the things that you point out is that this is kind of fueling the wrong direction. If we have growing wealth disparities, if we have actual fading access to the American dream, and people are having more and more struggles in the land of opportunity, what we need to do is understand how we can collectively fix this. And yet we're escaping into reality TV to help us feel better. And it continues to tell us that rags to riches is possible.
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A
I think one of the challenging things about picturing this is the normative claim that a lot of people make. And I've been very careful not to make that claim in my book. What I mean by that is it is very easy to read my book and think, oh, she's saying that this is bad for democracy, that people are not demanding changes because they're not informed. Some of the evidences show the link between the two. But I'm very careful when I'm making normative statements like that. What I mean is that we do not know what is the right level of optimism to have for any society to have. Imagine the opposite scenario where everyone watches the news and very, very pessimistic about the future of America. Is it a good thing? I am not sure, because in some other parts of the world, when people are very pessimistic about the American Dream or the prospect of upward mobility, then maybe they will demand structural changes. But in the meantime, that pessimism then leads to lower birth rate or more mental health problems. So it feels like we cannot have the good things all at the same time. So it's tricky to think about what is the optimal level of optimism to have in any society, for society to function better and have a more functioning representative democracy where policies are responsible and reactive to our needs. But it is a problem in a way that inequality is rising, particularly at the top level. And many of the policies that we have right now are not really addressing the problem. And we do need much more collective will to address the problem. But our media environments in many ways stacked against for us to mobilize and have this collective will. So that makes it trickier. But again, if you are sorry, if you're like a low income family, you have five different part time jobs and you have to feed your children and you came home around 11pm, do you have any energy or mental energy to watch news? Probably not. And should we expect those people to consume news and be aware? I am not sure.
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C
And as we get deeper into the book, you are careful to outline so many of the nuances that you're touching on there. One of them is that while you're looking at reality TV and you're looking at how people do or don't engage with the news, you're also looking at what affects people's vote. Often how we know how people feel about policies is by what they vote for. And you're very careful to delineate a number of factors that can actually affect how people vote. One is that you point out that if someone's polling place is in a school, for example, and their ballot initiatives to fund the school, they are more likely to be favorable in their voting for funding schools. Another is that if there is a serious weather event that affects not only if people get to the to the polls, but how they feel about certain things at that time. And so actual tangible life circumstances are affecting how people vote. And it can also be things that the pollsters don't ask about, but that as a political scientist, you dig into.
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A
Yeah. So I include those examples to give a comparison, which is that if the random location of polling stations or the random weather that you happen to have on the election day can affect the voting choices, and these are most of the time arbitrary things that happen to our life. Can you imagine, then the true power of entertainment media, which is not arbitrary, which is you choose to select to consume those on a daily basis, then the power of that entertainment media that you choose to consume should be way more immense than these random factors that we already documented in political science. So that was the context that I brought those examples that maybe we just have not find the right way to uncover all those powerful entertainment media effects out there because they're just so pervasive. And often we lack the tools or data to really quantify the true force of entertainment media. My book was one attempt to do it. But again, there's so many different types of genres about entertainment media or other storylines that's out there. So I think it's only the beginning of the big research agenda that we have to build.
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C
And you tell us in the book that there are ever expanding platforms and countless ways that people consume news and also that they engage with media and that that's going to keep changing. You also point out in the book that in a healthy and functioning democracy, we don't censor how people enjoy watching TV or getting their news. That that there's supposed to be a free marketplace, for lack of a better word, of how people engage with media offerings. As we go along, though, you let us know that while so much of the data is about representative samples, you wanted to know about what's unrepresented in the samples. Can you talk a bit more about these unrepresented people and unrepresentative samples?
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A
Yeah, I love to. Because I think one of the patterns that I see in modern political science is that you're now much more likely to rely on online data and online polls. For instance, now we use Twitter data to think about American public opinion. We now use web tracking data. So we have now tendency to think that this is like a true American public opinion, even though there are a lot of people who are not online, who do not use social media, who never opened Twitter. But somehow our competition heavy research of today are neglecting. I'm always very aware of those missing kind of steps in our research. So, for instance, let's say that I really want to know all the far right or far left conspiracy theories consumed by a very small subset of Americans, because again, most Americans are not that into conspiracy theories or do not actively seek them all the time. It's like a very small percentage of the national population that engage in this very extreme behaviors. But often those outliers do not exist in our national surveys or usual data that we turn to. So then I think the open question for all of us, all of us here is then how do we get to know these people? How do we study them? Again, there are many ways that we can get into it, but I think it's like a bigger issue of, well, what if people are never online? Can we ever reach them? Last year I saw one news article that there was a computer cafe opened in the Queens which is only like 10 minutes away from Columbia campus. But the newspaper article was basically mentioning how the local residents are very excited for this free computer access and this computer cafe is open to the residents. And then that somehow hit me that in 2025, you know, some neighbors are excited to have like WI Fi and have free computers. Even though I think people in our academic circle it's very easy to assume that obviously everyone has a computer and a phone, but that is not necessarily the case. So who are we missing by relying on particular data or particular sample? And how do we reach those people? So when I say I love doing research by meeting Americans where they are, I think you already mentioned this, but I wanted to meet people where they are. So for instance, I drove a truck to rural Pennsylvania to the Blueberry festivals and farmers market to really talk to people there and conduct an experiment on them. My recent example was I wanted to talk to older Americans who are watching a lot of cop TV shows ranging from Chicago PD to Blue Bloods. And I really couldn't find them on the Columbia campus for obvious reasons. So I thought hard about where can I find like older residents who consume a lot of TB all the time. My answer was retirement house. So I actually ended up emailing 300 retirement houses in New York and New Jersey to figure out whether I can go there and talk to them and also collect data on their media consumption and the effects they have on, on their policing attitudes. So those are, I think, kind of examples of how I approach research. Maybe one other example is whenever I take the New York subway, I don't stalk people, but I kind of look around and see what people are doing with their phone from the distance because it's kind of easy to tell even from like, you know, one mile away whether someone's texting someone or is on Instagram or watching a TikTok. And for the past one year of my New York subway, I only saw two people reading news with their phone. So perhaps that confirms with all the things I see from my empirical data set. But this is another way of me trying to get the real world data of like talking to Uber drivers, talking to bartenders, like all the time about their media consumption to make sure that I'm not really missing by only looking at the convenient data that I couldn't collect from the comfort of my my chair.
- [33:33]
C
For listeners, they'll learn more about how you study the known territory of News media by diving into chapter two, which is called entertaining Nonpartisan Hearts and Minds. And it also takes us through the transformation over the recent decades of news media. Chapter three is called A Tale of Two Media and that digs more into these rags to riches formulas that several of the reality TV shows that we have been talking about use. And they, they help understand where this robust belief in upward mobility comes from. And that breaks down sort of the three markers that you noticed across these types of rags to Rish's show, which is that they have three key things. They have an ordinary protagonist, a tangible financial game and. And a belief in the meritocracy. The stories of you driving around in the truck, listeners will find in chapter four, called America's Got tv. I want to circle back to America's Got TV just for another moment because you talk in there about what you call this hometown effect of a particular TV show called American Idol. Can you unpack how people can feel sort of a personal connection to reality TV through these kinds of hometown effects?
- [34:49]
A
Yeah, sure thing. So here I was looking for some quasi random opportunities where somehow imagine there are two comparable towns like town A versus Town B that are very similar, except that one town happened to produce a very high and well performing American Idol contestant. And by virtue of that, because of the hometown effects, a lot of people are just naturally more likely to watch a television if you know that someone from your town will be on the show. Like the way that if someone's a very famous Olympic star, then maybe you're going to tune into that Olympic channel just to like root for the hometown person that you knew from early on or from your childhood. So this is like a very intuitive pattern that we see all the time is that yeah, when someone from your hometown is very successful, everyone looks for that guy or this. So that was the variation that I was kind of tapping into. Is that what happens to people's belief in American dream when similar towns in many other aspects of demographics but only one town happened to produce a very high performing and top contestants for American Idol, then do they happen to believe in upward mobility much more than the residents of a different town who didn't happen to produce the American Idol contestants? So that was the kind of a natural experiment that I turned to to show that there is a real world effect of watching TV shows like American Idol on how people think about the upward mobility.
- [36:21]
C
Chapter five is called Powerful Signal and listeners can go to that chapter for a dive into the observational data. Where I'd like to go now is chapter six called the Meritocratic Dilemma. And this is where you dig into some of what you alluded to earlier, which is about aspirations and optimism that they're neither a objective good or an objective harm. And you ask the so what question as we get into the Meritocratic Dilemma, can you tell us what that dilemma is and a bit of what you'd like people to take away from it?
- [36:55]
A
Yeah. So the dilemma is about what do we do. On the one hand, when you're tired, have a long day, obviously when watching a feel a good reality television show or any entertainment show, it's good for your mental health and maybe it will give you energy to go another long day. So. And it also makes people to innovate more. There's also evidence that watching Shark Tank makes people to apply for my patent. So again, like these TV shows are good for our economic success and innovation, that when you watch someone succeeding, you want to try to. So this is a good thing. But the dilemma is perhaps the same stories of the rags to riches that make people feel empowered and be more innovative and invent things more also could be served as a force in our collective politics where that makes people to not demand more redistribution or support less of the measures that increase taxes on the response people. So that poses as a dilemma in our democratic society.
- [38:00]
C
Earlier in the book you let us know that American TV consumption surpasses all other developed economies. The final chapter of the book is called Chapter 7, the Entertained States of America. You let us know that the primary focus of the book has been the powerful narrative embedded in ostensibly non political reality TV shows in the Entertained States of America. You take us through some of the findings of the book. And one thing that you point out there that I'd like to take a moment with is that you say those who consume misinformation are not the same individuals who consume the fact checking websites. It's interesting because I think so many of us think that you can fact check anything and figure out if you have misinformation. But what you're pointing out there is that people who are frequenting sites or forms of media that provide misinformation are not the people who are going to Snopes or elsewhere to say, well, is that true? How did you find that out?
- [39:00]
A
Yeah, so this is organic from a lot of web tracking data. A lot of papers have already shown that consuming misinformation is not that much of a common phenomena, particularly extreme form of misinformation. And it's always happened in a very Skewed way. There's a very small percentage of Americans who engage in that behavior and so does for fact checking. Because what kind of person go to factcheck.org to check the facts about political information that you just consumed? Very rare behavior. Maybe some academics will do it. So the point that I was making there is in many of the intervention studies that we do in social science is like, oh, what if we correct misinformation for people? What if we offer them fact checking? But oftentimes the population that we conduct intervention on are not right sample is that we are conducting interventions on perhaps the misleading sample who otherwise would not consume insulin prevention anyway. We are giving a medicine to people who are not sick. If that's the metaphor, that's easy to follow. That was the point that I was making is we have to be aware of what people are consuming on a day to day basis and devise our more precise prescriptions about how we fix those problems if we want.
- [40:19]
C
In chapter seven, we also learn a little bit about propaganda, soft propaganda, and about the role of influencers. On page 172 you say in democracies, the extent to which the elite can utilize entertainment media to advance their political goals is a bit more restrained. But you also take us into how they can hire influencers to provide messages to people. We go on to learn about micro narratives and macro implications. You explore the idea of TikTok and how in such a short package of information, people can be profoundly influenced. What would you like people to know about this sort of complicated dance between what could be considered soft propaganda, a democracy that wants to make all types of information available to people to choose for themselves and these micro narratives and just the vast number of platforms where people can go to to be entertained.
- [41:21]
A
This is a very important question. Now we're thinking about the next election and then the other way that politicians and campaign strategists are now using social media influencers to deliver messages to mass people. On the one hand, it makes sense that if you want to reach to young voters who are not that interested in politics, you have to grab their eyeballs. And where are they? They're on TikTok. And how do you talk to them? In the age of growing distrust in journalists and politicians, you have to deliver your messages through trusted messengers who are already trusted by these young people. And oftentimes these are the social media influencers. So now there are a whole discussion about like sponsored content on podcasts or, or on TikTok or any social media platform of what is political versus what is not political, because the line between the two is very, very blurry. And I think our campaign finance law have evolved a little bit more to accommodate this new evolving media landscape where the content creators out there are literally getting paid to produce the content that politicians want them to say. And the disclosure thing, disclosure requirements should be probably more stringent than now. So I think this is like a very evolving discussion that we have now. But I think one takeaway is very clear, is that if there's one kind of lying takeaway from this whole podcast is that what you want is who you are. And it doesn't matter whether you are reading news or entertainment. The things that we are consuming in front of our screen affects the way we think about the world, affects the way the way we think about the other people, about the world in general. And we always have to be mindful of what we are exposing ourselves to, whether it's a 50 second TikTok video for four hours or one hour, very fascinating TV show on Netflix. It just affects the way we behave, the way we think, what we believe, and it's profoundly important in this age of infinite media transition.
- [43:32]
C
Page 179 you say that you align yourself with those who recognize politics as a perennial undercurrent coursing through the veins of everyday American life. You go on to talk about how politics manifests itself in how people shop in department stores, whether it's a shoe that they will no longer buy or a designer that they no longer use their products. You talk about how politics can affect culinary choices, such as someone not going to a restaurant anymore because of its LGBTQ rights. And you go on to say that politics becomes palpable in football stadiums when a quarterback chooses to remain seated during the anthem, casting a spotlight on the harrowing specter of police brutality. You go on to talk about how it reverberates in billboards when pop superstar Taylor Swift's verses on gun violence and mass shootings become a rallying cry. Later on in you say politics can be found everywhere, away from the obvious but often closest to us. And without a doubt, politics can be found in the entertainment media we voraciously consume, crafted for escapism, yet so often mirroring and molding the political realities we cannot escape today, as most of us spend more than half a day engrossed in screens, Entertaining narratives and stories shape our values, norms, attitudes, and therefore culture. As such, they carry profound political consequences, ones that you hope will no longer remain unseen. We're coming to the close of our time together And I want to ask you, what do you hope this episode will spark for listeners?
- [45:08]
A
Yeah, I'm hoping that you are much more aware of what you're watching or consuming. One of my assignments that I often assign to my undergraduate students in any class is I let them to Download their entire YouTube Watch history, which is very easy for you to download if you just go to your Google account and see and examine the patterns of the videos they watch or the content that they are watching. And I think often through this exercise, students learn a lot about themselves. So I'm hoping that this episode, if you listen to the full I thank you for listening inspire you, think harder about the choices that you make every single time when you're in front of a screen.
- [45:51]
C
Thank you so much for being here today, Dr. Ingie Kim, and sharing from your book, the American How Reality TV Upholds the Myth of Meritocracy. You've been listening to the academic life. I'm Dr. Christina Gessler inviting you to please join us again.