A Minor Announcement and a Major Request

Transcript

Hello to all bookworms, litterbugs, and those of you who are merely verse-curious.  I’m interrupting your day to make a brief announcement and to ask you all a big favor.

As you may know, in March of 2024, the US House of Representatives passed a bill banning the social media app TikTok, citing national security concerns and mounting evidence of its detrimental effect on users.  In April of that year, the Senate followed suit and the bill forcing TikTok’s owner, the Chinese company Bytedance to be sold or it would be banned.  The following month, Bytedance sued to dismiss the ban citing constitutional issues.  This past Friday, January 17, 2025, the US Supreme Court upheld the ban and a day later, TikTok went dark in America.

This is as much to say that the Classic English Literature Podcast is no longer on TikTok.  I’ve deleted my account and uninstalled the app.  This will make it more difficult for me to attract new listeners, but that’s the way things are.

I’m not terribly bothered by this.  In fact, if I’m honest, I’ve always felt a bit icky using TikTok – actually, I feel a bit icky using any social media.  I don’t want to get political here.  I’ve never wanted the podcast to be at all political in any partisan or ideological way.  This show is about the interpretation of British literature, its history, social milieu, cultural significance, and philosophy.  Obviously, when engaged in such a project, my own political, social, and religious beliefs will no doubt inflect the ways in which I carry out my analysis and discussion of literature, but I’ve tried to avoid any polemical positions.  So my icky feeling has little to do with the politics surrounding the new law.

No, the icky feeling comes from my ambivalence about the moral quality of social media.  On the one hand, it's very good for connecting with people, building a community across the world, and sharing one’s interest with the like-minded.  Also, since I live in a small town in a rural state, I am also aware that for many people, especially those from marginalized communities, social media can be a great way for folks to establish a kinship with members of those communities  who may not happen to live nearby.

On the other hand, I am deeply concerned about the negative effects of social media: its tendency to tribalize, its addictive algorithmic mechanism, its capacity for deteriorating the very concept of truth.  As a high school teacher, I have seen the demonstrable increase in teen anxiety, depression, and cognitive decline.  It is no surprise to me that, in recent years, the zombie, the undead, has become a major trope in popular culture.  Walking through the school halls, I see hundreds of students, eyes glazed and souls isolated, almost incapable of interacting with others in any direct human way, the screen the only world that matters.

So, while I recognize that apps like TikTok and Facebook and Instagram are indelibly part of this brave new world and – in terms of being a podcaster – I also recognize their importance in reaching out to people who may be interested in a discussion about literature, history, and philosophy.  But I also sometimes feel dirty, that I’m complicit in a media ecosystem that I believe often does more harm than good.

So, I’m off TikTok and I feel OK about that.  A few months ago, some of you may have noticed, I dropped the show’s Twitter/X account because of my misgivings about its new owner and the culture he would create.  I have similar misgivings about Facebook and Instagram, which I’m still on despite those reservations, which have only been exacerbated by their parent company Meta’s recent decision to abandon fact-checking.  I’m also still on YouTube.  I’ve also recently set up an account with Bluesky, joining, as I hear it, millions of other Twitter/X refugees – we’ll see how that works out.  To be honest, if I could, I would do away with the show’s social media presence altogether.

Look, I suppose I’m teetering on the sanctimonious here, though I don’t really mean to.  I know that running a podcast already puts me in bed with a number of hosting companies whose practices may not always align with my values, so I realize I’ve kind of made my hypocritical deal with that devil.  It’s impossible to divorce myself from the tech-industrial complex.  But it would be great if I could reduce my reliance upon social media to build and reach my audience.  Actually, I’d love it if I could only use text messages and emails. 

And here’s where I ask for your help.  I know that at the end of every episode I ask that you tell a few friends about the Classic English Literature Podcast, and I’m asking again.  Please – if you enjoy and value the show – please tell everybody you know about it.  Send them a text, forward a link, talk to them in person.  I think it would be awesome if the show’s audience could grow organically, by word of mouth, by people connecting with people.  It’s a show about storytelling, after all, that most fundamental of human activities.

Thousands of years ago, people in their nomadic groups or in their farming villages gathered around a fire, gathered around the hearth, to banish the darkness, to protect themselves from whatever lurked in the night.  And what did they do?  Two things, and they are the two things that differentiate us from all other life on earth.  One, they cooked.  They applied heat to the bounty of nature and transformed it.  They created rituals around the meal; they gathered to nourish their bodies.  And two, they told stories to nourish their souls.  They told stories about the world around them, tried to make sense of the thunder and the rain, tried to situate themselves in relationship to the stars above them, the mountains, deserts, and forests around them.  They told stories of gods and heroes, they told stories about their day, about the hunt, about the crops, about what may lie beyond the horizon.  Those stories make us human – they are the way that the universe becomes conscious of itself.

So please, please – invite everyone you know to join us around that campfire.  Let’s restore the hearth as the center of our humanity.

Thanks for tolerating this little bit of grandiosity.  I’ll be back in a week or two with an episode on Milton’s Paradise Lost, and I hope to see you and all your friends gathered about the flames.