EVERY SPOKEN WORD
2 min read · 447 words- 0:00 – 0:10
Skibidi Toilet as a Gen Alpha touchpoint (and a parent's confusion)
- AGAdam Grant
My son explained to me that skibidi came from Skibidi Toilet. I watched a few Skibidi Toilet episodes.
- AAAdam Aleksic
Yeah.
- AGAdam Grant
I want that time back. [laughs] Like, that, that added no value to my life.
- 0:10 – 0:40
Reading Skibidi Toilet as a story about mediation and surveillance
- AAAdam Aleksic
Well, I think it's actually incredibly important to look at Skibidi Toilet, which is this YouTube short series about a race of fictional, uh, camera-headed androids battling toilets. And what is this story telling us, right? If you were a Gen Alpha child looking at this, it is diegetically narrated through the lens of a camera. They often look at iPads and direct other cameras in the show. So you're... Now you're... You are looking at this on your iPad as an iPad kid, looking through the head of a camera, looking at another camera, uh, and it's this commentary about
- 0:40 – 1:11
Memes as cultural dialectics: technology vs. the 'ugly' human force
- AAAdam Aleksic
surveillance. It's about the, this digital gaze and how we interact with, uh, this hyper-mediated reality. And on the other side of this technological progress is the basest thing you're taught is evil in the world. It- the toilet is the first bad thing you're encountering. It is this story about, uh, the panopticon versus this just human kind of ugly force. I, I see it as actually a, a dialectic commentary on our, on our culture. So yeah, you look at the meme, you dissect where it comes from, and you understand more
- 1:11 – 2:14
Media literacy through meme analysis: judging reality in a distorted information environment
- AAAdam Aleksic
about who we are as a society, how ideas are affecting us. Um, I think if we educate ourselves and have deep media literacy about the things we are looking at, we are better able to judge reality, and I think that is so, so important. Uh, it's going to be even more important moving forward as we are increasingly in this boundary of not knowing what is real. There is very convincing AI deepfakes on the internet now. They're gonna be widespread because of apps like Sora and, and future apps where, without watermarks. We don't even know the... A- algorithms don't recommend us the actual picture of reality. They recommend us what generates engagement. Because even if you're not online, the chocolate that's in your store nearby or the song that's playing on the radio in the bar that you're in with your friend, that comes from TikTok, or the clothing people are wearing around you, that comes from TikTok. Because this is where it's higher up in this memetic node, percolating outwards into the mainstream, affecting all of our lives regardless of whether you're on or offline. So I think we should take time to understand how we're being affected by the internet, and that requires this deep knowledge of ideas and why they're popular.
Episode duration: 2:14
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