🟧 Conversations are the new unit of culture - One Thing

Kyle Chayka: What do hours-long podcasts, YouTubers, Twitch streamers, and TikTok talking heads — the hottest formats of our new media era — all have in common? They are driven by conversation, either with an on-screen participant or the implied partner of the consumer, staring at their screen. As plain text seems to grow less necessary and we move toward getting our news in these multimedia formats, conversation is becoming a dominant driver of culture. The format of a back-and-forth chat a unit of discourse. (Think of all those decontextualized TikTok clips of quipping podcasters.) You can put forth an argument in a podcast interview as easily as you can in an essay these days, and probably more people will get it.1 This concept crystallized for me, fittingly, during a conversation with Friend of One Thing (FOOT) Tope Folarin. We often talk about where people get their ideas and opinions from, whether in culture or politics. Right now it’s not from a print magazine; it’s from listeni

Kyle Chayka: What do hours-long podcasts, YouTubers, Twitch streamers, and TikTok talking heads — the hottest formats of our new media era — all have in common? They are driven by conversation, either with an on-screen participant or the implied partner of the consumer, staring at their screen. As plain text seems to grow less necessary and we move toward getting our news in these multimedia formats, conversation is becoming a dominant driver of culture. The format of a back-and-forth chat a unit of discourse. (Think of all those decontextualized TikTok clips of quipping podcasters.) You can p