Mentor Text analysis of podcast – dylan M

Drowning in entertainment: the age of distraction by oliSunvia on YouTube 

I think that the title is very effective, as many young people, including me, are often distracted easily by a variety of different things. The world is at our fingertips, and technology has been evolving, studying human behavior in order to make our phones more addictive than ever.  

`The speaker hooks the audience in by beginning her podcast with a quote from Deleuze, a French philosopher from the early 1950’s. It is captivating because it is very old yet it predicts the state of humanity today. I notice that the podcast is very fast and information focused. Also she compares and contrasts two different popular books, with similar takeaways but different ideas and focuses. The voiceover is very polished and educated as she is speaking right to us. They are very diligent with the way they incorporate fast sound bites of different things to keep the reader engaged. Like Infamous subway suffers gameplay on the side of the clip as a reference of how many things people need now to focus on a video. You begin to know about what the podcast is about as soon as she starts talking in her video, it is not a hard topic to grasp. You know who the speaker is because if there are no images on the screen, it is her talking directly to the camera.  

Middle part  

She keeps introducing new ideas, as the podcast is parts, by the 7-minute mark she is already on part 3 of the podcast. Talking about the history of media consumption and when it started, going back to the invention of the telegraph and popularization of newspapers. She talks about how the focus shifted from information to becoming the most entertaining or generating the most buzz. How people began fixating on getting or being the fastest source of information. She then compared that to now, as the same is done with online articles, when there is a major event news outlets rush to release their articles the fastest to compete with others to supply the high demand of fast media. She shows us evidence of this by showing 3 articles about the same thing published by the NYT, NBC & CNN in the same few minutes. I believe that this is an element of storytelling as she is explaining to us why things are the way they are today. I think the speaker researched many books, and articles about mass distraction and influx of important information after noticing a pattern. The text does not incorporate interviews or conversations. In part 4 she focuses on how much we are focused on entertainment. How most of the information that we focus on throughout our days is mostly trivial and not life changing. How things that used to be taken seriously like presidential debates have since turned into popularity contests with unserious antics and less structured. She backs this evidence up with an audio clip of Donald Trump and Joe Biden screaming over each other.  

Outro  

After finishing her criticism of the modern state of peoples of attention spans. She reflects on how it affects the video essays that she makes, and that she is guilty of catering to it at times. She makes sure there is only a small space between her talking and that she tries to make sure she includes outside footage, so they don’t get bored of looking at her. She then speaks about how news and entertainment somehow got confused and mixed up with each other, making media way less knowledgeable. She ends the podcast with a quote “How delighted would be all the kings, czars, and Fuhrers of the past to know that censorship is not a necessity when all political discourse takes the form of a jest.” in the back is a funny news clip, the music is classical, and this closes out of the essay. I think that the message is we as a society need to become more patient and disciplined. Our attention spans have been deteriorating more over the last 100 years. Due to our phones, due to the news and the media, due to social media apps and the need for constant new trivial information that distracts us from things that actually matter. If Gen Z doesn’t do anything now, our kids will be effected and we will continue to be distracted for generations.  

The podcast is 32 minutes long, I will try to integrate the story telling element into my project. By descriptively talking about the rise of drill music and rap as a whole, how it ties into gang violence anad more. I will avoid most of the memes as I want my podcast to be a little more serious.