The Rise of YouTube and How It's Changed Our Lives
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This is The Pulse, stories about the people and places at the heart of health and science. I'm Maiken Scott. When my kids were little, I tried really hard to limit their screen time. When they did get the coveted tablet or laptop, they loved watching shows on YouTube like Fireman Sam or Shaun the Sheep.

Then I realized they must have been watching something other than those kids' shows because I found little videos they created on our iPad, like this one. Hi, guys. You know, my dad offered me some strawberry popsicle, and I know you guys love chocolate, right? It's my son. He's about six or seven, looking directly into the camera like he's taking a selfie. And strawberry is the worst. My sister loves it.

Or here's my daughter hosting an imaginary talk show. Spoiler alert, it was a purple stuffed sea turtle called Slider.

The whole YouTube trend of sharing your lives and interests had seeped into their brains. This phenomenon inspired tech journalist Mark Bergen to write a book about YouTube, a company he had covered for years. He was talking to his good friends who had a son. Like a lot of parents, I think, of this generation trying their best to keep their kid off screen, no TVs and no phones. And then I remember one day he was sort of singing, their son was singing this song,

And they're like, they've never taught him this song before. And I said, I recognize that song because it was this incredibly popular YouTube video for kids that had become this earworm. YouTube's also the world's biggest kids entertainment platform. And it was not invented to be that at all.

YouTube has become so many things it wasn't invented to be. They initially launched with this idea for a dating website in part because when they were thinking about why would people want to upload videos of themselves or watch videos of non-professionals, strangers, it would probably be for sex.

So that was their calculus. The first video uploaded to the platform as a test is innocent. It features one of YouTube's founders, Jawed Karim, at the San Diego Zoo. He's in his 20s, but he looks like a teenager. All right, so here we are in front of the elephants. The cool thing about these guys is that they have really, really, really long trunks.

The video is grainy, a little shaky, and not especially interesting. It's an ordinary moment on a slightly overcast day, but somehow it's this idea that really took off, that we all could and should capture and share our lives. It became...

over the past 20 years now an unstoppable force. The site now features billions of videos. 500 hours of content are uploaded every minute. It's become an opinion maker, a powerhouse for entertainment, learning and sharing, for spreading political information and capturing societal movements. On this episode, the rise of YouTube and how it's changed our lives. ♪

YouTube revolutionized how we watch video and how much of it. Endless choices available on demand for free. Then TikTok burst onto the scene in 2016, serving up a rapid-fire stream of short-form content. YouTube answered with YouTube Shorts in 2020.

Short-form video has become one of the dominant forms of media for kids and young adults over the past five years, and experts say it has had an effect on our attention.

But really, researchers are just catching up to what's happening, trying to understand how short-form video affects cognition. Skills like attention span, self-control, and delayed gratification. Skills that could be impaired if somebody's brain is expecting a new reward every few seconds. Reporter Sarah Willer-Earnst has more.

When Carly Mallow was a kid, she was known for pulling an all-nighter or two. I read all the time. I would get in trouble for the flashlight under the bedsheets. Like, I was reading every book, every new book. Like, it was the only thing I wanted for Christmas. Like, I loved books. Her attention was snatched away by fantasy books like the Percy Jackson series and Ranger's Apprentice.

just wrapped by the need to know what happens next. But fast forward to her early 20s, she picks up a book. And I was bored out of my mind. I would read like two pages and then I'd be like, nope, I need my phone. And I would scroll. The book would be open on my lap, but I would be scrolling. Scrolling on TikTok, one quick video after another. A woman in her garden, two friends on a cross-country road trip, beautiful views on the summit of a mountain.

And an endless stream of novelty. By comparison, reading felt tedious. It required so much patience and attention. Attention Carly no longer had.

Shorter attention spans seem like a disease of our time. An English teacher, Makayla Dane, sees her students struggling to focus. A lot of times, they just have that zoned-out look, you know? They're just, like, putting heads down, playing with a pin. They love to take it apart and put it back together for some reason. She teaches 9th and 10th grade at a small school outside St. Louis, Missouri.

She doesn't have to fight phones in the classroom since her school bans that, but she still knows her students are all on the app. Like they say, tell me you're on TikTok without telling me you're on TikTok. As soon as something is trending, they're in the classroom like, what's up, brother? Or pookie or whatever it is. It's just like, okay. Makayla herself is on TikTok.

which is where she discovered the idea for a little experiment. Teachers, in the desperate attempt to reclaim their students' attention, are testing out the TikTok teaching method, an idea that went viral last year. Why the hell is my professor playing subway surfers in his presentation? It takes a page from the popular practice of double screening, like looking at your phone while also watching a movie on your computer. A

Imagine you're in a lecture. Half of the screen at the front of the classroom is taken up by lesson slides. But the other half is a video of colorful and enticing games like Subway Surfers or Temple Run. She picked a video of Temple Run. On screen, you can see a character running to collect coins and dodging obstacles along the way. All while she was teaching a lesson on plot elements in novels.

After it was done, she conducted a brief survey. Show of hands. Be honest, there's no wrong answer. Did you feel like that video helped you? A handful of students found it distracting, impossible to focus. But also... I had a lot of students actually tell me, yes, that was super helpful. It helped me to pay attention. Please do it more. Like, I loved that. It seemed like a win. But

But psychologist Gloria Mark says these students were likely not really engaging with the lesson being taught. Gloria is a professor at the University of California, Irvine, who studies attention. I think the reason is because people are only getting surface stimulation. She says double screening or consuming short-form content is a passive experience. They're getting shocked and stimulated. As a result, they keep wanting more shock and awe.

but it's not fulfilling them in any kind of deep sense the way long-form content could. Endlessly scrolling through videos doesn't engage what psychologists call deep processing, something that requires time and active engagement with the material.

Gloria says it's a key part of learning and remembering. We retain information better that's deeply processed. Which is what happens when we do things like read a book, for example. You're constructing questions and you're like actively trying to make sense of this material, trying to connect it.

to other parts of the material. Instead of focusing on one thing, Michaela's students are switching back and forth. Lecture, no Temple Run. No lecture, no Temple Run. And that's a familiar feeling because on TikTok, they're switching from one 30-second video to the next. Gloria believes that this constant buzzing from one thing to the other can crystallize into a habit. They're getting out of practice, so to speak, with doing deep processing because...

because we're so used to looking at snippets of content. We don't have the experience and practice of reading long-form content, which teaches you about immersion. And immersion, in essence, is uninterrupted attention. What's needed for watching a long movie, reading a novel, or studying for a test.

She says we can form habits around short-form content and the task switching that's built into it. Seeing a video that makes you laugh provides rewards, especially in our stressful times. The association with positive emotions can make us crave it, like we crave sugar or junk food. So people have developed habits that when they're starting to feel a little bit antsy, they will switch their attention.

and divert it to something else. And quite often in social media, not always, could be news, could be email, could be a lot of different things. That good feeling offers a reinforcement that can draw you back to the app, all the while interrupting us away from tasks that feel more tedious, boring, or uncomfortable. What may set TikTok apart from news and emails is how it so expertly serves bursts of novelty that are customized to us.

Something fueled by the app's signature technology: the personalized algorithm. "It's almost like virtual foraging." That's Anthony Vaccaro, a neuroscientist doing a postdoc at the University of Southern California. "We're looking around, like maybe there's going to be a little sweet treat for us." Novelty that is somewhat unpredictable is one reason short-form content is so gripping, he says.

and can contribute to addictive relationships with TikTok. We want to figure out the pattern there, because that would be really, really interesting if we could. I can imagine. The survival advantage this gave are hunter-gatherer ancestors foraging in nature. We do know that when rewards are kind of intermittently scattered, and you know they might come, but you can't control exactly when they come, that tends to promote this type of addictive behavior.

Gloria Mark from UC Irvine says that social media addiction only affects a small sliver of the population, about 5%.

But problematic relationships are much more common. And all that digital foraging for rewards has left its mark. Gloria's research shows that attention spans have gone down in the past 20 years. In 2004, we measured attention spans on screens to average two and a half minutes. But a similar study from 2016 found attention spans were just 48 seconds. Both of these studies are limited to attention on screens, as opposed to books or human-to-human interactions.

After hearing that, I wondered, probably like a lot of people, how much is social media to blame for this? I think we have a lot of evidence to suggest it contributes to our attention spans being shorter. The content itself is fragmented and our attention mirrors the content, but I don't think we can point that as the only culprit. We

We live in a world rife with distractions and demands for our attention. But social media is a major contributor. This role has put tech companies in the hot seat. Pressure has been mounting. Parents, lawmakers, kids themselves are worried about the kinds of trying relationships young people are developing with social media.

Carly Mallow, the avid reader turned TikTok fanatic, is 25 now, and she had to make the hard choice to kick her habit. She missed reading books and the sustained attention she once was able to summon.

Plus, she started to feel the effects of her scrolling habits. It had a toll on my mental health. It had a toll on my hobbies. Like, I just stopped doing stuff because I was just scroll, scroll, scroll. What can I do better? What can I do differently? How can I, like, grow? It wasn't quite as bad as an addiction. She was still able to finish college and hold a job. But it zapped the fun out of things she used to love that required delayed gratification.

And so, about a year ago, she decided to get rid of TikTok. I had to delete it because I couldn't figure it out otherwise. It got to the point where I just didn't have the self-control to stop scrolling. But the craving for the app, even subconsciously, was still there. And I'll like open my phone and I'll click where the app used to be.

And I'm like, whoa, don't do that. The app's not there anymore. Her mom noticed that the habit was creeping back on an app she didn't delete. I was on Instagram Reels like last year and she was like, are you on TikTok again? I was like, no, I'm doing Instagram Reels. And she goes, what are those? And I told her and she goes, it's TikTok with a different name. Get off of it. Instagram is now gone from her phone and Snapchat too. But what has come back are some of the things that Carly used to love. She's reading more.

And running two. I'm getting there. And that's exciting. And maybe one day if we had this conversation again, I'd be like, yeah, no, that was that was my 20s. Ha ha ha. And now I'm in my 50s or 60s and I'm knitting for fun or something. I don't know. That story was reported by Sarah Willa Ernst. We're talking about the rise of YouTube and how it's changed our lives. The platform is now 20 years old.

For many of us, YouTube has become a digital toolbox, a place where you can learn how to do almost anything with step-by-step visual instructions. Healthcare worker Mike Brown told us YouTube has helped him save money on car repairs. I've learned to change the oil on my car. I've learned to change light bulbs. I've changed my brakes, everything.

Why is YouTube so effective as a learning tool? John Medina is a developmental molecular biologist and the author of Brain Rules. He says,

Reason number one, we're visual creatures. Half of the brain is devoted to visual processing, okay? 50% of the cortex is devoted to visual processing. It's the most of any sense that exists. So the thinking is, when we see something, it grabs our attention faster and we can process it more quickly. If I write out the word, a sphere that's rotating, okay, that's fine. That's a lot of information.

We have to imagine this in our minds. What if I just showed you a globe that's spinning? You'd get that instantly. So video tutorials have a big leg up here compared with written instructions. The second reason they work so well? Motion. We pay tons of attention to moving objects. If you have a complex piece of information and it's moving, your brain is just going to lock down onto it. And what is YouTube if it's not visual plus motion?

Ergo, a lot of us think that's why you pay attention. The visual aspect of YouTube, seeing something and then being able to replicate it, has helped Michael Murphy take his crochet game to the next level. He's learned how to make amigurumi, tiny stuffed yarn creatures that are adorable but also really hard to make.

For example, Michael has mastered something that's at the start of many amigurumi patterns. It's called the magic ring. And a magic ring is how you start everything when you're making amigurumi. And it's really confusing. And you've got to use both your hands and fingers.

It feels like you're contorting your hands in a very weird way. So seeing this in a video was really helpful. And have several different people on YouTube showing me how to do it so that I could figure out the best way that fit my needs and how my hands work. That segment was produced by Christina Brown.

Coming up, YouTube has changed the nature of fame and what becomes popular. But is it homogenizing our tastes? Machine curation really only works by engagement. So things that are already popular become more popular. That's still to come on The Pulse.

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This is The Pulse. I'm Maiken Scott. We're talking about the rise of YouTube and how this platform has changed our lives. Mark Bergin was in college when he first took notice of YouTube. He was huddled around a computer with a bunch of his friends watching a video. I don't recall the creator's name. I think the title was Shoes. Shoes.

And it was very much of that era. It was incredibly irreverent, sort of like a late night TV, but even stranger. It was sort of a musical parody number. I don't think it probably stands the test of time like a lot of YouTube and a lot of comedy. But it was new, it was weird, it was free, and you could watch it over and over again. Oh my God, cheers. Cheers.

Mark is now a tech journalist at Bloomberg, and he went on to write the book about YouTube. It's called Like, Comment, Subscribe, Inside YouTube's Chaotic Rise to World Domination. He says the way YouTube started is very different from how it's ended up today. From the very onset, kind of a culture of

It's almost kind of punk rock in some ways, right? It was like experimental, something that was very much not TV. It was a lot of the early YouTube were people that were sort of rebelling against mainstream media. In 2006, though, YouTube was bought by Google and things started to change. The audience grew and grew and YouTubers became celebrities in their own right.

It certainly changed Hollywood and it's changed the nature of fame. Who could and would become famous? People who seize this platform as an opportunity to talk to a growing audience of fans. There are some of the earliest YouTubers are still active today, which is

It's pretty mind-blowing. Sup, you beautiful bastards. You're watching the Philip DeFranco Show. I hope you've had a fantastic Wednesday. Philip DeFranco is one who is very early. There's always tomorrow, though that could also be just as bad, if not worse. There are a lot of these kind of aspiring filmmakers, web video comics, people that were just experimenting at this time. This was before there was any chance of making money or a guaranteed profession. Here we go now.

Andy Samberg, the SNL star before he was on Saturday Live, he and his comedy troupe kind of put their videos up on YouTube and had some pretty early viral hits there. And then there's, and one of the really interesting early ones was these webcomics that created Lonely Girl 15. I don't know if

Listeners will remember that. Hi, guys. So this is my first video blog. It looked like a teenage girl just chatting about her life, being homeschooled, feeling alone. But it later turned out this was written by a team of creators and performed by an actress. My name is Bree. I'm 16. But people kept watching, even though they knew it was not real.

YouTube gave rise to influencers and to problematic stars like Felix Schellberg, also known as PewDiePie. Because he sort of pushed the boundaries of what was acceptable on YouTube.

and push the boundaries of what was a joke versus what was not. And for many users, the platform created parasocial relationships with those stars. Where you might watch a YouTuber, you don't know them personally, but you think they kind of operate as if you do. We've all kind of experienced this online, where people develop relations with someone deeper than a fandom, right? The relationships that YouTubers have...

with their audience is something different than, say, someone like George Clooney has. And I think that's a really important fact about the platform. What do you think is the it factor there? What's so different about how people talk to their audience on YouTube that makes that possible? That's a really good question. I think there's, for one, there's a regularity, right? I mean, you'll have some YouTubers that will post several videos a week,

And I think there's just sort of being a reliable, steady presence in people's lives. I think there is an informality in this sort of YouTube aesthetic that is something very different than what we get in film and TV. A lot of it's just the...

That's sort of YouTube invented this now familiar style of looking at the camera, of addressing the audience directly, of having sort of a lot of YouTubers will have inside references, right? They'll have an audience that they've had carried over for years and sort of part of these communities. And I think there's something very beautiful about that.

One of the things that's always fascinating to me is like what people started to share and that people actually watch it. You know, like the stuff that's so popular now, like the get ready with me or here's me eating, here's me folding my laundry. Like it's all kinds of stuff where on some level you're like, why would anybody care? But then here I am too watching it. In some ways, you know, this history of the

platform is really people kind of experimenting and seeing what sticks. That's been what was really fascinating to me is that even on the creator side, let's say you mentioned like the videos of people sort of eating food, right? This was not something that anyone working for the company ever imagined being a popular format. It's nothing that we really saw on TV before.

And yet that kind of takes off. And the thing about YouTube is that once one format becomes popular, you'll see droves of people just trying to chase that virality. In part because, you know, unlike television, there are no producers. There's no sort of scripted sense about what people are telling you to do. And so they all sort of have to chase this mysterious algorithm that dictates what types of videos succeed.

do well. And so any trend that pops up tends to just get a swarm of YouTubers and creators that will follow it until it kind of dies down. You look back in the 20 years, they're just these different patterns and waves of different content types that have come and gone.

And some people have found things that have been very successful, but they don't always last. The platform also played a major role during global political movements like the Arab Spring. Where YouTube became a fairly serious place because what you saw was that mainstream media

Broadcast news was having a difficulty actually getting into these countries, but there was so much cell phone footage coming out. So YouTube became a place where people could find raw footage and updates on political situations all over the globe, but it's also become a place where conspiracy theories and misinformation flourish. Issues like 9-11 truth or conspiracy, which I think we're all kind of familiar with now, are

And people at the company, I think, you know, initially told me that they always assumed that those really outlandish conspiracy theories, you know, things about the earth being flat, for instance, is a clear example. They thought these were so sort of patently absurd that, you know, people would just not watch them. And I think they certainly underestimated the ability for these kind of videos to be really compelling to people.

And this was something that kind of grew and grew is a lot of political videos would quickly veer into things because, you know, YouTube had no system for verifying accuracy or truth. And how does the company handle this now in broad strokes? There were some mass shootings where it became like an immediate conspiracy theories came out of that. YouTube sort of began to change its policies around conspiracy.

things that they saw as misinformation. You know, one way that I think was really telling that one of their earliest attempts is to people may have seen these, right? And you kind of put like a Wikipedia box underneath the video. And so if you go to a video about

Say there's something addressed like the flat earth conspiracy. You might have seen at one point like a Wikipedia box that says, you know, here's the science behind why the earth is not flat, in fact. And this is, you know, it's a reminder here that Google, which owns YouTube, is a search company. And their approach to this has always been to try to like surface information and let people sort of decide for themselves. They've been very reluctant to want to be the arbiters of

of what's true and what's not. I think they got increasingly more pressure to do that on the regulatory side, certainly in Europe. And then the COVID-19 pandemic became this major turning point where the company became fully aware that the misinformation about health had incredibly huge stakes.

And so they took pretty dramatic change in direction there in how they handled videos about at first COVID-19 and then the vaccines and had a fairly strict compared to their prior policies about removing a lot of videos or certainly like suppressing them and search and recommendations.

Still, it's a very complicated system that, to be clear, YouTube has shared some about how they do it, but a lot of it's pretty opaque. For all of its potential faults, Mark says there are lots of positive aspects of YouTube. For example, one major benefit that's easy to forget about now, you don't have to miss any big moments.

I live in London now, so I didn't get to watch the Super Bowl halftime performance because I was asleep. But I can guarantee the next day that all the Kendrick Lamar videos I want will be on YouTube. And that is something that has changed our world fundamentally, that any archival footage that YouTube is probably one of the world's biggest library of content and cataloging history. Tell me what you're going to do to me.

Mark Bergen is a tech journalist for Bloomberg and the author of Like, Comment, Subscribe, Inside YouTube's Chaotic Rise to World Domination.

When I go on YouTube, everything I see at first is pink. It's all makeup, clothes, pretty bedrooms with fluffy pillows. That's because it's mostly my 14-year-old daughter who is using YouTube, and the homepage is customized based on what she watches. Algorithms decide what gets the prime real estate on YouTube. And on some level, that's a good thing. They filter the content to our liking and help us pick.

But of course, this becomes a game of sorts. Clicks beget more clicks, and creators try every which way to get the algorithm to favor their content.

In the early days of YouTube, there was a team of humans in charge of picking videos to feature on the homepage. And some people are pushing back against the idea that algorithms should decide what's popular. Alan Yu has more. In 2006, Mia Qualiarello's job at YouTube was to hire and lead a team of people called Cool Hunters.

Their job was to find interesting videos that were bubbling up in music, news, film, comedy, or beauty to feature on YouTube's homepage. Felt like I found a diamond in the rough. Like it was so exciting to find content that was like,

interesting and creative. These were videos that were not immediately popular, but the Cool Hunters thought they deserved a larger audience. There's like a music video, like a techno, fake techno music video called like My Hands Are Bananas. Geriatric 1927, Peter Oakley, a darling older man in England who was

doing these great vlogs. I was born in 1927 and of course my young life was spent when World War II was

happening. Mia stressed that she and the other cool hunters did not want to pick winners and losers. YouTube did not want people to be the kingmakers of the site. So they were also part of the communities they were in charge of watching. For instance, the person looking out for great new comedy videos was someone who made comedy videos himself and knew other comedians well.

Then Google bought YouTube in November of 2006. A while after that, things began to change. Executives wanted the site to suggest the kinds of videos that would keep people on the platform longer. Picking something that was cool, different or arty was no longer in demand. I always felt like a gazelle on the Serengeti being hunted by lions, you know?

who were like the suits, the engineers and algorithms who were like always salivating over like what little real estate we had on the homepage and really wanted to optimize the site. I felt like my team's expertise and purpose was not entirely appreciated once we got acquired by Google. I mean, it would be a matter of time before we would be deemed like obsolete.

Mia says she and her team were proud of building relationships in the communities they were part of, and featuring videos that might not have made it to the homepage based on clicks. However, she also says it was not easy to prove to Google that they were making money for YouTube. The company disbanded the Cool Hunters in 2010. Mia left the next year.

YouTube is, of course, not the only place where algorithms decide what users see. This happens across platforms like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Spotify, and Netflix. And while this means people can get a stream of content tailored to their likes and interests, it also means that something else gets lost, argues Miguel Gomez.

He had worked at a branch of TLA, a small video store chain, just outside Philadelphia since the late 1990s.

In 2012, the chain closed, so he bought the store and renamed it Viva Video. It was a decision that most saw as foolish. Miguel says he and his colleagues developed a customer base of people who wanted to talk to other film lovers and choose movies that could expand their horizons. Like there's a movie Ruben and Ed that I love a ton. That's this very strange comedy from the 90s with...

Crispin Glover, he's a guy, his cat has died. He wants to go bury it out in the desert. Kind of has to befriend this other fella for this weird road trip out into the desert to bury his cat. And I remember this is something like I recommended to this woman, Susan, who tended to be much more like art film directors.

directed. So it's not the sort of thing that's going to show up on your algorithm. Like if you like, I don't know, Godard, you're not going to get Ruben and Ed necessarily pushed to you. He says algorithms thus far have not been able to account for taste. As

Especially not the wild card of having a group of people with various different tastes who might recommend something you would never think to look for. There is a clerk there who's a friend of mine, Abe, who would recommend Koyaanisqatsi to everyone.

This is an experimental 1980s art movie with no plot, no dialogue, and no characters. It consists of slow motion and time-lapse videos like rocket launches, bats flying, clouds floating, people walking, set to music by famous American composer Philip Glass.

If you were coming in with your kid for a sleepover, he would tell you to take Koyaanisqatsi. To some degree, that's a little insane, but it's also awesome that, like, if Abe's around, everybody that might possibly have an interest in Koyaanisqatsi is going to hear about it and watch it. That movie is available on streaming platforms, though I'm not sure what combination of interest would be required for this movie to come up in someone's suggested queue.

Algorithms also cannot build relationships the same way a human can, says Brian Wei, who used to be a manager at the video store with Miguel. I had a mom come into the store who's trying to connect with her teenage son, and she said, "I would like to watch a comedy, but he wants to watch a spy movie. Like, what do you think he would recommend?" And I just said, like, "The Man from UNCLE" came out pretty recently. Have you guys seen that? And she said no, and then she watched it and came back the next day, and she said that was perfect. It was exactly what we both wanted.

And the thing that I love about that in particular is, like, it's one thing to just suggest a movie to a person. It's quite another to, like, get to know that person on a granular level and understand not only what makes them tick, but, like, what specifically they're looking for, what kind of experience they want. And the great part about that as a video store clerk is that there's accountability. That person takes that recommendation from you, and they're going to bring the movie back, and they're going to tell you what they thought of it.

Despite those relationships, the video store Viva Video, like many others, did not last. It lost money starting in around 2018. Miguel and another investor kept it going for a while. They had loyal customers until the end, but closed in 2021 when their landlord got a much better offer on the property.

The heyday of video stores may be long over, but people are now pushing back against algorithm-driven culture in different ways, says Kyle Chaker, a staff writer at The New Yorker. I think we've gone through this period in the 2010s of reaching peak algorithm, and we now kind of understand why algorithmic recommendations are sometimes bad.

or we shouldn't rely on them completely. Kyle says he sees this resistance to algorithms in the rise of fashion newsletters, where people can find clothing recommendations from a specific person they pay to support. He sees this in DJs who have enough people who like their taste in music that they make money from followers.

Kyle wrote the recent book Filter World: How Algorithms Flattened Culture. He says, of course, what some people call taste, others would call bias. The gatekeepers of a record label or an art museum are definitely making choices based on their own experiences and perspectives.

But I think the machine curation also has this flaw, too, of machine curation really only works by engagement. So things that are already popular become more popular. But what I find really powerful about human curators is their ability to surface the weird culture, the obscure stuff.

really niche finds that they like and then pass it on to more people. And that's kind of how culture gets developed and innovates at all. Kyle says there are some platforms that have a good balance of humans and algorithms suggesting what to watch or listen to. You have...

platforms like NTS or Boiler Room, which highlight niche musical voices in a cool way, even as they broadcast online. And you have streaming services like Criterion or Adagio, which kind of curate and highlight specific bodies of culture. So Adagio streams only classical music,

And Criterion is an art film version of Netflix. Mia, who used to lead the Cool Hunters at YouTube, ultimately left to become head of creative community at Flipboard. It's an app and platform that curates online content like news stories, social media posts, and videos. Flipboard has more than 30,000 feeds that users can follow and customize.

Algorithms pick the posts in the feeds, but the most high-profile ones like CanUse, Politics, and Tech get human attention as well. We often talk about curation at Flipboard as a layer cake, and you don't always know what the ingredients of the cake are. So there's a lot of wizard-behind-the-curtain tweaking that goes on to make sure that what's being surfaced is

is high quality. Kyle says smaller, more niche platforms do not come anywhere near close to the size of platforms like Netflix, Spotify, or YouTube. But he sees that as a feature, not a bug. I think there is a limit to the scale of human creation, but I also think that

Through the social media era of the 2010s, we learned that infinite scale is bad. Like, infinite scale is not something that we should aspire to. I don't think there should be a platform like Facebook or TikTok that works for a billion people. It just seems to have too many negative consequences and too much of a homogenizing force for what gets broadcast across it.

That story was reported by Alan Yu. Coming up, is YouTube's popularity fueled by the fact that humans are hardwired for storytelling? We have amazing capacities that really are unique. And the number one of those is for me that we can share experiences. That's next on The Pulse. ♪

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And that's where Shortwave comes in. We're a joy-filled science podcast driven by wonder and curiosity that will get you out of your head and in touch with the world around you. Listen now to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR. This is The Pulse. I'm Maiken Scott. We're talking about the rise of YouTube and the profound impact it has on our lives and culture.

So how did YouTube become so powerful, so popular? One reason could be that it gives us a great platform to talk about our favorite subject, ourselves. Research has found that when people talk about themselves, it lights up the reward center of the brain. I actually love YouTube as this medium of democratization of storytelling that everyone gets to tell their story if they want to.

That's Fritz Breithaupt. He is a cognitive science researcher and the author of The Narrative Brain, The Stories Our Neurons Tell. Fritz says we are born to tell stories. I think as humans, we have amazing capacities that really are unique. And the number one of those is for me that we can share experiences.

We don't just share information about what happened, but through stories we can share emotions. Emotions that listeners or audiences feel as well. The sadness when something tragic happens, the frustration or anger over a mishap or injustice. That is also something we can do in the most wonderful cases. When something positive happens to one of us, we talk about it.

We tell a story and all of us have it in their head. We feel the joy and that's amazing. Fritz says the emotions we feel while hearing a story anchor the information. He's conducted studies where thousands of people tell and retell stories through a game of telephone to see what people remember and how accurately. And the one thing that always stayed is

was the degree of the emotion of the story. I mean, how embarrassing it is, how joyful it is, how surprising it is. So we concluded from this that what is so special about stories is the emotion.

The emotion draws us in. We hope for a happy end of a story. When our best friend tells us what she did at the date last night, we hope for, yes, yes, finally it worked out. We hope for that, even if it doesn't come, but we are hoping for that. That draws us in. And if it finally happens, it releases us too. And that's what we remember. We may not remember the details.

And all of these things. But we do remember the happy outcome. So it is the emotions that are so special for us in the stories. So do you think our ability to tell stories, to experience stories, is that sort of the it factor that has allowed us to progress to where we are compared to other species? Yes.

Absolutely, yes. For a long time, people thought our main advantage is kind of toolmaking. I mean, intelligence of something of that kind. And that's not completely wrong. Toolmaking is important. But how do we make tools? By passing on expertise, by mentoring, by teaching each other, by telling us how it works.

Then people thought, after they thought, okay, it's maybe not just pure intelligence, there's a social component to it. Social intelligence was the big buzzword in evolutionary sciences of the development of humans. But I think it's more specific.

It has to do with not just with any kind of social intelligence, but the intelligence that lets us transcend a single mind to the mind of many, to the true we feeling that we can get from a couple of things, but very high on the list is narrative thinking.

For thousands of years, stories have been a vehicle to transmit information and important lessons, to make them memorable and to help increase our chances of survival.

Now, with YouTube and other platforms, everybody can tell their stories to a larger audience. It is a game changer in the most positive way. While in the old days, like a century ago, most people were shut out from the large media. The large media at that point, what were they? They were books, I mean, printed books, but only a few people would get printed. It was an expensive kind of thing. People couldn't do it. YouTube.

and also similar forms, now have made this accessible to very many people. And the nice thing there is that people think about the story they want to tell. Even if they just take a single take, there's a little bit of editing and thinking about it, crystallizing the story. And I like that. I like that a lot. When people rethink their own story, when they tell the same story more than once, even in just an oral form, the story becomes more real

clear. We've noticed, for example, that the positive emotions at the end of the story tend to go up. People make it more into these emotions episodes that are rewarding. They bring it to a happy end. People who do that, who edit their story, who are thinking about their story, whether that's a YouTube story or whether that's an oral story that they tell again,

They do really good community work, self-therapy and self-expression.

Talk a bit about story length, because stories can be really long, you know, whatever, like Odyssey long. Or nowadays, they are super short, right? And we're watching something called shorts all day long. So does the length matter in terms of our buy-in into a story? Are we losing the capacity to hold on to longer plot lines?

I believe that our mind is most optimally tuned into shorter episodes. Even in the long stories, the Odyssey, the Bible, and all of these big sagas that we have.

There are a lot of short episodes. They have a beginning and an ending. So in a certain sense, that capacity for us to break down the huge story into the small segments was already always there. It is true now that, of course, our stories tend to have become very short, shorter and shorter.

Most likely our life has accelerated. We don't have the patience any longer to read 50 pages to learn the name of the protagonist of the novel. We want to know something a bit faster. Everyone who makes a TV show nowadays kind of knows that basically you have the first episode, you have to basically the first 30 seconds of the episode to make your case. People have more choices nowadays.

So I think a lot of our impatience with long stories has to do with the fact that we get impatient and then say, let's not watch this. Let's watch a different thing or tell me, yes, not that one. Swipe the other one. That is definitely true. So is that all bad? Well, I mean, we want to learn patience. We want to cultivate these things. But it also is there's a positive side to that, which is that we are critical, right?

We're not taking any story in any longer. And we say, well, if the story is not appealing to us and we can smell that very quickly, then say, well, then I want to hear a different story. Fritz Breithaupt is a cognitive science researcher and the author of The Narrative Brain, The Stories Our Neurons Tell.

That's our show for this week. The Pulse is a production of WHYY in Philadelphia, made possible with support from our founding sponsor, the Sutherland family, and the Commonwealth Fund. You can follow us wherever you get your podcasts.

Our health and science reporters are Alan Yu and Liz Tong. Our intern is Christina Brown. Charlie Kyer is our engineer, and this week we had additional engineering from Adam Staniszewski. Our producers are Nicole Curry and Lindsay Lazarski. I'm Maiken Scott. Thank you for listening.

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