(no subject)

[shadowkat]

Not sure about the accuracy in places, and I think it oversimplified a few things here and there...but otherwise fun and informative. (Which to be honest is how I feel about 90% of the things I see on the internet. I take all of it with a hefty grain of salt and you, dear readers, should too.) I snagged it from elsie who snagged it from Tumblr, who snagged it from Youtube. Gotta love the internet...information, valid or not, is just a click away.

Watch on YouTube

Comments

[cactuswatcher.livejournal.com]

My only gripe with this kind of thing is that being very casual in style, it even more encourages in-one-ear-and-out-the-other than the average American high school class. It's clearly too much info to remember for one sitting. Maybe it might give somebody (adult or kid) just enough curiosity to look more deeply into something they saw. But it's flippant enough to discourage the same person if the next thing they look into is more serious.

Watch it this morning, wake up tomorrow, and will you remember anymore Japanese history than before? Personally I'm doubtful.

Instead I recommend slightly more serious videos that are available on everything including Japanese history. Try this video on World War One communications. Too much information again, but at least concentrated on a manageable topic. Full of information you probably don't care about and will never remember, but maybe you get the gist. Maybe the topic of the whole war gets a little less mysterious even as it gets more complex. And if I ask you now what Adolf Hitler did in the first World War and then you watch this, you probably will remember tomorrow and the next day, if not necessarily forever.

[shadowkat67.livejournal.com]

I agree. And .. Adolf Hitler was a regimental runner - sort like a messenger in the German Army, running communications back and forth. (I just watched the video.)

I was discussing this with a friend recently, how many of my co-workers, who are 10-15 years younger than me -- don't know who the Presidents of the US were. Or their history. Some do, a lot don't. They didn't take History or Humanities in school, they focused on important stuff like finance, business, and science. As a result, they are insanely dumb about certain things. And think Fox News, Newsday, and the newspapers are telling the truth. (Sigh).

I see it on lj and social media as well --- a tendency to like the sound-bites. A lack of patience for in-depth information.
And a heavy reliance on fictional re-enactments or retellings.

There's a great article in the New Yorker about Google and the death of factual information:

Entitled the End of Facts (http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/03/21/the-internet-of-us-and-the-end-of-facts?mbid=social_facebook) -- which gets across how information becomes warped via social media and through the internet.

It's hard to be clear on what is true. I mean the video on Japan is most likely accurate, but it has taken some incredibly complicated information from another culture, and reduced it to fun sound-bites palpable to a Western audience.
Not that there is anything wrong with that per se, but like you said -- the danger is the viewer won't dig deeper. Most won't, unless their interest is sparked.