Ah! Sounds like a title written by an academic stiff! Too long for a TikTok.
If you are an expat in Romania, your “informed” relatives probably bring up certain personalities. We can’t list all of them in a Tweet, without it being called a rant. I’m not even sure they would all fit in a TikTok.
TikTok may be associated with Călin Georgescu. I went to TikTok, to try and watch some of his videos. They were, in a word, short.
I also went to Twitter, sorry, X, on occasion, but I haven’t seen the tweets from the most infamous expat, Andrew Tate. I used to think he ran the Tate Modern museum, that modern-art bad-taste home of elephant dung and labelled dead sharks. Not that dead sharks can’t be in a museum, but if you stuff a shark, it is more taxidermy than art.
I found out that he is involved in Mixed Martial Arts, said some controversial stuff, and has an accent a bit like, well, the founder of Hey Cluj. Despite the common accent, they have never met.
Tate was also featured under “the worst advice on the internet.” According to the screenshot, Tate said, “I don’t believe depression as a clinical disease is real.” In a YouTube video, the Daily Stoic shortened this to, “Clinical depression isn’t real.”
The video paraphrasing that then goes on for many words saying why he is wrong. Can’t he at least quote the guy correctly? Perhaps reading Twitter and watching Tiktok a lot makes us shorten and paraphrase.
Why should I care? Do I deliver Jerry’s Pizza? No, it is just about being factual. Saying “I don’t believe” is not “giving advice.” No doubt Tate gives advice you disagree with, and maybe it is very dangerous advice, but at least do a little research and find something that is written as advice. Otherwise, you are just “preaching to the choir” or “virtue signalling to the echo chamber.”
But some people have it worse. We take Owen Jones, in his video “Owen Jones tears apart hideous distortion of the truth.” Basically, on X, Jones has had his words taken out of context. When he is taken out of context, Jones appears to be saying something that he is not.
Now, I will not excuse those who take Jones out of context, nor the threats or other terrible ways they act. What Jones himself seems to point out is that X seems to be a breeding ground for this kind of talk.
Jones defends himself not in a TikTok or an X ‘tweet’, but through a thirteen minute YouTube video. It is much more difficult to argue against untruths on X or TikTok.
If we do get our news in soundbites, we might see things taken out of context. And when newspapers over-analyse a Twitter-X or TikTok soundbite, they do their viewers a disservice.
It makes sense to do more research, to find out things the reader might not know, outside the soundbite websites.
We could always share little Analects or Maxims, things like “early to be early to rise,” or “time is money.” But if we rely on soundbite social media as a news source, we are likely to be misinformed.
Quiz: Who do you know?
From political history, the superficially informed might know Vlad Dracula, Nicolae Ceausescu, and even Victor Ponta and Ion Antonescu. In Cluj, most of you have seen the statues of Avram Iancu, and Mihai Viteazul. (And perhaps you’ve seen Alexandru Cuza, Iuliu Maniu, and others.)
Theatre, there is Ionesco. Goga, Caragiale, Eminescu, have statues or streets named after them. Vasile Alexandru’s play featured in the square about a year ago, the actors were pretty good.
In Sports, there is Nadia Comăneci, Gheorghe Hagi, and a few who still compete.
Okay, what do all these people have in common? Well, a statue seems to have a certain message. If you are a writer, stand there, looking stoic. If you are a military hero from the olden days, you rode a horse. Kings tended to be military heroes. Iancu has the symbolic instruments.
If you explain these people through a TikTok or a Tweet, you can give a dictionary definition, maybe provide a photo. We can introduce them.