The History of Ukraine, TikTok as a Search Engine, and the Repatriation of Stolen African Art - Dinner Table Digest № 24
The Dinner Table Digest is an intermittent collection of interesting material from around the internet, curated by Peter Thurley at Dinner Table Don'ts. Subscribe today!
This time I have two fairly lengthy excerpts to share with you, so I have kept the Digest links to one YouTube lecture by Timothy Snyder, a New York Times article on TikTok as a search engine, and David Frum’s cover essay in The Atlantic.
For Gen Z, TikTok Is the New Search Engine - Kelly Huang - New York Times
This fall I am sitting in on an applied philosophy of language class at the University of Waterloo, taught by my friend Jenny Saul. We’re looking specifically at how online based speech differs from non-online based speech, and this past week we have been looking at the problem of Fake News. We read a paper that argues that social media companies (and more broadly speaking, non-governmental internet institutions) might have some kind of obligation to assess and communicate the reputation, reliability and truthfulness of information being transmitted over their networks. I found myself especially interested in generational differences in how reliable information is assessed. This was prompted by the New York Times article below, which makes the claim that Generation Z, and in particular those between the ages of 18 and 24, are turning to TikTok as a search engine, eschewing Google’s results as ‘biased:’
More and more young people are using TikTok’s powerful algorithm — which personalizes the videos shown to them based on their interactions with content — to find information uncannily catered to their tastes. That tailoring is coupled with a sense that real people on the app are synthesizing and delivering information, rather than faceless websites.
On TikTok, “you see how the person actually felt about where they ate,” said Nailah Roberts, 25, who uses the app to look for restaurants in Los Angeles, where she lives. A long-winded written review of a restaurant can’t capture its ambience, food and drinks like a bite-size clip can, she said.
TikTok’s rise as a discovery tool is part of a broader transformation in digital search. While Google remains the world’s dominant search engine, people are turning to Amazon to search for products, Instagram to stay updated on trends and Snapchat’s Snap Maps to find local businesses. As the digital world continues growing, the universe of ways to find information in it is expanding. …
“In our studies, something like almost 40 percent of young people, when they’re looking for a place for lunch, they don’t go to Google Maps or Search. They go to TikTok or Instagram,” Prabhakar Raghavan, a Google senior vice president, said at a technology conference in July. …
Doing a search on TikTok is often more interactive than typing in a query on Google. Instead of just slogging through walls of text, Gen Z-ers crowdsource recommendations from TikTok videos to pinpoint what they are looking for, watching video after video to cull the content. Then they verify the veracity of a suggestion based on comments posted in response to the videos.
This mode of searching is rooted in how young people are using TikTok not only to look for products and businesses, but also to ask questions about how to do things and find explanations for what things mean. With videos often less than 60 seconds long, TikTok returns what feels like more relevant answers, many said. …
TikTok’s results “don’t seem as biased” as Google’s, [Alexandria Kinsey, 24, a communications and social media coordinator in Arlington, Va.] said, adding that she often wants “a different opinion” from what ads and websites optimized for Google say.
Ms. Kinsey said she also loved how quickly TikTok videos presented information. Although she sometimes fact-checks what she finds on TikTok by using Google, she said, “I rarely see something that requires that much thought.”
Timothy Snyder, an expert in both Ukraine’s conflicts with both the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union is teaching a course at Yale University on the history of Ukraine in relationship with the current Russian invasion. There are few professors better positioned to teach about the nuances of the current conflict than Professor Snyder.
Who Benefits When Western Museums Return Looted Art? - David Frum - The Atlantic
There are certain conservative authors that I trust more than others, and David Frum is one of them. Long before Trumpism, Frum, a Canadian by birth, had been reflecting on the consequences of his partisan affiliations, in particular his speechwriting contributions to the George W. Bush Presidency. This doesn’t mean that I agree with him - I rarely do - but I almost always find his arguments to be both thoughtful and sound. That’s part of what makes this piece so interesting to me - Frum is raising really important questions about how the Western world should go about repatriating stolen and looted art pieces from Africa and other places. Frum agrees pretty broadly with the thesis that these art pieces should be returned to their rightful owners, but he is not entirely sure who ‘the rightful owners’ are, and, moreover, should they be returned to a governmental agency, there are good reasons to believe that the repatriated works of art will not be properly cared for, let alone displayed in any kind of meaningful way. On the other hand, as you’ll read, the objects are stolen and do not properly belong to their current possessors - what right do the thieves have to dictate how repatriated objects should be treated?
Whoever ends up as the decision maker over repatriated Benin artworks and the accompanying grants from Western governments and foundations will control hundreds of jobs and tens of millions of dollars in building and operating contracts. The ability to award jobs and dispense contracts translates into enormous political power—and oftentimes into personal wealth for the hirer and contract-dispenser. Edo State’s budget was only about $500 million this year. An entity or person spending tens of millions of dollars to construct a museum—and many millions to operate it—would instantly become an overwhelmingly important player within the former kingdom of Benin. That’s a prize worth fighting for. However, as the governor and the oba circle each other, another contender lurks, the most powerful of them all: the Nigerian national government.
The Obaseki-Ihenacho concept of an independent, private museum was not devised to spite the oba. It was developed, fairly obviously, to protect returned Benin art from a national government that has miserably—and often maliciously—failed to protect Nigeria’s cultural heritage. The dismal record is well described by Oluseun Onigbinde, the head of a fiscal-transparency group called BudgIT. Onigbinde is the author of a 2021 book, The Existential Questions, an unblinking analysis of contemporary Nigeria’s most urgent problems. He, too, hopes to see the Benin pieces returned someday, he told me recently. Here and now, however, “the management is very, very poor at our museums. A lot of times, people find themselves in those places not because they are qualified, but by chance. You have a lot of people working in those places who do not understand the mission, especially at the leadership level. There are no strong rules around the management of museums: who gets access to the art, who is accountable for it. I went to the museum in Kano. It was really poor, how pieces were kept. Someone could break in and walk away with anything.” ….
During my first visit [to the National Museum], I was being led by a curator toward the Benin section when all the lights cut out. The day’s diesel-fuel allocation had been exhausted. I viewed a few Benin pieces by the light of my cellphone. I would have to return, I was told, to see the most iconic of the items acquired by Murray and the Fagg brothers. ….
When I raised the Nigerian government’s past record with Lai Mohammed, the culture minister, he retorted, “You can’t steal my property and then when I ask you to return it, you answer that you don’t have confidence how I’m going to keep it.”
This line of reasoning resonates powerfully in the West, supported by the work of radical critics of Western museums such as Dan Hicks. Hicks is a curator at the Pitt Rivers Museum, at the University of Oxford, and a fierce advocate for the return of Benin works. In 2020 he set forth his views in a passionate polemic, The Brutish Museums: The Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence and Cultural Restitution:
The arrival of loot into the hands of western curators, its continued display in our museums and its hiding-away in private collections, is … an enduring brutality that is refreshed every day that an anthropology museum like the Pitt Rivers opens its doors.
Hicks urges the immediate return of artworks taken by European colonial powers to their places of origin. Western people, he believes, have no business worrying about what happens to the art after that. Instead, their focus should be inward, upon themselves and the iniquities of their own culture. “It’s time to start to bring this episode to a conclusion, by understanding, rejecting and dismantling this white infrastructure,” he wrote.
Yet the consequences of viewing restitution as a ritual of guilt and atonement, of self-purification through self-purgation, cannot be waved away. Western museums are extremely reluctant to express their doubts about the uncertain fate of pieces returned to Nigeria. The curators I interviewed all spoke only on deep background. At one major Western museum, the curator I interviewed was accompanied by a professional minder who recorded every cautious word uttered.
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