Embedded Files
( - previous issue - / - next issue - )
AR 22:12 - Media business model "manufactures dissent"
In this issue:
COGNITION - have we moved from "a business model that manufactures consent to one that manufactures dissent"?
CONTROL - do online behemoths promote inequality and control consumer choice while shifting revenues from individual creators to giant platforms?
CULTURE - do most of our media sources emphasize sensational nonsense just to attract eyeballs for advertisers?
WISDOM - when advocating intellectual humility and recognizing the limits of our understanding are both revolutionary and necessary
Apologia Report 22:12 (1,332)
March 22, 2017
COGNITION
"Fact: The News Media Is in Trouble" by Jason Tanz -- "The advertising-driven business model is on the brink of collapse. Trust in the press is at an all-time low. And now those two long-brewing concerns have been joined by an even larger existential crisis. In a post-fact era of fake news and filter bubbles, in which audiences cherry-pick the information and sources that match their own biases and dismiss the rest, the news media seems to have lost its power to shape public opinion. ...
"[T]he ability to reach a national audience now belongs to everyone. There is noting to prevent fringe ideas and arguments from entering the informational bloodstream - and nothing to stop them from spreading.
"These developments have upended the business logic that once pushed journalists toward middle-of-the-road consensus. ...
"[W]ith infinite news sources, audiences follow the outlets that speak most uniquely to their interests, beliefs, and emotions. Instead of appealing to the broad center of American political opinion, more news outlets are chasing passionate niches. ...
"Before social media, a newspaper editor had the final say as to which stories were published and where they appeared. Today, readers have usurped that role. ...
"If readers are the new publishers, the best way to get them to share a story is by appealing to their feelings - usually not the good ones. A recent paper in Human Communication Research <www.goo.gl/YDlsT2> found that anger was the 'key mediating mechanism' determining whether someone shared information....
"In other words, we have gone from a business model that manufactures consent to one that manufactures dissent - a system that pumps up conflict and outrage rather than watering it down."
A sidebar on page 49, "The Generation Gap," notes that "The younger the consumer, the more dramatic the shift away from traditional news outlets" and includes a graph that shows (among other things) that while 85% of the 65-and-over crowd prefer cable, local, and network TV, 50% of 18-29-year-olds get their news online (49% of those 30-49 do also). WIRED, Mar '17, pp48-9.
---
CONTROL
Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy, by Jonathan Taplin [1] -- "In this insightful analysis of the intersection of technology and culture, Taplin, director emeritus of the University of Southern California's Annenberg Innovation Lab <annenberglab.com> ... explains how the rise of modern Internet monopolies has changed the face of information and entertainment. 'The rise of the digital giants is directly connected to the fall of the creative industries in our country,' he argues as he ... provides a keen, thorough look at the present and future of Americans' lives as influenced and manipulated by the technological behemoths on which they've come to depend." Publishers Weekly, Feb 27 '17.
The publisher's promo explains: "Since 2001, newspaper and music revenues have fallen by 70%; book publishing, film and television profits have also fallen dramatically. Revenues at Google in this same period grew from $400 million to $74.5 billion. Google's YouTube today controls 60% of the streaming audio business and pays only 11% of the streaming audio revenues. More creative content is being consumed than ever before, but less revenue is flowing to creators and owners of the content. With the reallocation of money to monopoly platforms comes a shift in power. Google, Facebook and Amazon now enjoy political power on par with Big Oil and Big Pharma, which in part explains how such a tremendous shift in revenues from artists to platforms could have been achieved and why it has gone unchallenged for so long. ... As Taplin observes, the fact that more and more Americans receive their news, music and other forms of entertainment from a small group of companies poses a real threat to democracy."
Last, Kirkus (Mar 1 '17) adds "... if [the Internet] is largely amoral, that, by Taplin's account, owes little to those who are making fortunes on the Web by controlling and selling information and ransoming eyeballs. ... What does all this have to do with democracy? For one thing, it promotes inequality.... For another, it narrows choice despite ... seemingly endless offerings.... A powerful argument for reducing inequality and revolutionizing how we use the Web for the benefit of the many rather than the few."
---
CULTURE
"The *Social* Medium Is the Message: Facebook and Twitter wield huge influence over how people understand the world around them" by Clive Thompson -- begins: "Social networks have been exposed. No one can pretend that they are simply neutral platforms.... That fiction was laid bare on November 8." The thinking of Marshall McLuhan - "the Patron Saint of WIRED" - "could vibrate with anxiety at the coming impact of electronic media. He suspected we could have too much contact with each other - that we'd become fearful and angry by incessant exposure to the world at large." (Even Steve Jobs insisted that his kids stay offline and did not allow them to use an iPad. <www.goo.gl/92E7ky> - RP)
"Zeynep Tufekci, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina ... tells me, 'I'm Facebook friends with some people who support Trump, but I don't recall seeing their Facebook updates - it appears the algorithms assumed I wouldn't be interested.' ...
"[S]ocial networks increasingly influence how people learn about the world. According to the Pew Research Center, about 44 percent of Americans cite Facebook as a source of news." <www.goo.gl/b6TkOY> Thompson then asks: "How should social networks grapple with their civic impact? ...
"In December [Facebook] unveiled a system that makes it easier for anyone to flag a post if it seems like deliberate misinformation." This piece concludes with the words: "The most effective disinformation hides amid actual facts."
"Imagine if you got rid of all the makers of virality: no counts of likes on Facebook, retweets on Twitter, or upvotes on Reddit. Artist Ben Grosser created a playful browser plug-in called the Facebook Demetricator <www.goo.gl/cFfo3g> that does precisely this. It's fascinating to try: Suddenly social media stops being a popularity contest. ...
"The biggest impediment to all this change, though, is economic. Traditional media organizations publish and broadcast nonsense because it attracts eyeballs for ads. New media have inherited this problem in spades: Facebook and Twitter and YouTube know - in vivid, quantitative detail - just how much their users prefer to see posts they agree with ideologically, seductive falsehoods included." WIRED, Mar '17, pp56-59.
Ever wonder how big the leading newspaper, broadcast and online media companies are and how they compare? The page 60-61 spread in the above issue of WIRED magazine presents "Attention Is Our Business," a fascinating though complex three-part graph of the current print, television and web "battle to grab eyeballs" for media, market share and influence in the USA and beyond. Visit the following link to view the numbers behind the leading content generators from that feature (which we've merged with some additional detail and random historical context). <www.goo.gl/xzD998>
---
WISDOM
As a counterpoint to the foregoing, consider The Knowledge Illusion, by Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach [2] -- "A tour of the many honeycombs of the hive mind, courtesy of cognitive scientists Sloman (Brown Univ.) and Fernbach (Univ. of Colorado). You know more than I do, and you know next to nothing yourself. That's not just a Socratic proposition, but also a finding of recent generations of neuroscientific researchers [regarding] the superficiality of much of what we carry inside our heads. We think we know, and then we don't. Therein lies a small key to wisdom, and this leads to a larger purpose, which is that traditional assessments of intelligence and performance are off-point: what matters is what the individual mind contributes to the collectivity. If that sounds vaguely collectivist, so be it. All the same, the authors maintain, 'intelligence is no longer a person's ability to reason and solve problems; it's how much the person contributes to a group's reasoning and problem-solving process.' This contribution, they add, may not just lie in creativity, but also in doing the grunt work necessary to move a project along. After all, even with better, more effectively distributed thinking, 'ignorance is inevitable.' Some of the book seems self-evident, some seems to be mere padding, and little of it moves with the sparkling aha intelligence of Daniel Dennett. Still, it's sturdy enough, with interesting insights, especially for team building." Kirkus, Jan '17 #2
Publishers Weekly (Nov '16 #2) finds the authors "attempt nothing less than a takedown of widely held beliefs about intelligence and knowledge, namely the role of an individual's brain as the main center for knowledge. ... The book starts with revelatory scholarly insights into the relationship between knowledge and the brain, finding that humans 'are largely unaware of how little we understand.' ... In an increasingly polarized culture where certainty reigns supreme, a book advocating intellectual humility and recognition of the limits of understanding feels both revolutionary and necessary. The fact that it's a fun and engaging page-turner is a bonus benefit for the reader.'"
-------
SOURCES: Monographs
1 - Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy, by Jonathan Taplin (Little, Brown & Co, 2017, hardcover, 320 pages) <www.goo.gl/VcChdu>
2 - The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone, by Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach (Riverhead, 2017, hardcover, 304 pages) <www.goo.gl/gLdETP>
------
( - previous issue - / - next issue - )
Page updated
Google Sites
Report abuse