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his is instead a sober evaluation of how the strategies of digitally capturing our attention have altered us — our lives, our media, and our worldview. These incremental shifts have added up to enormous changes in our politics, our global outlook, and our ability to see each other as fellow humans.
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Today the news needs to compete with everything else in our digital life — thousands of apps and millions of websites. More than anything, it now competes with Social Media — one of the most successful attention-capturing machines ever created.
Social Media is one of the primary reasons there has been a double-digit drop in newspaper revenues, and why journalism as an industry is in steep decline. It is now how a majority of Americans get news.
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It shows you stories, tracks your responses, and filters out the ones that you are least likely to respond to. It follows the videos you watch, the photos you hover over, and every link you click on. It is mapping your brain, seeking patterns of engagement.
It uses this map to create a private personal pipeline of media just for you. In doing this it has essentially become the editor-in-chief of a personalized newspaper that 2 billion people read every month.
By traditional journalistic standards, however, the News Feed Editor is a very, very bad editor. It doesn’t differentiate between factual information and things that merely look like facts (as we saw with the massive explosion of viral hoaxes during the 2016 election). It doesn’t identify content that is profoundly biased, or stories that are designed to propagate fear, mistrust, or outrage.
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Emotional responses are one of the most prominent ways to gauge the value of a post, and the easiest things for the News Feed Editor to map, measure, and provide more of. These are emotional hijacks — based on affective engagement.
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A sample of top performing word series from a recent study of 100 million headlines includes:
Tears of joy
Make you cry
Give you goosebumps
Is too cute
Shocked to see -
For many users, the headline itself becomes the story, even if it doesn’t resemble the original factual event.
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Regardless of the dramatic drop in crime over the last 30 years, more than half the population believes crime is worse than it was in years past.
Media (and now Social Media) is a major component in the assumptions that inform our perspective. A focus on crime in news reporting doesn’t just change our opinions on crime in general — it makes us feel far more threatened than we should be. For most of us, perceptions are reality. When we see the world as a dangerous place, it changes our behaviors and our attitudes, regardless of the actual threat.
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The same dynamic plays out in the political arena. During the 2016 election cycle, CNN made over a billion dollars in gross profit above the previous year driven primarily by advertising attached to news about the most outrageous candidate: Donald Trump.
This was far from the first time he explored running for president. In 1987, 2000, 2004, and 2011, Trump publicly considered a bid for the nation’s highest office. In 1999 he officially entered the race as a Reform Party candidate, testing his platform and evaluating the response, ultimately deciding he couldn’t get the traction necessary to win. After his unsuccessful run in 1999 Newsweek noted there simply wasn’t enough anger in the country to propel an independent candidate to victory.
His tone has not changed much in the last three decades. What was different about those previous years? One key distinction was this: The media wasn’t optimized for the kind of outrage necessary to provide coverage for a candidate like Trump.
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Throughout the 20th century, politicians, moguls, and academics knew the value of this influence. It had a name: propaganda.
Propaganda required money, talent, and infrastructure to create and distribute. It was an expensive and blunt instrument for top-down control.
Today we have democratized propaganda — anyone can use these strategies to hijack attention and promote a misleading narrative, a hyperbolic story, or an outrageous ideology — as long as it captures attention and makes a profit for advertisers.
Journalism — the historical counter to propaganda — has become the biggest casualty in this algorithmic war for our attention. And without it, we are watching the dissolution of a measured common reality.
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05 Aug 17
michael chalkgreat article on the current state of social media vs traditional journalism
journalism social.media article the.mission medium.com profit algorithm Facebook
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04 Aug 17
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02 Aug 17
mathew lowryEvery time you open your phone or your computer, your brain is walking onto a battleground... Your captive attention is worth billions ... This has actually changed how you see the world... <br>
walls of code have turned you into a predictable asset — a user that can be mined for attention... by focusing on one over-simplified metric, one that supports advertising as its primary source of revenue. This metric is called engagement, and emphasizing it — above all else — has subtly and steadily changed the way we look at the news, our politics, and each other... This article is one of a series exploring how these strategies of capturing our attention are influencing our lives.like attentionweb perception psychology media social media metrics engagement design cbot
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François ParmentierA lire absolument ! @nitot vient de nous partager cet article sur les algorithmes de sélection de l'info : https://t.co/AZQq5k7yVQ
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01 Aug 17
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31 Jul 17
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28 Jul 17
richard sambrookThis is How Your Fear and Outrage Are Being Sold for Profit
https://t.co/UZBjEZSTNa -
Bo Roehttps://t.co/r6NOzshWCR
— incognito sum (@incognitosum) July 28, 2017
“This Is How Your Fear and Outrage Are Being Sold for Profit” by @TobiasRose ... a well composed perspective of the how profit is generated from irrationality. https://t.co/LW0bkVdjF4
— Bo Roe (@boroe) December 7, 2017 -
27 Jul 17
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Vincent MurphyExcellent article on the many ways in which news is bad for you: https://t.co/YFabTX25sH https://t.co/AjpqrXvF3A
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26 Jul 17
Steven DehandtschutterThis Is How Your Fear and Outrage Are Being Sold for Profit https://t.co/85PkFAx2GU
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Chris JoblingThis Is How Your Fear and Outrage Are Being Sold for Profit https://t.co/85PkFAx2GU
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sunil-joglekar"The knowledge of how to reliably hijack the human brain for attention is one of the most significant new trends of the 21st century. This discovery, like every large-scale invention in our history, has unexpected outcomes that are difficult to predict."
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25 Jul 17
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mfossatti"This Is How Your Fear and Outrage Are Being Sold for Profit" — @TobiasRose https://t.co/Kc95GI9QkM https://t.co/JzlQk3fg6e
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Dan ConnollyThis is How Your Fear and Outrage Are Being Sold for Profit
https://t.co/UZBjEZSTNa
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