This is almost entirely what I too hold as the best intersection of facts which explain the current scenario.
I'm spending a lot more of my time looking at community behaviors online, moderation and moderation evolution, and any papers which cover this area.
This stuff is virulent.
I think we might be headed into a dead cat bounce period in the near future - a lot of people have become aware of this now, and the idea is obviously disseminating a lot more.
(3-4 years ago, I never saw this idea summarized and shared in a single piece, vs multiple times in the last 3 months.)
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The fundamental motor, the gameplay loop which drives this is the degradation and competition in the media sector.
Competition for ads, consolidation, along with management targets would force magazines/papers to move towards language which would grab a larger audience and more attention.
And then you have the partisan right wing groups, created because they kept saying that the entire media is a liberal conspiracy.
Another possible illustration of this correlation is the overwhelming displacement of nuance in public discourse over the last decade (eg: absolutist clickbait headlines targeting niche internet audiences), and the growing atmosphere of desperation. It's difficult to pick a definite causal direction, as it seems that each one amplifies the other in turn--a vicious cycle.
I'd also argue that what's left of the corporate media is rapidly losing credibility, highly partisan and rarely objective. this feeds social network frenzy, a lot of which is people parroting and attempting to amplify ideas from their preferred channels. There's always been a huge corporate yellow journalism problem, now it is possible to instantly orchestrate rage and frenzy repeated across countless personal accounts. Fear and hatred is highly corrosive....
Ugh. I'm very anti-censorship and I'm right there with you. It's hard to not acknowledge that we have a serious problem - half of the political establishment is hallucinating a different reality, far beyond the normal out of touch hubris pushed by both teams. I believe the raw energy is coming from being fed up with the looting and control by the plutocrats (like everyone), but they're being goaded in a completely nonsensical and destructive direction.
Every semi reputable editor (even Fox!) has put the brakes on this disinformation campaign, but it seems that doing so just makes the people believing it move on to even less credible feeds. Ultimately I think the hallucination can only die down on its own, but on the timescale of several years. Meanwhile the damage is being done right now. I just hope it's all just so Trump can continue grifting and developing political capital to try avoiding jail, rather than some larger plan like deliberately inciting a civil war.
Previously if one ventured into Internet conspiracy theory land, their new belief would be tempered by their social circle. Now whatever wild thing manages to get enough attention also creates its own social proof. We're essentially dealing with a violent mixture of the old and the new where digital non-natives are tuning into raw memetic noise while giving it the trust of the 1990's evening news.
I would be curious to see how this played out in a parallel universe where section 230 had never existed, the MITM business never gained popularity, new media ("tech") companies had to editorialize more like old media, and the anti-establishment action stayed on p2p nets with a higher barrier to entry.
It certainly could be that they’re intentionally making the news an indecipherable morass. But continuing to participate in it wouldn’t prevent the catastrophe you predict. If anything, abandoning the chaotic media and helping to collapse their ad revenue might be more effective.
Yes, several. They all seem plausible as well, which doesn't tell me anything about any of them being true or not.
1. The US mass media's race to the bottom as previous/traditional revenue models and funding mechanisms fall away
2. Rising economic hardship and income inequality causing greater widespread dissatisfaction with the status quo
3. App-based "free" social media in general where engagement time is prioritized above all else (Facebook didn't invent this)
4. The growing influence of big tech and financialization (SV and Wall Street) and the waning influence of the american worker
5. Demagogues
6. The death throes of the US political parties as they thrash about in a desperate push to try to stay relevant, resorting to simple and effective scapegoating and tribalism
I'm sure you can probably toss out a few more plausible ones, too.
I feel like the media's race to the bottom has accelerated dramatically in the last decade, even while its importance as an anchor of truth amid conspiracy-theory-filled social networks has only grown. It's concerning.
And worth noting that major news orgs caught onto this in the 90s. News these days is essentially entertainment. I think as people we are responsible for this, we ask for this stuff and approve of by consuming it. We are most certainly authors of our own demise but for some reason we think this is 'happening' to us.
>groups of like-minded citizens can resurrect real local newspapers
Social media is the killer, because in a perfect world it would serve precisely this purpose. But instead of replicating the means of production for each locality, you share one globally - which also helps concerned readers from different geographies pool their resources. A fine vision, and its true, but we see now how severe the downside is: the dissociation of reader from event is the wiggle room in which professional rhetoricians can form new and exciting memetic viruses. And virtually no-one has the psychic immune system to wade through it on a daily basis and not get infected with something. These viruses are designed to serve a narrow aim, and the side-effects are ignored, and this is what leads to the meltdown we have now.
Of course, a simple behavior change can help: pay attention to news in proportion to its physical proximity to you! The knee-jerk reaction to see a national or global trend when anything bad happens is bad for the soul. We should be open to seeing trends, of course, but only slightly. At least a little bit of stubborn resistance to inferring a trend from two anecdotes is good for the soul, I think.
Agreed completely. Crazy to see this endless iteration on ad optimization and maximizing screen time has made disinformation, polarization, and conspiracy so common. Really destroying society from the bottom up IMO
The internet is destroying existing power structures, and giving control to alternative media sources/platforms/whatever that people are starting to trust more than the 'mainstream' ones.
So all the hand wringing and fake news paranoia and what not feels like a desparate, last ditch attempt by those who did well before to try and cram the internet/social media genie back into the bottle before they're made irrelevant.
Does this potentially lead to authoritarianism and what not? Possibly, but the answer isn't to try and shut down freedom of speeech/independent media/any thought outside of an ever narrowing acceptable boundary, but to ask why these views are on the rise and deal with the real causes.
This is also my best case scenario, and I do think it's going to play out, but in a different way. Instead of relying on better signals, people are going to just generally disregard all signals. You can already see foreshadowing of what will happen in today's world. As the media has begun playing increasingly fast and loose with the truth, it's not like people just started trusting certain entities more - but rather trust in the entire media system collapsed.
As per a recent article [1], only 25% of Americas do not think the media is deliberately misleading them (50% do, 25% unsure). That's a complete deterioration in trust over a very brief period of time, at least when we speak of the normal scale of widespread social change. And, IMO, this will be a major step forward. Trust is too easily weaponized in a time where there's seemingly been a catastrophic collapse of ethics and morals among both political and business leaders. It's like The Prince is now everybody's bedside book.
This is true. However, online media is becoming more and more concentrated(and manipulated) as well. Facebook, Reddit, Tumblr, Google, and 4chan all make up a large chunk of our online media, and it should be apparent to most people at this point that each of those sites are either controlled by a company, country, or PR team. It wouldn't surprise me if we start seeing a decline in trust of online media in the future, too.
Maybe the focus on fake news about politics in the popular press will get people to wake up and realize that the problem has been worse, for longer, in the tech press?
I have been worried about how the press is generating fake news or at the very least using the main stream news to trigger people into becoming angry so they buy news papers/click on their articles for a while. The Mercer article was interesting for explaining the who of it but I knew it must be happening before and the mechanism is clearly based on wide data more than likely from facebook.
Its been a common trend of the past few years, the impact of media is vast and its widely subverting democracy right now and I am convinced its a grave threat to our societies but not sure how to stop it without doing equally bad things.
I'm spending a lot more of my time looking at community behaviors online, moderation and moderation evolution, and any papers which cover this area.
This stuff is virulent.
I think we might be headed into a dead cat bounce period in the near future - a lot of people have become aware of this now, and the idea is obviously disseminating a lot more.
(3-4 years ago, I never saw this idea summarized and shared in a single piece, vs multiple times in the last 3 months.)
----
The fundamental motor, the gameplay loop which drives this is the degradation and competition in the media sector.
Competition for ads, consolidation, along with management targets would force magazines/papers to move towards language which would grab a larger audience and more attention.
And then you have the partisan right wing groups, created because they kept saying that the entire media is a liberal conspiracy.
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