The Media Not The Messenger
Reworking the approach to media focused entirely on a massive influx of streams, and not editorial curation, has, unsurprisingly, made a mess of public discourse. This isn't because people are inherently stupider than they were before Facebook, nor are they any less media literate. Not that people were ever particularly media literate. Cable News has spent a decade laundering opinion through the appearance of information by using the language of television news design. Consider how even sports news is now crowded with endless crawlers and alerts.
Of course, they learned that from Newspapers. Sensationalism and radical opinion cloaked in the reputation of the paper hosting it. Many of the people taking to Twitter dragging the Washington Post or NYT editorial pages, don't seem to get the controversy is the point. Tabloids used their position among normal publications to similar effect of Facebook misinformation.
In the same way that Facebook makes every bit of news equal regardless of source, the average person's musings about the smell of their own farts curing headaches looks exactly the same as a study about the effectiveness of various pain relievers. The shitty truth is that, like most actual news, the dumb MLM pitch from your erstwhile high school pal serves the same purpose as most traditional news. It only exists to place ads next to.
We seem to be undergoing some sort of impression that there was a media golden age that had well-informed people making decisions based on reason and logic. Setting aside that logically valid arguments are not necessarily TRUE arguments, that's for your 101 level philosophy teacher, the problem is that you can trace every moment of this nation's history and find people acting on emotional rhetoric, identity, and everything else we seem to want to drop at the feet of our phone's apps.
There's a lot to cede here about the nature of algorithms driving people into angrier and more outrageous content in a steady stream until all their cat pictures and family updates are replaced with endless reporting about every apocalypse and ensuring content focuses on USes and Thems, political media gaining the same flavor for data driving microtargets that traditional media and marketing got into over a decade ago.
Understanding that this is about automated information exploring existing business practices and amplifying the effects is key to getting what's going on. Certainly, we're surfacing genuine assholes in the culture, but they aren't being created in the crucible of Facebook comment sections. Anyone local news consumer in the Midwest can tell you the virulent crypto racists looking for a red hat to rally around were there lurking beneath every crime story.
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