I love the term "Doom Bricks". I'm going to start calling my mom a "Doom Bricker" instead of a boomer. She runs a business on Facebook so it's all in jest, but I always warn her to keep some distance between her and those recommendation algorithms. Come up for air once in a while, I say!
>So news stories are now (and have been for some time) getting written based on what sells (which, no surprise, are strong emotions, usually negative ones) rather than what can be investigated and debated carefully over some amount of time.
there's another aspect of this. activating emotion with polarizing coverage is not only a strategy to boost short term engagement for ad dollars, but is also a political calculation for electorates. if stories motivated by activism mobilize targeted electorates moreso than their opposition through negative polarization, you can affect democratic outcomes in your favor
this is particularly relevant for an institution like the NYT and their new millennial cohort, who do not merely have pecuniary incentives but are seeking to be associated with and ultimately to conquest an elite cultural brand for their own purposes. because they pay less than say, a FAANG, the motivated people who stay there are quite happy to be compensated with social capital and the capability to swing elections and public opinion
It's an interesting idea but I'm not ready to speculate on this, and, it's not a problem with any one specific institution, it's when the internet works this way as a system. How can we , as individual actors and people who may work in this system, navigate it and moderate it? I should have left that as an exercise for the reader in the post because I don't have any answers yet :)
I love the term "Doom Bricks". I'm going to start calling my mom a "Doom Bricker" instead of a boomer. She runs a business on Facebook so it's all in jest, but I always warn her to keep some distance between her and those recommendation algorithms. Come up for air once in a while, I say!
>So news stories are now (and have been for some time) getting written based on what sells (which, no surprise, are strong emotions, usually negative ones) rather than what can be investigated and debated carefully over some amount of time.
there's another aspect of this. activating emotion with polarizing coverage is not only a strategy to boost short term engagement for ad dollars, but is also a political calculation for electorates. if stories motivated by activism mobilize targeted electorates moreso than their opposition through negative polarization, you can affect democratic outcomes in your favor
this is particularly relevant for an institution like the NYT and their new millennial cohort, who do not merely have pecuniary incentives but are seeking to be associated with and ultimately to conquest an elite cultural brand for their own purposes. because they pay less than say, a FAANG, the motivated people who stay there are quite happy to be compensated with social capital and the capability to swing elections and public opinion
It's an interesting idea but I'm not ready to speculate on this, and, it's not a problem with any one specific institution, it's when the internet works this way as a system. How can we , as individual actors and people who may work in this system, navigate it and moderate it? I should have left that as an exercise for the reader in the post because I don't have any answers yet :)
you might find this discussion of that very problem interesting
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/37-andrew-marantz-surfing-the-wake-of-the-woke/id1469999563?i=1000480896600
Marantz in general is good
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/01/05/virologist