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Is incessant fear-mongering manipulation the inevitable dystopian end of a society that is always connected to channels of mass communication? This is the resu

Is incessant fear-mongering manipulation the inevitable dystopian end of a society that is always connected to channels of mass communication? This is the result of the race to the bottom for eyeballs and attention - the appeal to fear. Does this ever resolve? We spend so much time lamenting the demise of journalism, the sensationalization of media, the fear-mongering, etc... But it's not like distinct "bad choices" led to this state - it's the simple consequence of TPTB (well, anyone, really) having the ability to engage wider and wider audiences (and ultimately everybody) in increasingly real-time creating such fierce competition for attention that we must eventually use our most powerful emotional appeals for even the most trivial messages. I mean, look at me, being all fatalistic - I'm guilty too. But I'm legitimately curious where we go from here, or perhaps more accurately, where do people think the bottom really is, and what will happen when we get there?

exergy 10y ago
Have you ever felt this sense of weariness on the internet? The idea that nothing is new, you've seen and heard it all before, and just a state of the brain being fried? This happens with increasing frequency to me, and is part of the reason why I seem to be gravitating, inexorably as it were, towards a low-information diet. No facebook, no instagram/snapchat/social media du jour, minimal news, and certainly no trump fever. I have a feeling the future will look more like the past than we'd like to believe. That eventually, similar to banner-blindness, we'll develop clickbait-blindness and long form, carefully researched and nuanced pieces will be a prerequisite if one wants attention. That or /r/forwardsfromgrandma, but I hope it's the former.
- pmyjavec 10y ago
  I've recently been on my own diet, and I have been experimenting with this method, when picking up the phone, set a timer, say 15 minutes and only allocate that much time to news, HN, social media etc. This is where magazines and some newspapers were good, journalists collated the interesting stuff for us and gave us a digest to read, which was published at most, once per day.
demonshalo 10y ago
I think the problem resides in the west's insistence on spreading the ideas of equality. Watching a youtube video from buzzfeed is (in the minds of many) a legitimate way to learn about things like group conflict or any other social phenomenon. Mass communication has indirectly given rise to mass access to bad information. However, that alone would not be a problem. What makes it a problem is once you are told that your opinion is equal to all others in society, you begin to believe that your buzzfeed backed opinion is on par with a nobel prize winning POLS professor.
- losteverything 10y ago
  There is no such thing as a wrong opinion. Its an opinion. Advice is different. Facts are different. Some opinions are worth listening to. That to me is the trickiest part
eli_gottlieb 10y ago
>Is incessant fear-mongering manipulation the inevitable dystopian end of a society that is always connected to channels of mass communication? No, it's the result of leaving nonfiction communication to the lowest-common-denominator of market forces. Just look at Great Britain: sure, they've got Rupert Murdoch, but they've also got the BBC.
- astrocat 10y ago
  > it's the result of leaving nonfiction communication to the lowest-common-denominator of market forces. but seriously, what's the alternative? How do you avoid market forces? What process does a culture need to undergo to pull it's journalism away from market forces and enshrine it so that it is no longer a commodity afflicted by the market's weaknesses? Is the BBC one such isolated place where the culture of the UK that supports it simply expects it to always have a higher standard, market demands be damned? How did it get there? Or more cynically, how much longer can it last?
Bartweiss 10y ago
I'm more than half convinced that the problem is with how these things are monetized. Basically, I think the per-view/per-click model of profit is disastrous. I value a well-researched, well-analyzed, 3000 word Guardian piece far more than a 200 word CNN piece. But if I click through one of the former and three of the latter, I'm conveying (roughly) three times the value to CNN. And if I click a link, the 'transaction' is made (for CPC, at least); it doesn't matter if I hate the piece and click away. This has left us in a place where you can either be niche (producing high user value) or manipulative (producing high user volume). Both interfere with detailed, consensus-reality news. Thoughtful, public-interest journalism in the vein of Murrow is the lowest-profit option for embedded advertising. We've incentivized for a news model which is not just hostile to society, but hostile to users. I don't want my how-to guides to come as slideshows with slow page refreshes between panels, but that's what I get. And I don't want my news to come as hyperbolic fear-mongering with clickbait headlines, but that's also what I get. So I think we're a little doomed, because humans inherently respond to drama and uncertainty, so we get a race to the bottom. But not truly doomed - I value lots of other things as well, and it's the monetization model that emphasizes our baser instincts. We don't need to nobly abandon market forces, just find a way to monetize that's based on something deeper than "pages loaded".
grillvogel 10y ago
>Is incessant fear-mongering manipulation the inevitable dystopian end of a society that is always connected to channels of mass communication? This is the result of the race to the bottom for eyeballs and attention - the appeal to fear. Does this ever resolve? sure, all you need to fix that is a prescription for the latest anti depressants that the nice pharmaceutical companies have made to help you deal with all the existential angst that our society has been engineered to cause you.

exergy 10y ago

Have you ever felt this sense of weariness on the internet? The idea that nothing is new, you've seen and heard it all before, and just a state of the brain being fried? This happens with increasing frequency to me, and is part of the reason why I seem to be gravitating, inexorably as it were, towards a low-information diet. No facebook, no instagram/snapchat/social media du jour, minimal news, and certainly no trump fever. I have a feeling the future will look more like the past than we'd like to believe. That eventually, similar to banner-blindness, we'll develop clickbait-blindness and long form, carefully researched and nuanced pieces will be a prerequisite if one wants attention. That or /r/forwardsfromgrandma, but I hope it's the former.

pmyjavec 10y ago
I've recently been on my own diet, and I have been experimenting with this method, when picking up the phone, set a timer, say 15 minutes and only allocate that much time to news, HN, social media etc. This is where magazines and some newspapers were good, journalists collated the interesting stuff for us and gave us a digest to read, which was published at most, once per day.

demonshalo 10y ago

I think the problem resides in the west's insistence on spreading the ideas of equality. Watching a youtube video from buzzfeed is (in the minds of many) a legitimate way to learn about things like group conflict or any other social phenomenon. Mass communication has indirectly given rise to mass access to bad information. However, that alone would not be a problem. What makes it a problem is once you are told that your opinion is equal to all others in society, you begin to believe that your buzzfeed backed opinion is on par with a nobel prize winning POLS professor.

losteverything 10y ago
There is no such thing as a wrong opinion. Its an opinion. Advice is different. Facts are different. Some opinions are worth listening to. That to me is the trickiest part

eli_gottlieb 10y ago

>Is incessant fear-mongering manipulation the inevitable dystopian end of a society that is always connected to channels of mass communication? No, it's the result of leaving nonfiction communication to the lowest-common-denominator of market forces. Just look at Great Britain: sure, they've got Rupert Murdoch, but they've also got the BBC.

astrocat 10y ago
> it's the result of leaving nonfiction communication to the lowest-common-denominator of market forces. but seriously, what's the alternative? How do you avoid market forces? What process does a culture need to undergo to pull it's journalism away from market forces and enshrine it so that it is no longer a commodity afflicted by the market's weaknesses? Is the BBC one such isolated place where the culture of the UK that supports it simply expects it to always have a higher standard, market demands be damned? How did it get there? Or more cynically, how much longer can it last?

Bartweiss 10y ago

I'm more than half convinced that the problem is with how these things are monetized. Basically, I think the per-view/per-click model of profit is disastrous. I value a well-researched, well-analyzed, 3000 word Guardian piece far more than a 200 word CNN piece. But if I click through one of the former and three of the latter, I'm conveying (roughly) three times the value to CNN. And if I click a link, the 'transaction' is made (for CPC, at least); it doesn't matter if I hate the piece and click away. This has left us in a place where you can either be niche (producing high user value) or manipulative (producing high user volume). Both interfere with detailed, consensus-reality news. Thoughtful, public-interest journalism in the vein of Murrow is the lowest-profit option for embedded advertising. We've incentivized for a news model which is not just hostile to society, but hostile to users. I don't want my how-to guides to come as slideshows with slow page refreshes between panels, but that's what I get. And I don't want my news to come as hyperbolic fear-mongering with clickbait headlines, but that's also what I get. So I think we're a little doomed, because humans inherently respond to drama and uncertainty, so we get a race to the bottom. But not truly doomed - I value lots of other things as well, and it's the monetization model that emphasizes our baser instincts. We don't need to nobly abandon market forces, just find a way to monetize that's based on something deeper than "pages loaded".

grillvogel 10y ago

>Is incessant fear-mongering manipulation the inevitable dystopian end of a society that is always connected to channels of mass communication? This is the result of the race to the bottom for eyeballs and attention - the appeal to fear. Does this ever resolve? sure, all you need to fix that is a prescription for the latest anti depressants that the nice pharmaceutical companies have made to help you deal with all the existential angst that our society has been engineered to cause you.