4 ms·

Great article. The author concludes with the following points on what is happening to information as all information is increasingly "flattened" to fit the new,

Great article. The author concludes with the following points on what is happening to information as all information is increasingly "flattened" to fit the new, single content stream of the social media feeds on our smartphones: 1. Everything is trivialized: major public policy changes arrive in the same package and placed next to trivial pop culture. 2. We respond to information using the same low-bandwidth tools (like, heart, retweet, etc.) that limit the expressiveness of response. 3. All information is in direct competition, playing the algorithms to gain attention. 4. Power over information is consolidated to a very small number of gatekeepers, and mainly Facebook. This is an interesting way to look at things, and it resonates with me. I think the author described the problems with what I think of as the "hypermedia" era very well. But the author doesn't offer suggestions for what, if anything we should do about it. As for myself, a couple years ago I read Cal Newport's Deep Work and then Digital Minimalism, and found their ideas compelling enough that I deleted Facebook and disabled web browsing and email on my phone (although I later put web and email back). However, #deletefacebook seems to have about a snowballs chance of happening at large. What countering forces could or should break the deathgrip that Facebook and Google in particular hold over communication and information publication today?

op03 6y ago
He missed an important piece - it all functions because the Reward circuitry in peoples brains are feeding off of Likes/Clicks/View/Upvote counts etc etc. Take the dumb counts away. Hide them. Delay them etc etc and all of a sudden pavlovs dog or skinners rat starts behaving differently. People act as if this dumb half baked reward system solely existing to increase "engagement" underlying everything is now unchangeable and baked into the fabric of everything for ever and always. They are wrong.
- TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
  There are market forces behind the engagement cult, so - unfortunately - they're probably not wrong while those forces continue to operate. The root of that problem is the use of the web as a device for capturing time and attention and selling that attention to third parties. As long as that continues to be the prime directive, the race to the bottom will continue.
- joe_the_user 6y ago
  There are quite possibly better ways to run reactions than the way current social media does it. However, I think it's easy to miss the important role/use that these devices play. The article "the silence is deafening" just the other day noted how non-verbal cues in conversation and I'd add that social media reactions and similar devices allows people to be "loosely engaged" with each other in the way that who attend the same event without exchanging words are loosely connected. And these kinds of perfunctory attachments are important (as COVID also shows). These kinds of attachment were also manipulated even before the Internet, with store clerks instructed to say "have a nice day" and such even in the 1970s. Which is to say, likes, memes and emoticons may seem kinda silly and annoying from one perspective but they're a way to emulate "the stuff of life" and we need to think about how to do that better.
jaspax 6y ago
I derive some hope from the fact that there seems to be an accelerating trend of people doing their online socializing in places other than Facebook, even if they still technically have a FB account. I don't have stats to back this up (FB itself has an obvious motive to obscure the fact that this is happening, so I don't trust their usage statistics), but I'm meeting more and more people who state that they only visit FB rarely, and express a preference for WhatsApp, Discord, or some other service for actually getting into contact. A related anecdote: I finally took the step of deactivating my FB account some months ago, and when I told people about this I mostly heard sympathy rather than disappointment or disbelief.
chrchang523 6y ago
For #3 at least, an environment that separated within-topic from between-topic competition for attention might be a major improvement. A large search engine cooperating with a government might be able to pull this off by making content also findable on any major all-vs.-all feed ineligible for display: a preselected topic is embedded in each search, so search results can in principle be isolated from between-topic attention competition. This would almost have to start outside the US, but if it actually works it may then see wider adoption. (I'd expect some radicalization/"evaporative cooling" memetic hazard to remain, but it should at least decrease in intensity, since one driver of increased self-radicalization is low viability of moderate, non-attention-grabbing content relative to overstated clickbait.)
throwaw4y-plate 6y ago
When you put it that way, the timeline distorts events in a way that reminds me of how language is flattened and simplified by Newspeak.
- naringas 6y ago
  similarly, all language itself flattens and simplifies reality
joe_the_user 6y ago
Power over information is consolidated to a very small number of gatekeepers, and mainly Facebook. I run a modestly large Facebook group. I haven't noticed any way that Facebook prevent me from whatever sort of information I want to be. So I can't see Facebook as an absolute filter. But certainly, at scale, Facebook does wind-up being a filter but through the default, predictable laziness of the average person. Remember, Hypothetically, if you had a network of thousands of moderators and millions of people in civil, well moderated groups, you could have a debate in almost social media forum you chose; FB, Reddit, some BBS, email, whatever. The exception would Twitter or any media that doesn't allow moderation. But at a point, if we had actual community, it could trump the media it was on. This is not to say that this is at all likely. Rather, the point when you have passive mass of seething people, yes, sure who is turning the spigots on the hot-button issue content is going to be an "influencer" but this status is by no means cure-able by the elimination of a given media outlet (well, some portion of "#deletefacebook" seem to be weird introverts with a sort of daft "the problem is people who don't know each talking at all" approach and who hope that eliminating platforms can stop this). What countering forces could or should break the deathgrip that Facebook and Google in particular hold over communication and information publication today? I think the hostility these entities face today expresses a situation of them not having a tighter grip (at least a much tighter grip) on the public imagination than The New York Times, CNN, right-wing radio, corporate public relations etc. There are many forces struggle here. In many ways I shudder to think what a Facebook under the control of whatever corporate consensus might appear (and I'm further to the left than the right).
- klyrs 6y ago
  > I think the hostility these entities face today expresses a situation of them not having a tighter grip (at least a much tighter grip) on the public imagination... The issue isn't a grip on our imaginations, it's the grip on our data (including off-site traffic thanks to ubiquitous trackers) that seems objectionable. And when it's the only way to talk to your grandma, for example, it's maddeningly difficult for a lot of people to quit
  - joe_the_user 6y ago

op03 6y ago

He missed an important piece - it all functions because the Reward circuitry in peoples brains are feeding off of Likes/Clicks/View/Upvote counts etc etc. Take the dumb counts away. Hide them. Delay them etc etc and all of a sudden pavlovs dog or skinners rat starts behaving differently. People act as if this dumb half baked reward system solely existing to increase "engagement" underlying everything is now unchangeable and baked into the fabric of everything for ever and always. They are wrong.

TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
There are market forces behind the engagement cult, so - unfortunately - they're probably not wrong while those forces continue to operate. The root of that problem is the use of the web as a device for capturing time and attention and selling that attention to third parties. As long as that continues to be the prime directive, the race to the bottom will continue.
joe_the_user 6y ago
There are quite possibly better ways to run reactions than the way current social media does it. However, I think it's easy to miss the important role/use that these devices play. The article "the silence is deafening" just the other day noted how non-verbal cues in conversation and I'd add that social media reactions and similar devices allows people to be "loosely engaged" with each other in the way that who attend the same event without exchanging words are loosely connected. And these kinds of perfunctory attachments are important (as COVID also shows). These kinds of attachment were also manipulated even before the Internet, with store clerks instructed to say "have a nice day" and such even in the 1970s. Which is to say, likes, memes and emoticons may seem kinda silly and annoying from one perspective but they're a way to emulate "the stuff of life" and we need to think about how to do that better.

jaspax 6y ago

I derive some hope from the fact that there seems to be an accelerating trend of people doing their online socializing in places other than Facebook, even if they still technically have a FB account. I don't have stats to back this up (FB itself has an obvious motive to obscure the fact that this is happening, so I don't trust their usage statistics), but I'm meeting more and more people who state that they only visit FB rarely, and express a preference for WhatsApp, Discord, or some other service for actually getting into contact. A related anecdote: I finally took the step of deactivating my FB account some months ago, and when I told people about this I mostly heard sympathy rather than disappointment or disbelief.

chrchang523 6y ago

For #3 at least, an environment that separated within-topic from between-topic competition for attention might be a major improvement. A large search engine cooperating with a government might be able to pull this off by making content also findable on any major all-vs.-all feed ineligible for display: a preselected topic is embedded in each search, so search results can in principle be isolated from between-topic attention competition. This would almost have to start outside the US, but if it actually works it may then see wider adoption. (I'd expect some radicalization/"evaporative cooling" memetic hazard to remain, but it should at least decrease in intensity, since one driver of increased self-radicalization is low viability of moderate, non-attention-grabbing content relative to overstated clickbait.)

throwaw4y-plate 6y ago

When you put it that way, the timeline distorts events in a way that reminds me of how language is flattened and simplified by Newspeak.

naringas 6y ago
similarly, all language itself flattens and simplifies reality

joe_the_user 6y ago

Power over information is consolidated to a very small number of gatekeepers, and mainly Facebook. I run a modestly large Facebook group. I haven't noticed any way that Facebook prevent me from whatever sort of information I want to be. So I can't see Facebook as an absolute filter. But certainly, at scale, Facebook does wind-up being a filter but through the default, predictable laziness of the average person. Remember, Hypothetically, if you had a network of thousands of moderators and millions of people in civil, well moderated groups, you could have a debate in almost social media forum you chose; FB, Reddit, some BBS, email, whatever. The exception would Twitter or any media that doesn't allow moderation. But at a point, if we had actual community, it could trump the media it was on. This is not to say that this is at all likely. Rather, the point when you have passive mass of seething people, yes, sure who is turning the spigots on the hot-button issue content is going to be an "influencer" but this status is by no means cure-able by the elimination of a given media outlet (well, some portion of "#deletefacebook" seem to be weird introverts with a sort of daft "the problem is people who don't know each talking at all" approach and who hope that eliminating platforms can stop this). What countering forces could or should break the deathgrip that Facebook and Google in particular hold over communication and information publication today? I think the hostility these entities face today expresses a situation of them not having a tighter grip (at least a much tighter grip) on the public imagination than The New York Times, CNN, right-wing radio, corporate public relations etc. There are many forces struggle here. In many ways I shudder to think what a Facebook under the control of whatever corporate consensus might appear (and I'm further to the left than the right).

klyrs 6y ago
> I think the hostility these entities face today expresses a situation of them not having a tighter grip (at least a much tighter grip) on the public imagination... The issue isn't a grip on our imaginations, it's the grip on our data (including off-site traffic thanks to ubiquitous trackers) that seems objectionable. And when it's the only way to talk to your grandma, for example, it's maddeningly difficult for a lot of people to quit
- joe_the_user 6y ago