3 ms·

The issue is that despite the internet appearing to be an infinite sea of nodes that can all participate in a global village, the reality is that “the media” is

by jl6 5y ago

The issue is that despite the internet appearing to be an infinite sea of nodes that can all participate in a global village, the reality is that “the media” is the very finite set of nodes that have control of users’ attention. We’re surely all guilty of facilitating this. Forget the global village of a billion voices - the number of news sources I regularly read isn’t even dozens. Anybody can still put up a web server, but it’s the attention channels that matter, and those are well and truly under control through non-internet means (money, regulation, threats, lobbying, …).

hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
Is there a "Jevons paradox" equivalent for information and media? That is, Jevons paradox states that as efficiency of resource usage improves (e.g. MPG goes up) that usage of that good can also, somewhat paradoxically, also go up, because the relative cost of that good goes down so it can be used in more ways, people can drive further, etc. With information and media, lots of us originally thought that lowering barriers to entry for media dissemination would make it easier to have this "global village of a billion voices". But instead what it has done is made it easier for users to filter to the top content, and easier for producers to use tons of data mining and machine learning to filter in on the most addictive (if definitely not the best) content. In the long term it can make it harder for smaller producers because they are competing against a much larger set of competitors for attention.
- karatinversion 5y ago
  My take, which is less a paradox and more of a "bitter lesson", is that increases in ability to communicate always lead to increases in centralisation, for the types of reasons you indicate. The early internet's utopianism took place in the window when the new ability to communicate had not yet been used to effect the new centralisation.
- KarlKemp 5y ago
  Yes, absolutely; reading the NYT or WSJ twice a week and never touching another news source will make you better informed than consuming the out[ut of a hundred YouTube channels and Twitter feeds you have chosen because you enjoy their opinions. Diversifying your news sources is a poor form of hedging. What we should encourage people to do is trying to come up with methods to increase trust: can you think of a way to verify some snippet of news from first principle?
WillPostForFood 5y ago
the number of news sources I regularly read isn’t even dozen At least you've added "nrk.no" to your list this week. The problem is real for people who live in Facebook or TikTok bubbles, but the democratized news dream of the internet is still alive, but it takes some work to break out from the world of the algorithmic feeds.
- zucked 5y ago
  Humans are not geared for our "village" to be this big. The expansion of our sphere of "care" flies directly in the faces of thousands of years human evolution. The "bubbles" we create, consume, and participate in are a subconscious attempt to slim down our giant "tribe" into something that our brains can manage. Of course these bubbles are readily aligned to people like ourselves - language, interest, appearance, culture, etc. Expanding your bubble is hard. It takes work. As a result, most people don't.
skybrian 5y ago
You're just looking at the first hop and that's excessively gloomy. What about all the sites that authors you read have read? Link sharing sites like Twitter and Hacker News have exposed me to articles from lots of less popular news sites, not to mention, all the blogs I'm subscribed to. Also, research-heavy blog posts about COVID and the war in Ukraine have lots of outgoing links. Some sources are in languages I can't even read, but I can get a rough translation. There are people who geolocate photos from Ukraine as a hobby, aggregators who find patterns, and people who do amateur military analysis. Sometimes they're ahead of the newspapers. (By a few hours. I assume reporters read them too.) This results in big differences between what we can read and what would be possible in China or Russia, without a VPN anyway. (Changing majority opinion is a whole different story though.)
sjg007 5y ago
We can surely build apps and devices to enable the see of a billion voices. After all everyone now has a computer in their pocket connected to the internet.

by jl6 5y ago

hn_throwaway_99 5y ago

Is there a "Jevons paradox" equivalent for information and media? That is, Jevons paradox states that as efficiency of resource usage improves (e.g. MPG goes up) that usage of that good can also, somewhat paradoxically, also go up, because the relative cost of that good goes down so it can be used in more ways, people can drive further, etc. With information and media, lots of us originally thought that lowering barriers to entry for media dissemination would make it easier to have this "global village of a billion voices". But instead what it has done is made it easier for users to filter to the top content, and easier for producers to use tons of data mining and machine learning to filter in on the most addictive (if definitely not the best) content. In the long term it can make it harder for smaller producers because they are competing against a much larger set of competitors for attention.

karatinversion 5y ago
My take, which is less a paradox and more of a "bitter lesson", is that increases in ability to communicate always lead to increases in centralisation, for the types of reasons you indicate. The early internet's utopianism took place in the window when the new ability to communicate had not yet been used to effect the new centralisation.
KarlKemp 5y ago
Yes, absolutely; reading the NYT or WSJ twice a week and never touching another news source will make you better informed than consuming the out[ut of a hundred YouTube channels and Twitter feeds you have chosen because you enjoy their opinions. Diversifying your news sources is a poor form of hedging. What we should encourage people to do is trying to come up with methods to increase trust: can you think of a way to verify some snippet of news from first principle?

WillPostForFood 5y ago

the number of news sources I regularly read isn’t even dozen At least you've added "nrk.no" to your list this week. The problem is real for people who live in Facebook or TikTok bubbles, but the democratized news dream of the internet is still alive, but it takes some work to break out from the world of the algorithmic feeds.

zucked 5y ago
Humans are not geared for our "village" to be this big. The expansion of our sphere of "care" flies directly in the faces of thousands of years human evolution. The "bubbles" we create, consume, and participate in are a subconscious attempt to slim down our giant "tribe" into something that our brains can manage. Of course these bubbles are readily aligned to people like ourselves - language, interest, appearance, culture, etc. Expanding your bubble is hard. It takes work. As a result, most people don't.

skybrian 5y ago

You're just looking at the first hop and that's excessively gloomy. What about all the sites that authors you read have read? Link sharing sites like Twitter and Hacker News have exposed me to articles from lots of less popular news sites, not to mention, all the blogs I'm subscribed to. Also, research-heavy blog posts about COVID and the war in Ukraine have lots of outgoing links. Some sources are in languages I can't even read, but I can get a rough translation. There are people who geolocate photos from Ukraine as a hobby, aggregators who find patterns, and people who do amateur military analysis. Sometimes they're ahead of the newspapers. (By a few hours. I assume reporters read them too.) This results in big differences between what we can read and what would be possible in China or Russia, without a VPN anyway. (Changing majority opinion is a whole different story though.)

sjg007 5y ago

We can surely build apps and devices to enable the see of a billion voices. After all everyone now has a computer in their pocket connected to the internet.