Attention Economy

Jonathan Haight and Sherry Terkle discuss how the ahistorical nature of social media strips us of accumulated wisdom, and specifically how the introduction of likes and retweets radically accelerated the outrage machine. This 45-minute discussion covers a lot of ground, including the mounting evidence that young people in particular are being profoundly affected in negative ways by social media.

Memetic warfare is no longer science fiction. It's real, and the Russian government has been using it to destabilize Western democracies. This is a sustained, broad effort with a goal of turning the strengths of our openness and freedom of speech against us. Here's just one example.

Our technology is bombarding us with distractions. It's constant, it's unavoidable. We also know ability to focus is a key differentiator for success in our hyper competitive world. It may also be true that those who already have built-in advantages are those most able to focus.

Clickbait works, and it's destroying journalism.

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"What are they optimizing for? Emotionality — your emotional response (to click or not click) to a stimulus (a lede or headline). And through years of optimization, testing, and writing, we’re discovering that the more emotional response a person has to something, the more likely they are to click."

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The causes and effects of the rise of 4chan, as explained by someone who has hung out there since its early days, reveals a great deal about disillusioned young men.

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The comments after the article are as interesting and valuable as the article itself. Talking about 4chan quickly becomes a Gordian Knot, because those who understand it most are those who participate in it, and the operative mentality of 4chan is inherently obfuscatory. I have a hard time understanding the "just doing it for lulz" mentality, but after reading this I am a bit less clueless. Hopelessness breeds nihilism. And a bunch of angry testosterone-fueled nihilists who just don't give a damn is dangerous.

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Idea for a Medium post: It's the Business Model, Stupid — Why Talking About User-Centric Design for Attention Economy Products is Like Talking About Improving the Usability of Cigarette Boxes

Another attempt to keep the Attention Economy at bay. Nothing terribly new here, save the observation that soon the elites may be differentiated from the masses in part because of their ability to avoid the continuous distracted state induced by social media. I think this has already started.

Content is fake, products are fake, the bots that view content are fake, our politics is fake, and we're becoming fake. The picture is bleak. This article offers no answers to the problems it glancingly describes, because nobody seems to really know how to handle this dilemma. We don't really know what is real any more.

In this interview Internet pioneer Jaron Lanier talks about the failed promise of the digital revolution and the economic and social environment that it created. Lanier puts into words many things I've been thinking about for quite a while. In particular, his take on the schizophrenic soul of the Valley:

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"Way back in the ’80s, we wanted everything to be free because we were hippie socialists. But we also loved entrepreneurs because we loved Steve Jobs. So you wanna be both a socialist and a libertarian at the same time, and it’s absurd."

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This is a must read.

"The machinery and language of personal liberation have been colonized and subverted by the very forces they were intended to topple." This piece argues that Silicon Valley's unvarnished optimism about the technology it creates has led to that technology being used to subvert the very values that allowed it to flourish.

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Build an audience, get views, get clicks, scale and scale and scale. In the Valley, these words are as reliable as the sun coming up each morning. But it's only inevitable because of the business models that power online social engagement. This is the elephant in the room that almost nobody wants to address. Advertising-driven revenue has led us to this dark place, and until we figure a way past that revenue model, it's going to be extremely difficult to get out of it.

Aviv Ovadya predicted in 2016 that web media platforms were ripe for a catastrophic event. His warning went unheeded, and the result was a presidential election in which innuendo and counterfactual narratives defeated the facts. Ovadya is looking at the current technology landscape and he believes that was just the beginning of what will get far worse.

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The rise of new technology for video in particular is rapidly making it more difficult to sort fact from fiction, and societies in which nobody can tell what is true and what isn't are easily manipulated by authoritarian governments. Will technology giants like twitter and Facebook that have been built atop Attention Economy business models aggressively fight against reality-bending manipulations that drive clicks and ad revenue? Why would they?

In Act Two, Meme Come True, This American Life crashes the DeploraBall and delves into how memes helped drive Trump to victory. The young, social media-savvy people who pride themselves on making it all happen lay out how distributed teams got the word out.

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I was astonished by this piece. There seems to be a real detachment for these people, a feeling of victory without any real reflection or understanding of the ethics of what they were doing or the real world consequences. This is the face of nihilism in the 21st century – victory detached from context, gamification gone mad.

dana boyd lays out in very broad strokes how decentralized networks of random actors are hijacking our attention, and how ill-equipped we are to deal with it. As boyd notes, this is global, and it calls into question everything we think we know about media literacy. But burying our heads in the sand will only make things worse.

We think of online communities as being akin to the communities we inhabit in meatspace. But these online communities are only as communal as their owners allow them to be.

This is the story of the first and most influential web forums, told by those who were there in the beginning. This is a valuable read because it exposes the inherently antisocial biases upon which dudebro social media (and its more broadly-accepted successors like twitter and Facebook) have been built. SA's founder is quoted as saying "I've been interested in giving people what I want, basically, because I feel like I don't understand a large portion, like 99 percent of people…" and later, "I just got so sick of it that I pretty much stopped writing and I got into a depression funk that I'm still in."

The gist of this piece is that the advertising-driven platforms that dominate social media are inherently prone to manipulation that hurts democracy. If anything this piece doesn't go far enough. There's a tough question that should be stated at the end: When most of the public gets most of its information from inherently untrustworthy sources, how can a democracy survive? And if we realize we need to change the situation, how do we do so?

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This is telling: "…she asked Ms. Sandberg how Facebook can “reconcile an incentive to create and increase your user engagement when the content that generates a lot of engagement is often inflammatory and hateful.” That astute question Ms. Sandberg completely sidestepped, which was no surprise: No statistic can paper over the fact that this is a real problem.