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Technology's Legacy: the 'Loser Edit' Awaits Us All
An anonymous reader writes: The NY Times Magazine has an insightful article putting into words how I've felt about information-age culture for a while now. It's about a phenomenon dubbed the "loser edit." The term itself was born out of reality TV — once an outcome had been decided while the show was still taping, the producers would comb back through the footage and selectively paste together everything that seemed to foreshadow the loser's fall. When the show actually aired, it thus had an easy-to-follow narrative.
But as the information age has overtaken us, the "loser edit" is something that can happen to anyone. Any time a celebrity gets into trouble, we can immediately search through two decades of interviews and offhand comments to see if there were hints of their impending fall. It usually becomes a self-reinforcing chain of evidence. The loser edit happens for non-celebrities too, using their social media posts, public records, leaked private records, and anything else available through search.
The worst part is, there's no focal point for the blame. The news media does it, the entertainment industry does it, and we do it to ourselves. Any time the internet gets outraged about something, there are a few people who happily dig up everything they can about the person they now feel justified in hating — and thus, the loser edit begins.
But as the information age has overtaken us, the "loser edit" is something that can happen to anyone. Any time a celebrity gets into trouble, we can immediately search through two decades of interviews and offhand comments to see if there were hints of their impending fall. It usually becomes a self-reinforcing chain of evidence. The loser edit happens for non-celebrities too, using their social media posts, public records, leaked private records, and anything else available through search.
The worst part is, there's no focal point for the blame. The news media does it, the entertainment industry does it, and we do it to ourselves. Any time the internet gets outraged about something, there are a few people who happily dig up everything they can about the person they now feel justified in hating — and thus, the loser edit begins.
It's a classic case of confirmation bias. The human brain does it all the time; if you don't know what it is or how to avoid it, look it up.
Yeah, I'm probably preaching to the choir on that last bit. I hope I am, anyway.
Steve Jobs and his "connect the dots" commencement address.
And that's the thing, the media does that all the time with successful people to show "what it takes" and never show the people who did those things and failed.
And business books will only show the successes that fit into their narrative and next thing you you know, your CEO reads that book and has all of you aping the successful company.
There is also an opposite of the loser edit, but I don't know if it has its own name. It is the edit where by using selective editing the focus is placed on (the mistakes or the perfection) one person in a competition, and minimizes the focus on the person who will eventually win or lose. So that when the final decision is revealed it "surprises" the audience - and hence boosts drama, and hopefully higher ratings.
My feeling is that I see this behavior more than I see a "loser edit"
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
Oh wait, every video that you make featuring your li'l buddy Timmyboy is a loser edit. Dice, PLEASE fire these guys. Timmyboy is still very proud of his "journalism degree." He JUST DOESN'T GET IT.
The job of an editor is NOT to just present stories that go along with the group-think of the day. We have Faux News and their ilk for that. Also, if they edit submissions too much "for clarity" the submitter will complain that's not what they wrote. So what are you going to do?
People were originally upset when SciAm started publishing articles about things like the politics behind nuclear weapons control back in (IIRC) the '80s. I was one of them, but one day there was one that caught my attention, was interesting, etc. - so I stopped my complaining.
Sure, some of the articles posted are of low quality ... I regularly up-vote them if they're stupidity like the Ask Slashdot "I heard there was money in app development" / "How can I interest my 2-year-old in programming" / etc., because they ARE stupid, but if they don't see the light of day, we'll never get to give the poster (and others with similar bad/naive ideas) a whack with the ol' clue-by-four. Not everything posted should agree with your world view or what you consider is acceptable news.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
I'm having a hard time seeing their point, when all I can think of is counterpoint. Prior to the Information Age, we lived in a world where our media was spoon fed to us, editing everything to make us believe a narrative. Kennedy was King of Camelot, not a womanizer. Hollywood was sparkles and success, not addictions and failures.
This tool the Internet lets us bypass all the BS and see these people for who they are, just people with problems and opinions, no one worth elevating to a point of authority. Lohan isn't a Mouseketeer anymore, she's an addict. Clinton isn't President anymore, he's tripping off to overseas underage sex parties. In the past, we'd never know the facts, just someone else's "Truth". The IRS had all of the missing backup tapes of Lerner's emails all along, perjuring themselves for the last two years. It isn't revisionism when the truth was hidden in the first place.
This style of story-telling is ubiquitous in how the stock market is reported. Every day there's a ton of news and the market either goes up, goes sideways or goes down. Reporters see what happened then pick a sample of news and say "The market rallied on news X & Y". Barry Ritholtz had a great example of a day when the market opened low and then rallied and a newspaper published a morning edition saying the market was selling off because of A and an afternoon edition where it said the market was rallying on the same piece of news.
Fact is that we generally don't know why some things happen, real-life doesn't make for simple stories and people that lose or do bad things are also capable of being kind and charming at other times. We're all heroes of our own stories.