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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.
Look, it all makes sense!" is a comfortable place in a chaotic World.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Is the biggest oxymoron there is. Verry little on tv is real and so-called 'reality TV' is among the most fake.
News doesn't fare too much better.
Any insufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
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?
The entire new testament pretty much selectively foreshadows the ending too.
Jesus was loser-edited.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
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.
It goes back way passed that, except it used to be called Monday morning quarterbacking; and no doubt variants existed long before football was a sport. I could imagine Ogg and Trog sitting in the cave discussing how it was obvious Slog would get eaten by a sabertooth tiger as they recall all the close calls and stupid things he did long before he was eaten. After that was done they started the great Obsidian vs Flint spearhead flame war... It's a lot easier to go back and find the needles in the haystack once you now what you are looking for and to spin a timeline that supports the eventual outcome.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
What? No. That's a completely different concept. At it's core Karma is simply the name for cause and effect as a single indivisible concept, though it does embrace much more subtle chains of causality than Western thought traditionally recognizes, and many traditions have wrapped it in lots of other concepts relating to reincarnation, etc. Drop a ball and it hits the ground - karma at its simplest: one event, not two. Make a habit of spouting your mouth off in biker bars and get your ass kicked. Earn a reputation as an honest and helpful person, and you'll find help forthcoming when you need it.
What perspective has you equating that with a relatively new phenomena where people go out and build a chain of foreshadowing for whatever random shit befalls you? Hmm, okay, now that I type it, it kind of makes sense. But I stand by my assertion that they're completely unrelated.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Because they can find a handful of things in a sea of evidence and then construct a narrative of guilt around it.
Well, would it be too much to ask for them to fix the typos and make sure the links work?
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Remember Fatty Arbuckle? He was a bigger star than Charlie Chaplin in his day. He mentored Charlie Chaplin and discovered Buster Keaton and Bob Hope.
Then he threw a party where a hooker got sick and later died. Months later, the jury at his final trial actually gave him a formal written statement of apology from the jury, because of the grief he had gone through for no good reason.
His films were banned and his career was over: And all the publicity was edited and picked to ensure the narrative justified his destruction.
It's called "yellow journalism" these days but it's been around since speech was invented.
Sometimes the "writing on the wall" is blood spatter...
Which is always 20/20. Humans are not able to predict the future no matter what information we are fed (with the exception of Charlie Sheen). Only after the outcome is realized can we then look back and see the clues leading up to it. It is hindsight that we use as a tool to punish others for not being able to predict the future.
Ascalante: Your bride is over 3,000 years old.
Kull: She told me she was 19!
You can find "proof" of anything you want to on the internet, whether it be that the Queen of England is really a lizard or that Steven Harper is a bible-thumping arsehole. You can "prove" Obama isn't really an American, that Kanye West is gawd or that Kanye West is the biggest ego to ever hit the planet.
The internet is just chock full of articles, forums, blogs, and other sources you can cite to support your pre-determined outcome.
It has always been this way -- there is no "fact checking" required to post something. On the other hand, there is no "editor" on a "mission" to change what you post, either.
At the core of it, the problem is not the internet nor the history it exposes, but the viciousness and old-fashioned nastiness of people who want to destroy others, often just because they can. Add that in to the human stew that just loves to hear and read nasty gossip about people they're jealous of, and you have a recipe for the "loser edit."
Where the internet differs from reality TV, though, is that with "reality" TV, all the episodes are subject to "loser edits" because that's what builds "characters" out of hours and hours of otherwise useless footage into something the general public will suck back like sweetened pablum.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
The "Loser edit" if it really is something we should wory about, and seek to avoid, has some rather dire consequences. I mean, think about it. Without the loser edit people like Justin Bieber are OK guys despite 18 documented police interventions and a drug conviction. It means that despite Pat Robertsons direct connection to a diamond mine in the congo that itself was responsible for decades of bloodshed and terror, hes an alright guy with a pretty gruff outlook on the gays. and worse yet, it means Dick Cheney, a man directly responsible for the death of nearly a million Iraqi citizens, is just a misunderstood old fogey.
Good people go to bed earlier.
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.
Summary: "The worst part is, there's no focal point for the blame."
There is a focal point for the blame: Us. We're the ones that keep the story moving, evolving, and being repeated.
Help fight poverty: Punch a poor person.
This is yet another reason not to be on FaceBook.
Don't post a ton of shit about your life online, and there will therefore be less material available for YOUR future loser edit.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Bad historians have done this forever, carefully culling information to fit the predetermined narrative that they're trying to present. Don't get me wrong, sometimes this can be done in a way that makes history more entertaining & easier to understand as long as it's highlighted as what it is, but the tenor of modern (particularly American, particularly ) teaching of history is very much a linear, determinate thing: this happened, so then THIS happened, which logically led to that.
HIstory - even recent history - *must* be understood in-context. Frankly, that's what makes GOOD study of history a really hard thing. Monday-morning quarterbacking happens whether the event was last night or 1000 years ago. The people of, for example, Dark Ages Europe are practically aliens from another planet, in terms of how they saw the world; to interpret their choices (or worse, to render moral judgement on their actions) solely through the postmodern view of 2015 would be ludicrous, yet it happens constantly.
"History is written by the winners" has always been true; the internet has simply made it a sport everyone can enjoy. It's no longer academic historians fighting closeted battles over esoteric issues within their field, it's the subject of daily conversation.
Further, with the astonishingly short memory/attention span of the modern American electorate, tendentious people are able to get away with the constant revisionist presentation of events within recent memory.
Hell, half the political conversations I have, the first effort is simply to establish SOME common basis of accepted facts upon which we can even constructively argue.
Idiocracy is truly approaching.
-Styopa
Seriously, who depends on Wikipedia as a reliable reference? How about something a LITTLE more serious, like the Smithsonian magazine?
To wit: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/...
"But Arbuckle's lawyers introduced medical evidence showing that Rappe had had a chronic bladder condition, and her autopsy concluded that there "were no marks of violence on the body, no signs that the girl had been attacked in any way." (The defense also had witnesses with damaging information about Rappe's past, but Arbuckle wouldn't let them testify, he said, out of respect for the dead.) The doctor who treated Rappe at the hotel testified that she had told him Arbuckle did not try to sexually assault her, but the prosecutor got the point dismissed as hearsay."
And:
"It wasn't until the third trial, in March of 1922, that Arbuckle allowed his attorneys to call the witnesses who had known Rappe to the stand. ...They testified that Rappe had suffered previous abdominal attacks; drank heavily and often disrobed at parties after doing so; was promiscuous, and had an illegitimate daughter."
If not a hooker, then perhaps it's too close to call. Fatty deserved better.
Sometimes the "writing on the wall" is blood spatter...
This is just the "narrative", isn't it? You can see the same events being given different narratives depending on the race, political persuasion etc of the victim. Nothing at all new here if you're even remotely interested in how event get described in any medium.
Only when they fall from grace, we have no inhabitions of saying we have really felt the entire time.
There are no "looser edits", just repealing of "winner edits".
Truth is, none of us in our heart of hearts really like status, class, or privledge. We all know its entirely bullshit. Only some of us have the audacity to risk being put on a watch list. Its why, when we have the power of anonyimitty feel more free to critique these structures of power and class. Its why we obssess over privacy, and saftey, and strong crypto, and fear the NSA.
If you're upset that a die in a casino rolled a 1 when you really needed something other than a 1, and you go back through previous video of the die being rolled and compile all the shots of it rolling a 1 together as "proof" that it's weighted to roll 1s, that's selection bias. Casino security will be on the floor laughing at you as they throw you out.
The most dangerous place I see this happening is in politics. No, I don't mean what politicians do. I mean when you and I think of our own politics. We have a very strong tendency to immediately accept any corroborating incidents as proof our political views being correct, without questioning if there could've been other explanations for why things happened that way. And we have a very strong tendency to grasp at the first explanation which seems to excuse why an incident seemed to contradict our political views. We let our predetermined views narrate what we observe happening in the world, rather than the letting our observations determine our views.
You're misconstruing the argument in the article. They're not saying that we should try to whitewash people who have done bad things, and a person's bad reputation may often be well deserved. They're warning against falling into the trap of, once someone happens into bad circumstances, of creating a narrative for that person that tries to assign their circumstances as a predestined result of fate. The most insidious example I see of this is when someone contracts a serious disease such as cancer. Often the first questions asked by medical staff are regarding their lifestyle choices, which builds into the narrative that they're sick because of the way they lived.
During the beginnings of the AIDS epidemic, for example, the first questions asked to those diagnosed were often whether they lived a promiscuous lifestyle, took drugs, or engaged in gay sex. All activities which were frowned upon, and fed into the dominant societal narrative at the time that the people who were contracting AIDS were losers who contracted the disease because of their loser lifestyle. I'd argue in that case the loser edit was applied to a whole category of people, and held back progress in addressing a serious health issue.
It would be ironic if Faux News hadn't argued, and won in court, that they are not obliged to tell the truth in their "news casts" because they're really just entertainment.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
If you don't have the courage of openly standing behind your opinions, then maybe they aren't worth listening to.
You've just demonstrated ad hominem. You're paying attention to who says something, not what has been said. Most people consider that a vice, not a virtue. More people, I dare say, value the ideas over the identity, and the more the better
Does the name "Thomas Paine" ring a bell? Obviously someone whose ideas are not worth listening to, because:
Obviously those ideas were the fiction of a madman, irrelevant to anyone and unworthy of publication. And yet:
Perhaps others are more aware that staying alive to write another day is more valuable in the long run than becoming an immediate, little known and unheard martyr for a cause? Like those who would stand up against an, e.g., Islamic government and say "you really ought not treat women that way." Perhaps you think that "Deep Throat" had nothing of value to say, either.
I've been the target of a fair amount of hate and discrimination, but you don't see me backing down. Or hiding behind a nym.
Yeah, thank God that /. vets the identities of people who post under other than "Anonymous Coward" names, so we know that you are the one, true Barbara Hudson (I'm sorry, BarbaraHudson) on the planet and that is your true, real meatspace name.
My phone number's also out there. There's nothing for adults to be afraid of.
There's nothing YOU fear, maybe, but it's arrogance to project that lack of concern over your own safety onto others and tell them how they should behave. Or to defend things like "loser edits" because you have no fear and forcing other people into the open will only prove you are right.