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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
It's called an autobiography.
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?
Because they can find a handful of things in a sea of evidence and then construct a narrative of guilt around it.
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...
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.
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.
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...
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.