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Social Media Is Killing Discourse Because It's Too Much Like TV (technologyreview.com)
Reader Joe_NoOne writes: Like TV, social media now increasingly entertains us, and even more so than television it amplifies our existing beliefs and habits. It makes us feel more than think, and it comforts more than challenges. The result is a deeply fragmented society, driven by emotions, and radicalized by lack of contact and challenge from outside. This is why Oxford Dictionaries designated "post-truth" as the word of 2016: an adjective "relating to circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than emotional appeals." Traditional television still entails some degree of surprise. What you see on television news is still picked by human curators, and even though it must be entertaining to qualify as worthy of expensive production, it is still likely to challenge some of our opinions (emotions, that is). Social media, in contrast, uses algorithms to encourage comfort and complaisance, since its entire business model is built upon maximizing the time users spend inside of it. Who would like to hang around in a place where everyone seems to be negative, mean, and disapproving? The outcome is a proliferation of emotions, a radicalization of those emotions, and a fragmented society. This is way more dangerous for the idea of democracy founded on the notion of informed participation. Now what can be done? Certainly the explanation for Trump's rise cannot be reduced to a technology- or media-centered argument. The phenomenon is rooted in more than that; media or technology cannot create; they can merely twist, divert, or disrupt. Without the growing inequality, shrinking middle class, jobs threatened by globalization, etc. there would be no Trump or Berlusconi or Brexit. But we need to stop thinking that any evolution of technology is natural and inevitable and therefore good. For one thing, we need more text than videos in order to remain rational animals. Typography, as Postman describes, is in essence much more capable of communicating complex messages that provoke thinking. This means we should write and read more, link more often, and watch less television and fewer videos -- and spend less time on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube.
People are increasingly just getting their news from overtly politicized outlets.
Fox News, Huffington Post, Breitbart, Drudge Report, Rush Limbaugh radio network, Buzzfeed, Jezebel... (and more)
These are all sites with a political agenda and deliberately biased. If you're getting your news from them, you're getting filtered news that has been written to support one of two polar political stances. People need to diversify their sources (and/or) not get news solely from sources that are deliberately biased. It used to be political bias in a news article was frowned upon, nowadays it's a requirement for many news outlets.
I still trust the BBC world service the most, although lately I've noticed some "editorial" content sneaking into their news headlines.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Social media, and thanks for giving us a working definition so we know where you're coming from, is an extension of traditional media. The same problem exists there.
If there was a way to make money off of honest discourse of political and social issues, someone would have already done so. The unhappy truth is that it is very hard to do so. So TFA's ranting against algorithms and such is ranting against television programming and development. It's just not easy to get eyeballs on honest issues because most of us don't like it. We don't like being made to feel bad about something we had little to nothing to do with. We don't like being confronted by a reality that we didn't make but are forced to take part of all the same. We don't like being told to eat our vegetables, essentially.
Given how it has been put together over the past two and a half centuries, American democracy isn't simply advanced citizenship. It's advanced everything. The requirements for participation has got to the point where you have to be on 100% of the time to even have a slight chance at understanding what's going on. There's no simplifying that in a twenty two minute nightly news report.
And that's the real problem. We need people to be participating now more than ever. But we don't want to create the sort of nation it would take for that to happen. It's hard. We've solved a lot of problems over the years. Hunger and disease are starting to look like we can actually do it. This? Organizing ourselves? This has always been at the bottom of the list of things to get done. Which is probably part of the reason we see the people that get into it, get into it. It's the last thing most people want to think about at the end of their long work day. Guess what? That doesn't make it any easier to resolve.