From MIT's Technology Review, Nov. 29:
If I
say that social media aided Donald Trump’s election, you might think of
fake news on Facebook. But even if Facebook fixes the algorithms that elevate phony stories, there’s something else going on: social media represents the ultimate ascendance of television over other media.
I've been warning
about this since November 2014, when I was freed from six years of
incarceration in Tehran, a punishment I received for my online activism
in Iran. Before I went to prison, I blogged frequently on what I now
call the open Web: it was decentralized, text-centered, and abundant
with hyperlinks to source material and rich background. It nurtured
varying opinions. It was related to the world of books.
Then for
six years I got disconnected; when I left prison and came back online, I
was confronted by a brave new world. Facebook and Twitter had replaced
blogging and had made the Internet like TV: centralized and
image-centered, with content embedded in pictures, without links.
Like TV it 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."
Neil Postman provided some clues about this in his illuminating 1985 book, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. The media scholar at New York University
saw then how television transformed public discourse into an exchange
of volatile emotions that are usually mistaken by pollsters as opinion.
One of the scariest outcomes of this transition, Postman wrote, is that
television essentially turns all news into disinformation. "Disinformation does not mean false information.
It means misleading information—misplaced, irrelevant, fragmented or
superficial information—information that creates the illusion of knowing
something but which in fact leads one away from knowing ... The problem
is not that television presents us with entertaining subject matter but
that all subject matter is presented as entertaining.”
(Emphasis added.) And, Postman argued, when news is constructed as a
form of entertainment, it inevitably loses its function for a healthy
democracy. "I am saying something far more serious than that we are
being deprived of authentic information. I am saying we are losing our
sense of what it means to be well informed. Ignorance is always
correctable. But what shall we do if we take ignorance to be knowledge?"
The
problem with today’s Internet, driven less by text and hypertext
(hyperlink-enriched text), is that it not only shares many of TV’s ills
but also creates new ones. The difference between traditional television
and the form of TV that has reincarnated as social media is that the
latter is a personalized medium. 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....MORE
