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Musings Report 2017:42 10-21-17 Is Social Media The Source of our Rising Disorder/Distress?
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Is Social Media The Source of our Rising Disorder/Distress?
It's no secret that the media's primary source of revenues is advertising. The more people who tune in, and the longer they tune in, the greater the value of the content to advertisers.
This is also the model of social media: the more hours people stay on Facebook, Instagram, etc., the greater the value to advertisers and thus the greater the advert revenues generated for the social media corporations.
In traditional media, this was measured by visitor impressions on websites, the number of web searches made for key words, the number of viewers of a TV program, the number of listeners to a radio station, and so on.
But Facebook has changed the advert-revenue model in several key ways. Facebook now seeks "engagement" rather than impressions, and it sells so-called "dark ads", adverts that are targeted by the advertiser to very specific audiences, so that only the people in that audience see the paid content/advert.
Only three entities know who's seeing the paid content/advert: Facebook, the advertiser and those targeted to receive the paid content/advert.
On the face of it, this seems fairly benign. A company selling Medicare plans might target Facebook users who are about to turn 65, for example, with paid content about Medicare plans or an advert for their services.
But these changes are not benign, as longtime correspondent GFB explains in his commentary of this article, How Facebook Rewards Polarizing Political Ads (via GFB):
Facebook has ditched the 'conventional' advertising metric for determining the value of advertising - 'eyeballs' viewing the material, i.e. 'impressions' - and instead uses their perverse and self-serving "engagement" model.
If your ad (your content) on Facebook generates users “engagement” (users like, hate, or share the ad or content) Facebooks spreads it to more users - because if the content is engaging, then users are staying on Facebook and are available to be shown more content.
The worst content for Facebook is content that is skipped over and ignored. And since Facebook can monitor that, that kind of content is fed out to users less and less.
So you have the ultimate circle - the more offensive and off-putting, the more "fake news" you make your paid content - the more people react to it ("engage" with it - reading it, and sending to other people who find it equally repellent or admirable as does the original viewer) the more the content appears system wide. Because in Facebook's view, anything that keeps people on Facebook is a win, a chance to expose people to other paid content. Round and round it goes.
Other commentators are also recognizing the qualitative threat this new model poses to democracy, social discourse and the fabric of our daily lives, as evidenced by these two articles:
What Facebook Did to American Democracy.
Smartphones Are Weapons of Mass Manipulation, and This Guy Is Declaring War on Them -- What’s crucial to understand is that, from the system’s perspective, success is correctly predicting what you’ll like, comment on, or share. That’s what matters. People call this 'engagement'."
Meanwhile, concerns over the influence wielded by Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Microsoft is also rising: Why Tech Is Starting to Make Me Uneasy.
So ask yourself this: how much better would you feel if you limited your time on social media to somewhere between zero and five minutes daily?
Then ask yourself: how much of the discord and distress that's so evident in the social media feeds and traditional media would diminish if everyone spent no more than 5 minutes daily on social media?
Extending the question to the entire media space: what if everyone spent no more than 30 minutes a day on any media, other than pure entertainment (listening to music, watching a movie, etc.)
In effect, corporations are now incentivized by the advert revenue model to sow as much discord and distress as possible, because all these negative emotions fuel "engagement."
What's especially perverse about the Facebook model is that ad blocking software won't eliminate the paid content in your FB feed, nor will it identify which advertiser targeted you or why.
Personally, I limit my time on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc. to a few minutes a day not because I have great self-discipline, but because I find more than a few minutes of social media feeds deranging and a time time sink I can't afford.
They don't make me feel better, or more alive, or more positive. Generally they make me feel the opposite: more disconnected from a deranging zeitgeist others take for granted, less positive and less productive.
I doubt I'm unique in experiencing these negatives.
Summary of the Blog This Past Week
This week's theme: the Rot Within
Which Rotten Fruit Falls First? 10-20-17
GDP Is Bogus: Here's Why 10-19-17
Fraud, Exploitation and Collusion: America's Pharmaceutical Industry 10-18-17
The United States of Weinstein: Complicity, Greed and Corruption Is the Status Quo 10-17-17
The Fading Scent of the American Dream 10-16-17
Best Thing That Happened To Me This Week
A second cousin's wedding and dinner party went off without a hitch. A fun Hawaiian wedding....
Market Musings: The Dow and Apple
Apple has long been a major part of the broader stock market's relentless rise. For this reason, it's interesting to compare charts of the Dow-30 (Dow Industrial Average) and AAPL.
Here's a weekly chart of the INDU. It's been overbought for months, and there is no real signs of weakness in the indicators (MACD and On Balance Volume).
Apple, on the other hand, has slipped from high overbought readings, and its MACD is descending, albeit gradually.
The rally that started last November is still intact in the INDU, but AAPL's matching rally is faltering a bit.
The past 11 months reminds me (and others) of the straight-line uptrend of late 1998 through 1999 and into early 2000, a time when warnings about stretched valuations were ignored and complacency was the norm.
If leaders like AAPL start weakening, it would be a sign worth paying attention to that the punchbowl might be nearly empty.
From Left Field
Smartphones Are Killing Americans, But Nobody’s Counting -- distraction kills when driving a killing machine...
Meet the Camperforce, Amazon's Nomadic Retiree Army (via Ben Evans) -- highly recommended, sobering...
Empire strikes back: Catalan independence
The scale of tech winners -- GOOG, AAPL, FB, AMZN are much larger than the old WinTel duo...
Dollar General Hits a Gold Mine in Rural America (via Maoxian)
"Essentially what the dollar stores are betting on in a large way is that we are going to have a permanent underclass in America."
The Drug Industry's Triumph Over the DEA (WaPo)
The true cost of a plate of food: $1 in New York, $320 in South Sudan
No One Mentions That The Russian Trail Leads To Democratic Lobbyists -- let's see how this plays out...
Attention Economy: What Price Do We All Pay for Justin Bieber’s Cult of Personality? (via Drew S.)
The Mathematics of Inequality --Bruce Boghosian runs the numbers and shows that without redistribution of wealth, the rich get richer and everyone else gets poorer
Treat people as citizens -- How a generation of political thinkers has underestimated the abilities of ordinary people and undermined democracy
Working at Google seemed like a dream job. The reality has been a tedious, pointless nightmare. -- at least in the HR dept...
"You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life." Steve Jobs
Thanks for reading--
charles |
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