Excerpts from an article by the always on-point master wordsmith Matt Taibbi.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/taibbi-facebook-can-we-be-saved-social-media-giant-w518655
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Everyone has it backwards. We shouldn't be asking Facebook to solve the problem. We should be fixing Facebook. It's our collective misfortune that this perhaps silliest-in-history supercorporation -- a tossed-off hookup site turned international cat video vault turned Orwellian surveillance megavillain -- has dragged us all to the very cliff edge of modern technological capitalism.
The Facebook News Feed made a mockery of the 24-hour cable news channels, which were really just repeating loops of a handful of daily reports. Facebook made it possible to see more than 1000 news stories per day, and on average a user actually did see, in between all that other FB stuff, about 200. This was hacker culture writ large, in that the feed was built around content grabbed for free out of the internet ether.
"Media brands are diluted when people say, 'I read this on Facebook,' says David Chavern, director of the News Media Alliance.
Once upon a time, a person had to make a conscious decision to pick up a newspaper, turn on the evening news or buy a magazine. Now, news came to you -- was even offered to you, like a magician offering you a card -- as part of an artificial entertainment experience that skewed consumer expectations in a highly specific way.
"I read this on Facebook" soon came to mean something like "I read this in a highly individualized masturbation session." News became a thing that only made it through if it fit into those constant, round-the-clock sorties Facebook was flying straight to your personal pleasure center. Simultaneously, the news stopped being a broadcast program designed to be digested, for good or ill, by a group, as families had once done over their nightly meatloaf.
Most problematic of all, however, was the combination of algorithmic data analysis and free news content, which accelerated junk news trends that had already begun to poison the media business. TV stations like Fox had long ago ditched what you might call "eat your vegetables" news -- investigative reporting and pieces that either require significant mental effort to understand, some willingness to question one's own beliefs, or both.
But by the Eighties and Nineties, everyone in media was realizing that audiences cared more about seeing graphics, panda births, and newscasters withstanding hurricane winds than they cared about news. The innovation of stations like Fox was to sell xenophobia and racism in addition to the sensationalist crap.
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| Zucker-borg |
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