Journalism is often poor, but we’ve replaced it with something worse
Social media relies on two faulty premises: that informed amateurs can contribute meaningfully to debates, and that busy people have the time and ability to pick out the informed contributions.
“Think of how stupid the average person is and then realize that half of them are stupider than that.” - George Carlin
One of the great promises of social media - perhaps the biggest lie told about it - is that it betters debate by allowing the average person to contribute their knowledge to a rolling conversation.
And by average, I don’t mean in intelligence. Social media’s premise is that it allows, for example, the heretofore unknown professional virologist to add their thoughts on a new strain of deadly coronavirus, or for a former aircraft pilot to offer their thoughts on why a Boeing 787 might have had its fuel control switches moved from ‘RUN’ to ‘CUTOFF’, causing a crash. Social media, we were told, would add depth and context to any ongoing debate.
Only that’s not how it works in practice. Social media isn’t a place of depth. Or context. At least not reliably accurate depth or context. It’s (mostly) a place of sensationalism, bullshit and speculation. A place where sensationalism, bullshit and speculation perform better than accurate depth or context.
Which isn’t to say informed amateurs don’t exist. The professional virologists were active during the Covid-19 pandemic. Former airline pilots did chip in on their socials when Air India Flight 171 crashed shortly after takeoff in Ahmedabad. And most of them had useful things to say. They were just hard to pick out in the daily tsunami of bullshit and speculation that dominates on social media - the stuff produced by the less informed amongst us. A detailed, reasoned and factual explanation doesn’t perform as well as someone with their hair on fire claiming (INSERT BODY OF AUTHORITY) is lying to everyone.
Which brings us to the other great lie told about social media…
We don’t have the time, energy, or ability to adjudicate raw information
Here’s a truth: most average people are busy.
The average person doesn’t have enough time in their day to wade through a stream of unfiltered commentary to pick out the useful nuggets. Or the ability. As intelligent as we might be, or well versed in our professional area of expertise, we can’t be experts in all things.
Are you well-versed enough in physics and chemistry to know at what point steel fails, triggering the collapse of a 110-storey structure? Do you know enough about Israeli vs. Hamas rocketry to know who bombed the hospital? How about Ukrainian-Russian history? In other words, do you know enough about the world to not fall prey to any lies that might be told about it?
Most of us don’t have enough knowledge in our resting brain banks to contribute usefully to these debates. Or to know, exactly, what we’re seeing. Thankfully for most of human history we haven’t had the ability to advertise our ignorance (however well-intentioned it might be).
Not anymore.
Social media encourages us to gainsay information and contribute in the moment, because the algorithms like conflict and don’t weight for relevance or accuracy. They’re not designed to pick out the relevant nuggets. At present, they weight for excitability and contagion - for Fool’s Gold. The algorithms will propel whatever is proven to keep our eyes on their platforms’ screens. And they do that because the platforms only get paid when we’re active on their platforms.
So our feeds start getting clogged with the more excitable bits from our feeds of nonsense.
Good thing we’re binning off the industry we used to rely on to curate our information
If only there was some kind of system - or profession - that could pick through the confusion of daily life and curate a smorgasbord of relevant information from informed observers?
Oh wait, we already have journalism. But journalism is dissolving in the battery acid of algorithmic, ad-based social media. The modern attention economy is where journalism goes to die. You try selling facts in a land where bullshit draws more attention and makes more money.
This is when the boo-birds will pop up in my feed to decry the state of modern journalism. And you know what? They’re right, to a point. Much of modern journalism is a poor imitation of its past self. It is an industry in financial crisis with a huge credibility problem. Journalism got the answer as to how to deal with the rise of the internet wrong. It got how to cope with social media wrong. It will surely fumble anything related to AI. At some point, journalism will realise that humping technology companies for money is a sign of Stockholm Syndrome.
And so is humping the government for money extracted from the major technology companies. With trust in journalism already dangerously low, the last thing media organisations should be doing is taking money from the people they’re meant to hold to account.
And yet, here we are.
This is when the boo-birds re-appear to say that any industry that can’t compete deserves to die. And that’s fine, as long as society doesn’t need the function that is dying off. But society needs the functions that journalism has historically provided and these functions are not being replaced by the new voices and powers of the attention economy. They are the functions being killed off by the attention economy.
Journalism commits many sins. It’s not perfect, nor has it ever been. It misses stories. It ignores voices. It can protect power instead of challenging it. It is powered by imperfect people making imperfect calls. But its mandate and function are important and society needs dedicated professionals whose full-time job it is to help us make sense of a fast-moving world. We don’t have the time or ability to do it ourselves.
More to the point, we don’t want to live in a society without power being held to account. We don’t want to live in societies where fiction trades at a premium to fact all so a few tech platforms can make shedloads of money trafficking us to their advertisers. We don’t want to live in a society where each of us has to wade through a firehose of raw, unfiltered content to find and judge the truth. It’s exhausting.
But that’s the world we’re condemned to live in until we put a harness around the unfettered attention-hoovering done by the major platforms of the attention economy.