I applaud your effort to capture the history, evolution, psychology, and mechanics of print media, media literacy, television, media programming, media reception, social media, the attention economy, algorithmic bias, feedback dynamics, cognitive bias, brain sciences, and assorted other aspects of media into a single post… But I think in doing so the important distinctions between different types and kinds of media have been lost, not to mention important historical features of media ownership, power, narrative, and so on.
While it’s clear that the social proofing of even fake news presents a real and present danger to democratic societies, new media are a post-truth phenomenon. Social authentication and distribution of fake news — intended by participants or not—establishes social “headlines” of any sort as socially and culturally valid. Conditions of acceptance of these types of content and information are not true/false but socially valid/invalid. Social media provide authenticity to information because they embed it in a form of mediated communication—in short they transform information into communicative acts whose social validity makes them social facts, whether they are empirical facts or not.
Now the use of algorithms and data design to micro-target stories to individuals based on interest matches, media preferences, political and other inclinations, and to direct messaging through social tools so that they achieve some minimal level of authenticity and social currency may be new in its sophistication and frightening in its effectiveness.
But I do think that as new forms of content and programming develop (to wit binge-watching internet tv), we adapt both cognitively and socially. We have the capacity to be one step of any marketing algorithm and I’m confident that if needed, we’re able as a society and culture to outwit targeted messaging as well as exploitation of our social tools. It is up to a culture to shape and define what constitutes acceptable discourse. And the conditions of acceptability for any claim or call on our attention can change overnight. This happens in markets (Lehmann) as well as in popular culture. Culture constrains the acceptability of technical mechanisms — not the other way around. Technical means are not acceptable until or unless culture sees them as being so.
So we are not trapped in our technically-mediated and enabled discourses, but challenged to respond. With skepticism, doubt, clarity, and intelligence. As it’s always been. And as I’m sure we’re doing.
