How Media Gets to Know Me
I’m a hundred percent media consumer. In my recent screen time history, the average time I spent on my phone is 4 hour and 55 minutes. On average, I spent 45% of the screen time on social media platforms such as WeChat, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube. I used almost all the rest time to consume different kinds of media from one specific personal blog, The New York Times and The New Yorker. Beyond that, I also browsed a few media sources on my laptop for about 2 hours per day.
I wondered how the media choose contents for my customized page. My past media-consuming habits reminded me that my focus on media never changed at all. The articles I clicked shared common topics, from entertainment news to analysis of social phenomena. I paid most attention to the visual part, which is also most audience would be attracted. The advertisers made efforts to appeal to the audience even by the in-text illustration, the headlines, and the leads.
I used to believe the data media collected for creating a customized page is my most common clicks. However, the truth is more complicated and different. Even though sometimes I clicked something by mistake, the click was memorized by the system and the related content would continue to recommend to me listed as my “interests”. Sometimes I clicked because I was attracted by the picture or headline instead of the content, but I regretted as soon as I saw the content. Nevertheless, the click was also counted into my “interests”, too. In the end, more than half of the stories on my customized page were of little interest to me. Even the ads were the result of links that I accidentally clicked on. I wondered these platforms were trying to convert my focus, but it seemed that they collected more than the common clicks: they analyzed my real interests. Whatever I clicked, it has to have something appealing to me. It could be a comic picture, an ironic headline, even the face of my favorite celebrity appeared. For advertisers, they don’t need to design advertising in order to completely fall into my latitude of interest. Instead, they only need to include a few elements which would fully satisfy my appetite, and then I’ll click. Every single click means a closer step to success for them. The process of the media getting to know me is lengthy and “conspiratorial”.
I used to think the customized page is built only by using a formulated algorithm analyzing people’s most common and recent clicks. To be more concise, the browsing time per page could be also included in the algorithm. I overturned it by myself because when I searched a lot of academic resources in the days when I was composing an essay, the media never stops to list my interests related content on my page. Even though I didn’t click them for days, they will stay on there waiting for my next click. If the algorithm was practical, it will cause the problem of inaccurate analyzation. A lot of advertisements appeared will almost irrelevant to the contents or the audiences’ focus. In order to reach the potential audience more accurately, it’s important for the advertisers not only make efforts to the formats or pitches of advertisements themselves but also choose an appropriate place to launch.
