“Fake News” is just one sign the digital giants are slipping
If someone offered you money just to make up stuff, would you do it? Don’t worry about it being good or substantial, like a novel — that would be too hard. You just have to give it a catchy heading and a photo. Ideally something involving a celebrity or one of any ‘hot button’ issues of the day.
I’d be tempted — after all it’s money for nothing — which makes it hard to get too riled up about fake news. Especially when some newspapers — you know who you are Daily Mail, The Sun for example — have been doing the same thing for many, many years.
Credit: Buzzfeed
Looking at things in isolation, one can wonder how anyone can possibly believe some of these fake news items. We are frequently so cynical and, in a world of ‘alternative facts’, the status of ‘expert’ has never been more maligned yet we appear to be increasingly credulous. (There are some good pieces about the role of mainstream media in encouraging the rise of fake news here and here.)
Why? Some of this might be down to the influence of ‘motivated reasoning’: an individual seeks out information that confirms their beliefs (leading to the same ‘bubble’ effect that gained prominence with last year’s electoral shocks) or uses one or two pieces of information that are inconsistent with a theory to debunk (in their minds) said theory. In this way, motivated reasoning helps to reduce ‘cognitive dissonance’ — the adherence to beliefs against the overwhelming weight of evidence. Climate change deniers are walking case studies of cognitive dissonance, and cherry picking stats, such as using the earth’s surface temperature (which, FYI, has also increased) or assumptions about the motivations of the scientific community, is the motivated reasoning.
Simply put, we want some things to be true so we find ways that allow us to believe them to be true. Or at least, we are attracted to the idea of them possibly being true that we give them undue consideration and thus create a feedback loop through the magic of online advertising mechanics.
It is tempting to think that this is all an awkward phase, the macro equivalent of teenagers arguing with parents who try to stop them smoking or drinking. Sooner or later everyone will calm down and start to behave more rationally.
Yet in most developed countries, a large proportion of people live much of their lives in the digital world, and it is a world so flooded with disingenuous
material it is becoming harder than ever to know what is real, desirable and achievable. Fake news is really just the tip of the iceberg.
Stretching ‘authentic’ to the limits
Consider some of the digital environments where many people literally spend hours every day.
Facebook in 2006 was very different from today — about all you could do was put-up a status and ‘poke’ people. Your ‘wall’ (note, not ‘feed’) was entirely made up of things your friends put online. Now of course, it’s one of the most sophisticated advertising platforms ever built. It’s a totally different proposition, and if I judged my friendships by my feed, my best friends would be a couple of newspapers and a UK nightly news program.
Twitter too has morphed from its micro-blogging origins to a new broadcast medium, and then into the world’s largest collection of semi-professional axe-grinders and raging ‘-ists’. Twitter has never really got a handle on the abuse that circulates on its pages and people genuinely suffer as a result.
One of the earliest signals for the manipulation of new media platforms was TripAdvisor. The promise was that crowdsourced reviews of hotels, restaurants and B&Bs are inherently better than guide books. But soon the site was embroiled in controversy: hoteliers and restauranteurs complained that fake reviews, posted by people who had never visited their establishments, were putting off potential customers and harming their revenues. On the flip side, ‘digital reputation management’ — the practice of scrubbing negative feedback from the online world, has grown to become an industry in its own right. And changes to defamation law made platforms such as TripAdvisor more willing to simply remove negative comments after receiving complaints, rather than try to defend the poster’s views.
Consider too, one of the other darlings of the digital world — Airbnb. I remember the first time I spotted listings from holiday companies — it was jarring for me because I had thought that this wasn’t a site for traditional listings. And now, there’s a whole Airbnb look and feel that accommodation providers emulate to ensure high levels of interest (for a really interesting read on this effect, and how the digital is affecting the physical world, check out this piece from The Verge.) That’s not to say it’s not genuine, yet do we run the risk of turning Airbnb into a McDonalds of the holiday rental world? A familiar experience wherever you go delivered, to all intents, through a huge, dispersed hotel chain?
Instagram is stark example of how an industry has developed to give the trappings of authenticity. We are, of course, talking about ‘influencers’, people who can get paid thousands of dollars to post a photo and a caption of food/fashion/travel etc.
There’s actually a lot of hard work that goes into something that come across as spontaneous and genuine. Their posts are not successful accidentally. They are finely calibrated to appeal to the widest audience; arranged and captured with utmost care and edited to create a specific effect. Each post is essentially a micro magazine shoot, usually funded by the same brands that would have spent big on a spread in a glossy magazine.
Credit: hstudios. Many of those classic ‘spontaneous’ top-down snaps you see on Instagram use a similar set up to this.
Which, to be clear, is absolutely fine. No value judgments here, simply congratulations to those making a living out of it. However, brands pay these influencers because the typical social media user identifies more with an individual than a media company. And who can blame them? Yet the model is not well understood by people who don’t work in the industry and who are therefore more likely to take at face value the influencers’ carefully cultivated lifestyle.
As long as people are happy, who cares?
As a disclaimer, I use each all of these services, and have done for many years. Yet it’s not hard to notice that each has evolved (as successful businesses do). In these cases, the quest for monetisation has seen them move away from their original focus and, as part of that, they have gradually reduced the immediate connection to an authentic person, place or experience.
Credit: Jacob. It’s a nice art shot, but have you ever seen London actually look like this?
So what, you may ask, it is not exactly a great social crisis that needs to be solved. And you would be right. However, if one were trying to imagine how we will interact with technology and platforms in the future, and how it might be possible for companies and services that are so ingrained in our daily lives (and worth billions) to fail, fall out of fashion, or even die entirely, then it’s not a bad place to start.
The problem that might eventually derail the all-conquering progress of the digital giants is one of quality and authenticity. Sure, for all of them the aim at the beginning was to be authentic, to connect people to each other quicker and easier. But the real business has always been about the scale: the number of users and the flow of data because that’s how the primary method of monetisation. And in that sense, they don’t care why people use their services, only that they do.
Enabling people to create authentic connections to others runs right to the heart of what these companies were set up to do. If we reach a cultural turning point whereby we decide that we have enough of unrealistic, detached or downright fake material, then a new mode of digital engagement will become dominant. Or maybe it will prompt us to seek (further) isolation among likeminded groups as we attempt to shield ourselves from the onslaught of falsity and hate. If that’s the case, we may unwittingly accelerate the fragmentation of our societies. Then social media and the digital platforms they are built upon will have failed to live up to their great promise, and we will all be the poorer for it.
