The Quantitative Trap
How systems rewarding more punish good
By MARTIN REZNY
At first, I just wanted to congratulate Derakhshan on a great analysis of the negatives of creeping recentralization and streamification of the internet, and then return to sulking about it. Unlike him, I’ve gone into blogging way too late and had to surrender to posting stuff to Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, SoundCloud, and such (such ultimately including also Medium).
However, as a graduate of media and communication, I can’t help but contribute a few more observations of what current trends in media mean to “content creators” like me, and I must say that for whole genres and schools of thought, it means pretty much guaranteed slow and painful death, and it sure doesn’t feel like what we’re losing is the bad stuff.
Culture of Quantity
The simplest way to explain the core of the problem is the age old contrast of quantity versus quality. The current paradigm is extremely quantitative — mathematical algorithms process inputs like numbers of views, numbers of “likes” or stars or just plain numbers, numbers of comments, or statistical frequencies of various objective actions and occurrences that can be enumerated, in order to direct more of all of it to what’s generating it most.
The sad-funny thing about it is that all this purely quantitative data is supposed to determine how good something is, answering a qualitative question. Despite what marketers seem to believe, math cannot compute quality, at least not currently, and the result is therefore a foregone conclusion — good is that which appeals to more people, that which compels them to do more doings, that which makes them pay more money.
That’s one of possible perspectives on quality, and I’m not saying that it doesn’t make any logical sense, but let’s look at culture as a technology. The contents appealing to most people are known — sexiness, cuteness, shock, excitement, and so on. Primal emotions stimulating instinctive reactions, effective at drilling habits into people and causing psychological addictions. Now think — should the purpose of culture be just instant gratification?
Put in another way, what if that which is good for social media is no longer good for society? Social media definitely are a technology, which means that we should be able to make them into whatever we want or need them to be. So let’s look more closely at how we can figure out what we actually want or need.
The Broken Feedback
Whether you like it or not, “likes” are meaningless, as well as their numbers. People are perfectly willing to like what they consider great, okay, or terrible alike, and that’s if you pretend that quality is only a line, and that people have in any way comparable standards. Whatever happened to the incomparability of different qualities? How do you compare a great funny work to a great terrifying work? Or a great sci-fi novel to a terrible pop music video to an okay news channel? By a number of clicks?
In fact, any quantitative unit of measurement of interaction with a text should be called a “click”, that’s literally all that it means, qualitatively speaking. It doesn’t say if it makes people ashamed, furious, ecstatic, smarter, dumber, etc. Sure, it does say if it made them spend more money or vote for a candidate, but is it good that they did so? By literally any other measure than somebody making a profit or winning? Of course, it doesn’t even try to define good, it doesn’t care who anybody is.
Put simply, our society is mentally stuck in the eighties playing an arcade, feeling awesome about how many beeps it did in the game, but getting poorer while wasting time and accomplishing or learning nothing. Ours is at best a simulation of a culture, faking the superficial elements of it, like content being generated and watched and “rated”, but there’s very little in terms of real expression or reflection of meaning, just vague sentiments.
In Numbers We Trust
I suppose the reason why numbers have dominated our culture has to do with the naïve and incorrect belief that numbers and technology are neutral, and do not inherently contain any values. As I have hopefully already demonstrated, nothing can be further from the truth — number based technology of communication has completely reshaped our culture. For the most part against our collective wishes and expectations, I might add.
At least when you boil down the internet to how it influences culture, it’s really quite straightforward, given that it is a completely objective and quantifiable system. What you can see on any given screen and what you can effectively find in one of the top results of a search is a limited resource, and that’s where the invisible algorithms come in. As explained above, what you will be allowed to see and find has to be primarily that which is the most current, the most stimulating, or that which is backed by the most money.
What it means is that mild, moderate, serious, ponderous, heavy, and/or timeless stuff is at a major technical disadvantage, much like poor people. Given that fight for the resource of visibility is a zero sum game stuck in an endless feedback-loop, substance is bound to gradually disappear, unless some major actions are taken by the audiences, who are decreasingly aware that anything else than obnoxious inane drivel or exhilarating fun stuff even exists.
And that’s where I intend to leave you before returning to my sulking, in the increasingly barren cultural desert of the forever-now. What? You’d like solutions? Bah, alright.
Until we actually teach computers to understand, using math that calculates meaning, the feedback systems have to be redesigned to be more human at their core — like valuing if people actually stuck to reading the whole article here on Medium, or perhaps through tags categorizing opinions and thus quality of engagement, or letting people put together lists of things, however abstract, ambivalent, and emphemeral the logic of the association.
One thing is for certain though — we shouldn’t expect the social media corporations to do it for us, and we shouldn’t just accept their “innovations”. Perhaps ignoring what they’re trying to feed us is a good start, looking beyond the first page of searches, and maybe we should look for advertisement-free funding models, too. Who knows, maybe all it would take is simply snapping out of the Pavlovian conditioning, always stopping yourself for a moment before clicking anything, giving yourself time to think through what you really want to see more of.
Shame none of that is gonna happen. I’ve earned my sulk now, begone.
