...Wheeler pinpoints the launch of CNN in 1980 as the beginning of today’s destabilizing shift:
“Immediately after the switch was thrown, I was in the CNN control room. What I saw was the opening salvo of the information world in which we find ourselves today. There, on the monitor, was a live feed from a beach in Florida where nothing was happening. The correspondent was reporting that the anticipated hurricane had not yet hit. At that moment, the nature of news changed. Traditional TV would have waited for the hurricane to hit landfall. But with 24 hours of airtime to fill, CNN had just redefined news to include what wasn’t happening…
From XIIID Research, Nov. 23:The abundance of video capacity on cable TV enabled the installation of multiple curators who differentiated their product through editorial decisions. The proliferation of cable news channels demonstrated how it was profitable to target opinionated programming to specific population segments. Today’s social media news and information follows the same model.”...
This epidemic “infobesity” has degraded truth and trust.
Previously from XIIID:The stats tell the bewildering story. In a single year, Americans now consume more than 1.3 trillion hours of information outside of work, or roughly 12 hours per person per day, according to a University of California, San Diego study. An average person taps his or her phone roughly 2,600 times every day. And the average human attention span has fallen from 12 seconds in 2000, to eight seconds in 2015, according to a Microsoft-sponsored study.In these pages, we have sought to dissect the events, economic dynamics, and potential regulatory approaches that will shape the lawmaker response to tech-giant power. Writing for the Brookings Institute last week, former FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler makes a vital case for why controlling the internet’s information firehose should top the list of ambitions.According to estimates, humans today consume roughly the same amount of information in a day as consumed in a week just thirty years ago. This epidemic “infobesity” lies at the heart of the global degradation of truth and trust. In turn, the business models of platforms like Facebook and Google — which “prioritize advertising velocity over factual veracity,” as Wheeler puts it — pose an existential threat to the global democratic order.The escalation of global information consumption may not be reversible or even a pure ill. However, only by addressing information overload head-on can regulators arrest the destabilizing spiral to information anarchy.We excerpt from Wheeler’s article, entitled “Did Technology Kill the Truth”:“We carry in our pockets and purses the greatest democratizing tool ever developed. Never before has civilization possessed such an instrument of free expression…Yet, that unparalleled technology has also become a tool to undermine truth and trust. The glue that holds institutions and governments together has been thinned and weakened by the unrestrained capabilities of technology exploited for commercial gain. The result has been to de- democratize the internet.We have seen this new reality gnaw at our political processes. The agents that formerly curated fact-based debates have been cast off in favor of algorithms whose first loyalty is not veracity…We exist in a time when technological capabilities and economic incentives have combined to attack truth and weaken trust. It is not an act of pre-planned perdition. Unchecked, however, it will have the same effect.Thus far, our response has been to address this 21st-century challenge in 20th-century terms and propose 19th-century solutions. We need to do better. We must determine how to harness the new technology to protect against the very problems it has created.”The tug-of-war between horizontal (i.e. peer-to-peer) and vertical (i.e. gatekeeper controlled) information exchange has been ongoing since Roman times. For a millennium, the Roman Catholic Church and landed nobility controlled the flow of information. Then Gutenberg’s printing press emerged, giving distributable voice to the previously silent. The 19th and 20th centuries saw two significant shifts: first the telegraph and telephone decentralized and then the radio and television centralized. And as author Tom Standage documents in his book, “Writing on the Wall,” each major shift in information exchange both instigated rapid progress as well as war-torn instability.Wheeler pinpoints the launch of CNN in 1980 as the beginning of today’s destabilizing shift:“Immediately after the switch was thrown, I was in the CNN control room. What I saw was the opening salvo of the information world in which we find ourselves today. There, on the monitor, was a live feed from a beach in Florida where nothing was happening. The correspondent was reporting that the anticipated hurricane had not yet hit. At that moment, the nature of news changed. Traditional TV would have waited for the hurricane to hit landfall. But with 24 hours of airtime to fill, CNN had just redefined news to include what wasn’t happening…The abundance of video capacity on cable TV enabled the installation of multiple curators who differentiated their product through editorial decisions. The proliferation of cable news channels demonstrated how it was profitable to target opinionated programming to specific population segments. Today’s social media news and information follows the same model.”From cable television to personal computers and smartphones, digital technologies transformed the information ecosystem by decreasing the cost of producing and distributing content while simultaneously enabling anytime, anywhere discoverability and consumption. Information gatekeepers — nightly-news broadcasters, national and local newspapers, even pop stars — have seen their cultural and political influence fade as cable news talking heads, bloggers, vloggers, podcasters, and most of all, peer-to-peer communication has risen in power. As revered tech columnist Walt Mossberg told Bob Schieffer for his new book, “Overload: Finding Truth in Today’s Deluge of News”: “The point is, we have much more at our fingertips. But we have much worse curations.”The downsides of this unprecedented information abundance and access have grown ever-ubiquitous and undeniable. To name just three: Information siloing has intensified social and ideological divides. Confirmation bias has devalued fact in favor of self-affirming opinion. And negativity bias has drowned out positive global developments, exacerbating pessimism and in turn, populist anger (WILTW November 13, 2016). As study after study has found, from digital infobesity has come increased stress rates, political polarization, cratering faith in institutions, and the devastation of consensus truth (WILTW February 23, 2017)....MORE
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