I know that it's a glaring contradiction to link to a lecture whose premise is that platforms like this one do everything they can to capture your attention and keep you using (by providing content, I'm contributing to the "capture"). One of the more effective methods used to do this is to promote content that "produces outrage." "Outrage" seems to be an potent motivator for social media users to continue to engage with various social media platforms and so more "outrageous" content is promoted and produced, creating a feedback loop of participants engaged in contentious arguments with one another. All of this "engagement" translates into higher ad revenue and profits for the social media platforms themselves and this disincentives them from actively modifying their own practices in order to amend the promotion of content that makes users "angry." (All of this is what the Turkish sociologist Zeynep Tufecki calls “persuasion architecture”, platforms crafted to subtly manipulate us so that we respond by continuing to provide them with our attention and our time*) This is, in part, how (and why) American politics has grown so partisan as "outrage breeds resentment" and this leads to deleterious effects on society as a whole. (I could elaborate further on this assertion but I’m not going to bother.) While this lecture alone might not paint an effective picture as to the problems associated with social media, I do have some other recommendations for you (dear reader) to peruse if you have both the inclination and the time (two of them mentioned in the video I’ve provided). A recent podcast by the New York Times called “Rabbit Hole’ offers a deeper examination of social media anchored by an investigation into the artificial intelligence behind YouTube’s recommendation algorithm and expanding out from there. *Zeynep Tufecki has done several TED Talks but the one I am specifically referring to here is from 2017 called ‘We're building a dystopia just to make people click on ads.’ Jarod Lanier - If you don’t know who he is, look him up. I’m just going to link to an interview he did Channel 4 about some of the ideas found in his 2018 book, ‘Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now’. (A title reminiscent of another book by Jerry Mander called ‘Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television’ written in 1978) Lanier was also on the Ezra Klein podcast back in 2018 which you can listen to here.
