What surprised me was that this fire captain was at---of all things---an Extinction Rebellion protest. This surprised me, because the fellow who posted the link is someone who is very adamant about man-made climate change being a total crock.
This surprised me so much I decided to ask him a question about it.
Hulet: So you believe in the climate change problem?
(Name withheld by me to avoid identifying the guy): Not the hype. Not this cat. The climate has been changing for billions of years. Nothing new there.
Hulet: Oh. I was just wondering why you posted that video then, he was talking at an Extinction Rebellion event---.
Unidentified guy: I focused on the broader general government corruption points.When I first watched the video the thing that really jumped out at me was that the fireman wasn't making any obviously factual claims. Instead, he was just complaining over an over again about how "corrupt" the government is. (My significant other pointed out that he's probably physically and emotionally exhausted from working constantly trying to fight the enormous Australian bush fires.) Whatever the reason, the video is pretty much entirely an emotive statement---just a long-winded way of saying over and over again: "I'm really upset and angry about the people running our society".
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Well, here we are, it's a new year. I know a lot of people read my blog. I know a number of you are fairly well off. So why not make a New Year's resolution to support local Indie media by buying a subscription to "The Guelph Back-Grounder"? PayPal and Patreon make it easy.
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I've also been trying to find the time to work through a couple books for future stories. One of them is Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation.
Marantz's argument is that the people running social media platforms on the Web have created artificial intelligence programs that can almost instantly tell what form of titles and content will attract random viewers to a specific story. (This is what is known as "click bait".) With this data analysis in hand, a whole new publishing industry has been created that simply selects for and designs exclusively on the basis of what sells instead of what is "true", "good", "important", or any other criteria that editors used to use to decide what stories to put in their newspapers or magazines.
Just to give you an idea of how successful this new editorial strategy has become, Marantz contrasts an aggregator website named "Upworthy" that just takes existing goofy stories from other on-line sites, repackages them in their own format, and, adds titles that tend to attract attention. Supposedly, "Upworthy" reported 87 million unique visits a month one year after it launched---more than The New York Times. (I was overjoyed when The Guelph-Back-Grounder broke 2,000 a month last November!)
Research has shown that what gets selected for "click bait" tends to based on a small number of emotions.
"Content that evokes high-arousal emotion is more likely to be shared," two Wharton professors wrote in 2012. "Positive and negative emotions characterized by high arousal (i.e., awe, anxiety, and anger) are positively linked to virality, while emotions characterized by low arousal (i.e., sadness) were negatively linked to virality."
High-arousal emotions are also called activating emotions. They are emotions that lead to measurable behaviors---in this case, clicking or liking or sharing a link---as opposed to deactivating emotions, which are more likely to induce torpor or paralysis.
(from Antisocial, Chapter 5---the Ebook lacks page numbers.)And the thing to understand is that
From the standpoint of sheer entrepreneurial competition, what matters is not whether a piece of online content is true or false, responsible or reckless, prosocial or antisocial. All that matters is how many activating emotions it can provoke.*
Footnote * Three MIT computer scientists, writing in Science in 2018, found that false rumors on Facebook evoked more high-arousal emotions than the actual news, which was more likely to inspire such deactivating emotions as malaise and confusion. This was one of the explanations for the paper's main finding: that fake news is consistently more likely to go viral than the truth.
(Antisocial, Chapter 5 plus footnote.)
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I can't help but think that the real issue is that some people get addicted to the feeling of being angry. It triggers something like an adrenaline rush---like jumping out an airplane while sky diving or blasting down a road fast on a hot motorcycle.
The problem from a social point of view is that this addicting behaviour is being promoted by businesses in order to promote advertising and push a political agenda. For example, as I pointed out in one of my more popular posts---Fundraising is Making Us Angry---the Conservative party bases most of it's fundraising on making supporters angry so they do "rage giving".
It's as if our society has allowed big businesses total freedom to distribute highly addictive drugs and "let the chips fall where they may" when it comes to the larger impact on society. (Wait---we did that with opioids didn't we? That's why we have two methadone clinics and a safe injection site in downtown Guelph, plus teenagers carrying around naloxone kits in their backpacks "just in case" they come across someone having an overdose.)
It didn't use to be this way. Newspapers, magazines, and, radio and tv stations used to have editors who took responsibility for what they published or aired. There were councils that forced them to show some restraint in what they printed. Could someone please explain to me why the government hasn't forced InterWeb companies like FaceBook and YouTube to take similar responsibility for printing out-and-out bullshit that cranks up adrenaline addicts?We used to have things like
- "truth in advertising" regulations through the Competition Bureau of Canada
- law 181 of the Federal Criminal code that said "Every one who wilfully publishes a statement, tale or news that he knows is false and that causes or is likely to cause injury or mischief to a public interest is guilty of an indictable offence and liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding two years"
- the American Federal Communications Commission had a "fairness doctrine" that governed the public airwaves from 1949 to 1987, which said that private broadcasters used the airwaves at the pleasure of the public. This meant that government regulators could force companies that were awarded a license for exclusive use of a specific frequencies to broadcast information for the public good (ie: "news") and that they had to allow different points of view equal ability to express themselves on air (ie: the radio and tv couldn't be political shills for one point of view or party---in effect, no Fox News or Rush Limbaugh allowed.)
- the National NewsMedia Council that you could complain to if you thought a newspaper, magazine, etc, was violating journalist or ethical standards
but for some weird reason the government of Canada (as well as almost everywhere else) has decided that "the Internet is new, it's groovy, it's disruptive---so absolutely none of the old rules apply!!!!"
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Furthermore, I say to you---climate emergency must be dealt with!
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