The Truth, Online

Reading Jill Lepore's review of Michael Patrick Lynch's new book, The Internet of Us, reminded me to write something on the topic of truth. I haven't read Lynch's book yet, but even the sub-title ("Knowing more and understanding less in the age of big data") gave me that all-too-familiar twinge of jealousy, of feeling as though someone had written about an idea that had been gestating in my mind for years before I had the chance to write about it myself, of being scooped. So, during this brief lacuna between the time at which I learned of this book's existence and the time at which I actually read it, let me tell you what I think it should be about, given that title. That is: how is it possible that the Internet helps us to know more and to understand less? Or, to take Lepore's tack, what is the relationship between the Internet/Big Data and the truth/reality?

At this stage, I have only a semi-organized collection of ideas on the topic. I'll base each idea around a question.

To what extent has truth (or reality) become subjective in the age of the Internet/Big Data? 

I think we vastly overestimate the extent to which the Internet has fragmented our sense of truth and/or reality. And by "we," I mean most people who think about the Internet, not just scholars or experts. My sense is that it is a commonly held belief that the Internet allows people access to many versions of the truth, and also that groups of people subscribe to the versions that fit their worldviews. This assumption is at the core of the "filter bubble" argument and undergirds the assertion that the Internet is driving fragmentation of polarization of societies.

I contend that most people agree on the truth or reality of most things, but that we tend not to notice the things we agree on and instead focus on the things on which we do not agree. Imagine that we designed a quiz about 100 randomly selected facets of reality. We don't cherrypick controversial topics. It could be something as pedestrian as: "what color is they sky?" ; "if I drop an object, will it fall to the ground, fly into the sky, or hover in the air" ; "2 + 2 = ?" I'd imagine that people would provide very similar answers to almost all of these questions, regardless of how much time they spend on the Internet. Even when we do not explicitly state that we agree on something, we act as though we believe a certain thing that other people believe as well. We all behave as if we agree on the solidity of the ground on which we walk, the color of the lines on the roadways and what they mean, and thousands of other aspects of reality in everyday life.

The idea that reality or truth is becoming entirely subjective, fragmented, or polarized is likely the result of us becoming highly focused on the aspects on which we do not agree. That focus, in turn, is likely the result of us learning about the things on which we do not agree (that is, of us being exposed to people who perceive a handful of aspects of reality in a very different way than we perceive them) and of truth/reality relating to these handful of aspects genuinely becoming more fragmented. Certainly, it is alarming to think about what society would look like if we literally could not agree on anything, either explicitly or implicitly; so, there is understandable alarm about the trend toward subjectivity, regardless of how small and overestimated the trend may be.

So, I'm not saying that that truth/reality isn't becoming more fragmented; I'm only saying that part of it is becoming that way, and that we tend to ignore the parts that are not.

It's also worth considering the way in which the Internet has unified people in terms of what they believe truth/reality to be. If we look at societies around the globe, many don't agree on aspects of world history, how things work, etc. Some of those people gained access to the Internet and then began to believe in a reality that many others around the globe believe in: that certain things happened in the past, that certain things work in certain ways. Reality and truth were never unified to begin with. The Internet has likely fragmented some aspects of reality and the truth for some, but it has also likely unified other aspects for others.

Maybe I'm just being pedantic or nit-picky, but I think any conversation about the effects of the Internet on our ability to perceive a shared truth/reality should start with an explicit acknowledgment that when people say that society's notion of truth/reality is fragmented, they actually mean that a small (but important) corner of our notion of truth/reality is fragmented. Aside from considering the net effects of the Internet on reality (has it fragmented more than it unified?), we might also consider this question:

What types of things do we agree on?

Are there any defining characteristics of the aspects of truth/reality on which we don't agree? When I try to think of these things (things like abortion, gun rights, affirmative action, racism, economic philosophy, immigration policy, climate change, evolution, the existence of god), the word "controversial" comes to mind, but identifying this category of things on which we don't agree as "controversial" is tautological: they're controversial because we don't agree on them; the controversy exists because we can't agree.

So how about this rule of thumb: we tend to agree on simple facts more than we agree on complex ones. When I think of the heated political discourse in the United States at this time, I think about passionate disagreements about economic policy (what policy will result in the greatest benefit for all?), immigration (ditto), gun rights (do the benefits of allowing more people to carry guns [e.g., preventing tyrannical government subjugation, preventing other people with guns from killing more people] outweigh the drawbacks (e.g., increased likelihood of accidents; increased suicide rates], and abortion (at what point in the gestational process does human life begin?). These are not simple issues, though many talk about them as if the answers to the questions associated with each issue were self-evident.

I can think of a few reasons why truth/reality around these issues is fragmenting. One is, essentially, the filter bubble problem: the Internet gives us greater access to other people, arguments, facts, and data that can all be used by the motivated individual as evidence that they are on the right side of the truth. In my research methods class, I talk about how the Internet has supplied us with vast amounts of data and anecdotes, and that both are commonly misused to support erroneous claims. One of these days, I'll get around to putting that class lecture online, but the basic gist of it is that unless you approach evidence with skepticism, with the willingness to reach a conclusion that contradicts the one you set out to find, you're doing it wrong. Dan Brooks has a terrific blog post about how Twitter increases our access to "straw men." So, not only does the Internet provide us with access to seemingly objective evidence that we are right; it also provides an infinite supply of straw men with which to argue.

In these aforementioned cases in which we disagree about complex issues, we tend not to disagree about whether or not something actually happened, whether an anecdote is actually true or whether data is or is not fabricated. Most disagreements stem from the omission of relevant true information or the inclusion of irrelevant true information. We don't really attack arguments for these sins; we tend not to even notice them, and instead talk past each other, grasping at more and more anecdotes and data (of which there will be an endless supply) that support our views.

If it is the complex issues on which we cannot agree, then perhaps the trend toward disagreement is a function of the increasing complexity and interdependency of modern societies. Take the economy. Many voters will vote for an elected official based on whether or not they believe that the policies implemented by that official will produce a robust economy. But when you stop and think about how complex the current global economy is, it is baffling how anyone could be certain that his or her policies would result in particular outcomes. Similarly, it is difficult to know what the long-term outcomes of bank regulations might be, or military interventionalism (or lack thereof). Outcomes related to each issue involve the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors of billions of people, and while the situations we currently face and those we face in the future resemble situations we've faced in the past (or situations that economists, psychologists, or other "ists" could simulate), they differ in many others that are difficult to predict (that's simply the nature of outcomes that involve billions of people over long periods of time). And yet we act with such certainty when we debate such topics! Why is that? This leads to my last question:

Why can't we arrive at a shared truth about these few-but-important topics?

First, there is the problem of falsifiability. Claims relating to these topics typically involve an outcome that can be deferred endlessly. For example, one might believe that capitalism will result in an inevitable worker revolution. If the revolution hasn't occurred yet, that is not evidence that it will never occur; only evidence that it hasn't occurred yet. There's also the problem of isolating variables. Perhaps you believe that something will come to pass at a certain time and then it doesn't, and you ascribe the fact that it doesn't to a particular cause, but unless you've made some effort to isolate the variable, you can't rule out the possibility that the cause you identified actually had nothing to do with the outcome.

There are falsifiable ways of pursuing answers to questions relating to these topics. And despite all the hand-wringing about the fragmentation of truth/reality on these topics, there are also plenty of folks interested in the honest pursuit of these answers; answers that, despite the growing complexity of the object of study (i.e., human behavior on a mass scale), are getting a bit easier to find with the growing amounts of observations to which we have access via the Internet.

The other problem is the lack of incentive to arrive at the truth. Often times, we get immediate payoff for supporting a claim that isn't true, in the form of positive affect (e.g., righteous anger, in contrast to the feeling of existential doubt that often comes with admitting you're wrong) and staying on good terms with those around you (admitting you're wrong is often inseparable from admitting that your friends, or family, or the vast majority of your race or gender or nationality are wrong). So, there are powerful incentives (affective and social) to arrive at certain conclusions regardless of whether or not these are in line with truth/reality. In contrast, the incentives to be right about such things seem diffuse. We would benefit as a society and a species if we all right about everything, right?

I suppose some would argue that total agreement would be bad, that some diversity of opinions would be better. But we don't tolerate diversity of opinion on whether or not the law of gravity exists, or whether 2+2 = 4. Why would we tolerate it in the context of economic policy? Is it just because of how complex economies are, and that to think you have the right answer is folly? (I suppose that's a whole other blog entry right there, isn't it). But certainly, even if you believe that, you'd agree that some ideas about economies are closer to or further from the truth and reality of economies. So, perhaps what I'm saying is that if we lived in a society where "less right" ideas were jettisoned in favor of "more right" ideas, we would all benefit greatly, but that the benefits would only come if a large number of us acted on a shared notion of the truth and that the benefit would be spread out among many (hence, "diffuse").

But what if there were an immediate incentive to be right about these complex issues, something to counter the immediate affective and social payoffs of being stubborn and "truth agnostic?" I love the idea of prediction markets, which essentially attach a monetary incentive to predictions about, well, anything. You could make a claim about economic policy, immigration policy, terrorism policy, etc., and if you were wrong, you would lose money.

Imagine you're a sports fan who loves a particular team. You have a strong emotional and social incentive to bet on your team. But if your team keeps losing and you keep betting on your favorite team, you're going to keep losing money. If you had to participate in a betting market, you'd learn pretty quickly how to arrive at more accurate predictions. You would learn how to divide your "passionate fan" self from your betting self. And if you compare the aggregate predictions of passionate fans to the aggregate predictions of bettors, I'd imagine that the latter would be far more accurate. I would assume it would work more or less the same way with other kinds of predictions. People would still feel strongly about issues and still be surrounded by people who gave them a strong incentive to believe incomplete truths or distorted realities. But they would have an incentive to cultivate alternate selves who made claims more in tune with a shared reality.

Of course, not all issues lend themselves to being turned into bets (how would one bet on whether or not life begins after the first trimester?), but it still seems like, at least, a step in the right direction, and gives me hope for how we can understand the truth and our relationship to it in the Internet age, perhaps even better than we did before.

Looking Back on the Start of our Lives Online

I've been blogging for about 10 years as of last month. I started the blog during my first semester of graduate school at the University of Texas. Now, ten years later, I'm in my first semester as an Assistant Professor. I've used the blog as a way to catalog ideas related to my work and passion: understanding media use, in particular new/digital media use. I like to think that I've been able to refine my thinking on this topic through this blog. If nothing else, the blog serves as a record the evolution of my thinking. It allows me (or anyone else) to travel back in time and see how I thought.

While we're on the subject of travelling back in time (as a nostalgist, this is subject to which I obsessively return), I'd like to go back even further, about 20 years ago, to the time when I first started using the Internet. Recently, I was prompted by a question: "what was it like to use the Internet in the 90's". I took this to mean, "what did it feel like?" Here are some thoughts:

The big difference between the online experience then and the online experience now, one that many young people today wouldn't think about, is the way in which search engines changes things. In the mid-90's, you had to either hear about a specific website from a friend, a magazine, or TV (though no one in mainstream media really cared about the internet, so it was mostly through friends). Then you had to type the specific web address into the Netscape Navigator browser address bar. Good search engines (and the explosion of worthwhile websites in the late 90's) changed the online experience from hopping around a small series of content islands to something that feels like moving through one's everyday offline life. You went from hearing about a particular website (the way you would hear about a particular book or movie) to just thinking of something, anything, typing it into a search engine, and finding it.

Reflecting on the changes wrought by search engines made me think about a similar big change in media choice that affected what it felt like to use the medium: the remote control. Both search engines and remote controls came along at a time when the number of available options exploded (in websites, or in cable television channels). They made the explosion of options manageable. The feeling of the media use experience changed in both cases, from a consideration of several options (akin to being in a store or a library and making a selection) to moving through a landscape, observing things around you and reacting to them, and at the same time, conjuring or creating a world from thin air, thinking of something and having it appear in front of you.

We are different selves in those situations (this is an idea that I keep coming back to: the ways in which our environment brings out different selves). In the first, we are a chooser. But in the second situation, there are a few selves that could be brought out or summoned. In the second situation, we are potentially a react-er, but also a creator, an unrestricted curious, creative impulse. We are also, potentially, an unrestricted Id, acting on inner impulses for immediate gratification, reacting not to the outer landscape but to subtle shifts in our moods or thoughts.

One of my big questions: How do you foster curiosity and creativity and downplay reactivity and the impulse for immediate gratification? The answer, I think, lies in manipulating (perhaps a kinder word would be "customizing") the choice environment, and we've only begun to do this, and not in a systematic manner. And that is what I want to do with my research. 

Stopping Media Addictions

Here's a question about addiction: to what degree does it depend on the environment, as opposed to the brain of the individual?

We tend to think of addiction as something that lives in the brain of an individual. Addiction is, in part, inherited. We can see it when we look at images of addicts' brains. But as I understand it, genes only predispose someone to becoming more easily addicted than other person. And yes, you can see differences between addicted brains and non-addicted brains, but these images don't necessarily tell you to what degree the behavior and its neuro-chemical correlates are products of genes, of habit (i.e., repeated behavior in the past), or of the environment (specifically, the array of options and stimuli one has in front of one's self). So neither of these bits of information really tell us all that much about the relationship of the addict to the choice environment.

Perhaps addiction is the name for a behavior that is less and less responsive to the environment. Instead of responding to the negative consequences of choosing to behave in a certain way (hangovers, social disapproval, damaged relationships, loss of professional status, etc.), the addict continues to repeat the behavior. The more addicted one is, the less it matters what goes on around them. All that matters is the repetition of the behavior.

But maybe we overestimate addicts' immunity to characteristics of their environment. Many approaches to stopping the compulsive behavior associated with addiction attempt to alter the way an individual responds to their environment. This is done through therapy, drug treatment, or other means. But in other cases, we try to alter the behavior of addicts by changing the environment itself: making them go cold-turkey, or removing certain cues in the environment that trigger the behavior. Many times, these approaches don't work. Addicts are able to find the substance to which they are addicted or engage in the behavior again, and its hard to remove ALL triggers in an environment.

But when we think about the environmental-manipulation approach to altering addictive behaviors, maybe we're not thinking big enough. What if we had an infinite amount of control over the environment? We could populate the environment with many other appealing options instead of merely removing the one that is preferred by the addict. Whether or not the addict relapses after being deprived of whatever it is they're addicted to would depend not only on how long they're deprived of it but also on what their other options are. What if we could take an addict who was down and out and plunk them down in a world in which they have many other opportunities for challenging, fulfilling accomplishment, nurturing, nourishing relationships, and spiritual and emotional support? I think that in many cases, the behavior would change, permanently. So addiction really depends on things outside of the individual's brain, but its hard to see this when our attempts to assess the efficacy of such approaches have been so modest.

Of course, it is difficult if not impossible to just plunk someone down in that perfectly challenging, supportive world. But the amount of control an individual has over the stimuli in their environment has changed. In particular, our media environments can be fine tuned in many different ways, though at present they just end up being tuned to suit our need for immediate gratification. We could, in theory, fine tune that environment to gradually ween someone off an addictive stimuli such as a video game, a social networking site, or the novel, relevant information provided by the Internet in general, and replace it with something that satisfies the individual in some way. This would be much harder to do with other addictions, like alcohol. You can't re-configure the world to eliminate all advertisements for alcohol, all liquor stores, all depictions of the joys of being drunk. It's simply harder to alter those aspects of the environment. Because it was so difficult to even try these environmental manipulation approaches to altering behavior, we haven't fully realized their potential.

By fine tuning media environments (rather than just demand that media addicts go cold turkey or other "blunt instrument" approaches to media addiction), I think we'll realize that media addicts are more responsive to their environments than previous thought. I'm not saying that media environments are infinitely manipulable; only that we haven't realized the full potential (or even really scratched the surface) of this approach to halting media addictions.

The problem of giving consumers what they want

After about a year and a half of intermittent reading, I've finished the terrific Thinking, Fast and Slow. At the same time, I've been co-teaching a class on the future of television. I'm in the process of preparing a final lecture for the class, and I plan on drawing from Kahneman to talk about supply and demand in the world of TV (or whatever TV will become, i.e., some system for the distribution and consumption of video online).

The rhetoric of giving viewers what they want, when they want it is a big part of how new TV technologies and content are being sold. As we move from an environment of restricted choice to one of expanded choice, it would seem that consumers of media are more likely to get what they want. How could it be otherwise?

First, let's think about "what they want": how to define that, how to measure it. There have always been feedback mechanisms built into commercial systems, ways in which producers determine demand so as to know what and how much to supply. In the days of early radio and TV, producers heard from audiences via letters. Then came Nielsen, with ever-improving sampling techniques that more closely reflect what people are choosing, though the Nielsen system and the TV choice environment it worked with had limitations: there were only so many options from which to choose; there were some people (e.g., college students) who were difficult to track and so they didn't show up in Nielsen's picture of audience demand. What if we could eliminate these limitations? Wouldn't we have a more pure picture of audience demand to which we could suit our supply?

Technology improved, costs fell, and these trends helped eliminate flaws and overcome limitations in the feedback system. I'd like to raise two issues related to this improving image of audience demand in the TV marketplace. The first is that there are certain attributes of the TV system that aren't overcome by simply monitoring audience behavior more closely and/or removing restrictions on the viewers, giving them more "control" (which is the general progression of improvements in TV technology). The second is that a market in which supply and demand were more perfectly matched may not be desirable.

No matter how good audience behavior monitoring gets and no matter how cheap it is to implement, it will run up against privacy concerns of the audience. As choice expands, we may get a clearer picture of how people behave in any situation without any limitations, and its bound to reveal some ugly truths about individuals and groups behavior. As much as the audience wants to have its desires understood, it wants to be selective about what it shares about those desires, especially in a world in which desires are so closely associated with identity and potential.

Also, even if we could know exactly how people behaved in a choice environment with few restrictions, are we then permanently locked in to what they will desire? There's a wonderful scene in Mad Men where Don Draper reacts to the in-house psychologist who tells him what her focus group observation revealed about audience preference. Don's objection may be to the difference between what people say they want and how they behave, but I think the more fundamental objection is that people's future desires can't be predicted by their past desires. Advertisers and content producers are in the business of telling people what they will want, and as much as that sentiment rubs people the wrong way, it explains something about audience behavior no amount of data or market research can. Of course these are the words of a defensive ad exec asserting his value in an age where empiricism is creeping into an artistic realm. But I think there's some truth to it.

Don is wrong about not being able to predict future behavior from past behavior if he's talking about certain kinds of individual behavior. But the next trend, the next popular TV show, may not reveal itself no matter how hard you stare at people's current or past behavior. Psychologists may know that people pass on certain ideas to other people in certain ways under various circumstances, but the actual ideas they pass on can be set in motion by anyone with the budget to get in front of enough opinion leaders. Advertisers and show runners are just such people. They survive by developing new tastes, new markets for new stuff, and they can still do it in an expanded TV marketplace. So you have this force that will keep dropping ideas that are beyond whatever audiences currently want so as to do this, no matter how accurate the audience demand measurements get. 

Then there's a point made by Jonathan Franzen at a discussion during last year's New Yorker Festival. He discussed how the number of tweets or mentions on Twitter was now being used as a metric of how worthwhile an up-and-coming writer was to a publisher. That is, a publisher would sign a writer who had 100,000 followers or mentions on Twitter and not one who had 100, just because social media mentions and followers are pretty good indicators of present audience demand. This is another instance of the tightening of the feedback loop between creators and audiences. This could force writers to cater to the audience in ways that they did not before. But this idea makes Franzen and other content creators uncomfortable. Writers spend more time on self-promotion and homogenization of their work and less on developing their voices as creators. Better work is produced, so the thinking goes, when creators are not so beholden to current audience preferences (at least the ones that audiences are capable of articulating). The work is "better" not just from some elitist, subjective judgement of its worth but from a market standpoint: if an author or a show runner takes their cues from the Twittersphere, the product will be less pleasing to that very audience in the long run than if the author or show runner listened to their inner muses.

Finally, Kahneman's book brings to mind that the definition of what an individual wants (and the way that the individual ultimately acts based on their desires) depends on various characteristics of the choice environment, namely the timing of the choice, the number of choices, and the arrangement of available options. For example, whether or not there are thumbnails for similar videos on the side of the screen, as there are now on YouTube, may influence what people click on. Recommended videos on one's Netflix screen is another example, or songs that come up on Pandora. Users could've searched for whatever their hearts desired in the search box, and yet what they viewed was influenced by the arrangement of options, not solely the product of a pre-existing, internal set of preferences.

Two questions that popped into my head toward the end of Thinking, Fast and Slow related to Kahneman's conceptualization of two different kinds of thought processes: System 1 which is intuitive, automatic, fast, instinctual, emotional, and System 2 which is deliberative, slow, rational. Often times, these "systems" or ways of thinking reflect conflicting desires: System 1 wants to eat a burger while System 2 wants a salad. System 1 wants to watch an action flick while System 2 wants a documentary. So how we define consumer desire depends on whether we appeal to System 1 or 2. Here are my questions: What would a world look like that was entirely geared toward System 1, without restrictions? Are we now living in that world?

The inconsistency between what we say we want and how we act under various choice conditions is not infinitely large. Depending on what you compare it with, it could be considered insignificant. It doesn't make much sense to throw out the entire system of valuation because it is flawed. Better to detect the flaws and correct for the flaws in a way brings about positive individual and collective outcomes. The first step is one many people haven't taken: seeing the inconsistencies between what we say we want and what we choose in different circumstances. Then, think about the world or the life that we want and think about how to design a choice environment to bring those about. 

The relationship between supply and demand work in a marketplace of culture objects (e.g., TV shows) has a level of complexity that is not accounted for in the rhetoric that surrounds improving TV technologies such as Netflix and YouTube, both how they are sold and how they are celebrated by the press and by consumers. The relationship isn't infinitely complex, and work like Thinking, Fast and Slow lays out some rules for how people behave in certain choice environments.

Remote Controls

This moment keeps nagging at me, demanding that I think about it, write about it. First, I must acknowledgement the ways in which metaphors, or the likening of one moment in history to the present moment, can hinder understanding. By cherry-picking the ways in which the two moments are alike based on our preconceived notions of the fundamental nature of the present moment while ignoring all the ways that the two moments are not alike (or the ways in which the present moment is similar to another moment in history), we don't move any closer to understanding our current moment. But here I use the past moment not as a means of comparison or metaphor, but as a way of identifying how certain trends in media use got started. 

I'm speaking of the invention and popularization of the television remote control. The remote, along with the increase in the number of channels, marked a crucial lowering of the barrier to toggling among choice. It was possible to browse entertainment options before, but not quite as easy, and that shift toward easy browsing marked a change from comparing several options to one another to what I call entertainment foraging. Our experiences of using media in an impulsive manner and the attendant feelings of guilt grow out of this moment. The internet and mobile devices have merely extended the logic of the remote control to more moments and areas in our lives. Even when we stay on a single website like Facebook or Buzzfeed, we are often hunting or foraging for some unknown thing. We tend to think of media use as content consumption or connection with an other, as individual experiences: skyping with a friend, watching a video, spending time on Facebook. But I'm interested in the moments in between, the time spent looking for something, the time spent choosing, the proliferation of what you might call "choice points". It's the glue that holds together the other moments, but it takes up a lot of time, perhaps as much time as the moments themselves.

When I started thinking about media choice, I thought that change from the traditional media choice environment to the new media choice environment was the change from deliberative choice (System 2, in Kahneman's terms) to impulsive choice (System 1). But eventually I came to believe that even if the options are few, when its a matter of how you spend your leisure time, the stakes are very low, and so you make a quick choice. There isn't much at stake, so why deliberate? Even when the choices were few, we probably still chose impulsively or ritualistically, without much careful consideration. So perhaps our media choices were always usually impulsive, but they were impulsive with many borders or restrictions, different borders and restrictions than the ones we have now. The options from which we chose leisure media experiences were limited by bandwidth and shelf space. The times at which we chose such experiences were limited by synced schedules and clear demarcations between work and leisure times and places. Without the borders, without the restrictions, the options have changed. When the options change (and this is highly counter-intuitive, but supported by a ton of empirical evidence), our choice patterns change. Increasingly, our impulsive choices, collectively or individually, feedback into the system that generates the option menus. Our options, and our selections, are dictated by the impulsive self with less interference from the outside world. This doesn't bode well for our long term self, our abilities to achieve long term goals.

What can we do about it? What are we doing about it? There are new technologies that form a middle layer between media applications that offer us options and our impulsive choosing selves. I call these software applications, like Freedom or Self Control, choice prostheses. Are they effective? That depends. In some ways, use of choice prostheses resembles dieting, and most diets do not work in the long term. In other ways, they resemble choice architecture or nudges, which are more effective in changing behavior in the long term. This is the next step in my research on media choice: to better understand how choice prostheses work and how they might best be used to change our choices for the better. 

Our Digital Prostheses

For the past few years I've been thinking and writing about a group of technologies that, it occurs to me now, may best be described as choice prostheses. This includes commitment technologies that restrict one's choice (e.g., Freedom, Leechblock, WasteNoTime, StayFocusd, SelfControl, etc.) as well as something like TweetDeck which organizes options. Often, these technologies are in the form of browser extensions, but not always. They are all designed to alter your media use experience, your management of abundant options, in some way. They occupy a layer in between content producers and consumers. They are like lenses, filtering relevant options from irrelevant ones, or immediately gratifying ones from necessary-but-boring ones.

Prostheses developers and users are, in some sense, in an arms race with content producers and aggregators who seek to maximize the amount of attention paid their content. The producers get better and better at hooking us and keeping us in their walled gardens. The most successful websites are not narratives you disappear into, but shopping malls where everything is free. When we think about the experience of using these sites, we see the discrete bits of the experience: the posts in our feed, the stories, the GIFs, the images we click on. What we don't see is the glue that holds the experiences together: the repeated act of selecting from many options, of entertainment foraging. The appeal of such experiences is manifold. We respond to novelty, and immediately gratifying fare (that which scratches us right where we itch at that moment). But I think we also respond to that act of foraging. It is not enough to simply be presented with something new and immediately gratifying. We desire to choose it for ourselves. I'm interested in the outcomes of these moments of choice, the extent to which they are made unconsciously and how they are influenced by the number and type of options and the timing of the decision. But I'm also struck by how much of our leisure time is taken up by these miniature moments of choice. 

The prostheses are what we use when we look at our media use habits and don't like what we see. If our habits are the product of our intuitive System 1 thinking interacting with choice environments designed to maximize time spent on websites, prostheses are a way to change the outcome, to bring our behavior in line with our intentions. 

Rechargeable Value

In trying to think through how I will have media users rate the immediate gratification value of their media selections in scheduled and un-scheduled choice environments, I've run across some artifacts that make it difficult to re-schedule certain media experiences in people's lives and still have them be enjoyable or valuable to them. For instance, if you insist that people only send text messages between 3 and 5 PM each day, they may not get much value out of text messaging at those times because the motivation to send those messages was time sensitive. They needed to re-schedule an appointment or make arrangements for dinner that evening. I think we tend to over-estimate the time sensitivity of the value of such communiques (including online chatting). Would you really feel deprived if you had to wait a few hours before learning that someone cared for you or want to make plans for the next day, or learning a bit about how someone's day went? Probably not, but we've gotten so used to having the ability to message whenever we'd like and we don't see a reason to change.

So, there's at least the perception that the value (in terms of enjoyment and utility) of messaging is affect by time in this way. Other mediated experience can be time shifted without losing enjoyment or utility. People are fine with planning to Skype at certain times and would be fine with switching the time if needed. People are fine with shifting a TV show to fit their schedules. They'd probably like to watch it as soon as possible because they're anxious to find out what happens next and they'd like a dose of the pleasure brought on by the show as soon as possible. If I had a choice between the next Batman film coming out tomorrow and having to wait a year to see it, I would choose to see it tomorrow. I might even pay a bit more to do so. But if I had to wait an extra few hours or even a few days to see it, it wouldn't change the value of the experience. I'm sure I would still enjoy it.

There are some interesting exceptions to this rule, some non-interactive media experiences whose value are somehow contingent on the timing of the experience. News and sports seem to decline in value over time after their live broadcast in a way that other types of content do not. For some reason, live-ness (or, to use a grocery metaphor, freshness) matters. Of course, a classic game might still be fun to watch on ESPN classic years later and old news might be fascinating to some, but for the most part, "yesterday's news" isn't very enjoyable or useful.

I had an interesting experience when I deprived myself of a few kinds of media experiences that I partake in a lot: NPR, Facebook, and Reddit. I was away on vacation for a few days and just didn't have time to check any of these (that is what one does with these sources: they check on them). I then experienced more pleasure than usual when I checked these at the end of the vacation. It was as if their value had been recharged since the last time I checked on them. Many interesting bits of news about my friends and about the world had accrued since I had last checked in. When I'm in my normal media habit, I check on these things regularly, getting some utility and enjoyment, but then quickly exhaust their value, having used up the best parts, having to wait until people in my Facebook feed post interesting things, until Talk of the Nation has another media-related offering, or until enough interesting/funny things are posted on Reddit. When I check on them often, their values are quickly exhausted, but when I don't check on them for a bit, their value accrues and lasts longer.

This isn't quite how the value of traditional current events news works, I think. I wasn't adamant about going back and finding exactly what had happened in Washington or Libya while I was off the grid. An even more obvious example would be weather reports: I'm not going to go back and read weather reports for Ann Arbor for the days I was out of town. If there's some sort of commentary about the events, like I'd find in Slate, NYTimes, the New Yorker, or Grantland, then the pieces hold their value. The less commentary, the shorter the "expiration date" for the experience.

People check Facebook many times throughout the day because they can, because its there. Each time you check it, you can only go so long before you've read all the good stuff and you're making due with the dregs. The same goes for any continuously updating site: blogs, Twitter, online newspapers, etc. If it weren't, if you had to check it between 3 and 5 each day, you might be able to read longer and enjoy it more, not having to make due with the dregs. You're dealing with a fully charged-up experience. You might even say that this is true for email accounts: if they're accounts you typically get pleasurable emails in, then you'll have more of a chance of getting that pleasure of an inbox full of pleasurable messages if you wait longer to check your email. If you only get messages that you consider to be unpleasant, then the longer you wait, the more unpleasant the moment of checking will be. The trouble is that its too hard to resist the not-fully-recharged version because its always accessible.

What kind of music do you like (right now)?

In keeping with my habit of making broad generalizations based on my personal experience w/ media...

As I was assembling a playlist for an upcoming roadtrip, I was thinking about the kinds of music I would want to listen to but also, acknowledging the social nature of most media consumption, what kind of music the people I'll be traveling with would want to listen to. Naturally, I thought in terms of genre. I'm pretty sure these guys don't like metal much anymore (if they ever did), which is a shame, b/c I do. Then I thought about my answer to that classic get-to-know-you question "what kind of music do you like," and, of course, my answer would be that typical avoiding answer: "lots of kinds, pretty much everything."

If you looked at my music collection, you would find many different genres from different eras and different places around the world well represented. But that doesn't mean I'd want to listen to any of it at any given moment. Our media preferences are governed by long-lasting preferences (I've liked metal since about 9th grade) as well as short-term moods (I'm not in the mood for metal right now). Here's my theory: as music collections expand due to the falling monetary value of songs vis a vis Napster, Torrent, and all that shit, long-lasting preferences broaden and explain less and less of why anyone wants to listen to any kind of music at a given time. As choices expand, mood and immediate context play a greater role in determining what you will choose.

But its tougher to know what kind of music you're in the mood for than knowing that you like rap or hate country. I've tried relabeling my music according to mood (so, there are rap songs and metal songs that are both labeled "energetic" and classical and rock songs that are labeled "melancholy") and occassionally that helps me find music that suits my mood and feels right, but most times, I find myself cycling through my shuffle until something clicks.

The way we engage with music changes when options becomes plentiful. Choice increases due to falling production/distribution cost. It happened w/ music, but the trends you see will happen with all other media. When you have all of those options, you can't rely on your identity as much to determine what media will satisfy you. You can't just say to yourself "I like this kind of music, or that kind of TV show, or that kind of news, so that's what I'll choose." Something happens to our decision making process when we have abundant, diverse options. I'm not quite sure what it is (experiments to follow, I hope), but my hunch is that we want to cede control to something else. Shuffle is one thing. Search engines are another. We're wary of being controlled, but we experience so much uncertainty and regret after choosing something when there are too many other options that we want our choice to be restricted.

Sometimes, we do know what we're in the mood for, but those moods and those preferences become more diverse given more and more choices.

The Problem with False Consciousness (and false desire and false choice)

There is a strain, one might say a dominant strain, of cultural theory (derived from Marxist theory) that claims that individuals immersed in a culture, exposed to certain information via media while other information is kept from them, are unable to know the truth about how the world works and thus make decisions that are not in their collective or individual best interests but rather in the best interests of those in control of the information flow. On the face of it, the theory of false consciousness seems possible, even likely. But here's the rub: the theory itself is just another way of looking at the world supplied and supported by individuals with interests of their own, some of which run counter to those of people reading about the theory. It is possible that those who are exposing others as having pulled the wool over our collective eyes are, in fact, pulling a different kind of wool over our eyes. The new illusion of "seeing the world as it really is" is all the more convincing given that the revelatory nature of the theory. How do we know it is not another illusion, one more pernicious than the last? We don't, and most cultural theory provides little evidence to suggest one way or the other whether it is just another bias looked at human nature. Are we naturally competitive or naturally cooperative? Are corporations and advertisers in charge of telling us what to desire, or are charismatic leaders/writer/artists the ones pulling the strings?

I like to use two movies from 1999 as convenient illustrations of false consciousness and (if you'll pardon the unwieldy double negative) false false consciousness. The Matrix is a classic good v. evil story of false consciousness. A handful of good guys need to clue everyone else into the fact that they are not acting in their own best interests, but are rather part of an elaborate illusion that serves the interests of a controlling "other." Fight Club issues a similar indictment of mainstream culture, albeit in a less metaphorical more literal manner. However, the bunch of rag-tag rebels that fight The Man inevitably coalesce around a charismatic leader who, as it turns out, is insane. Group-think develops, critical thinking goes out the window, and the group of rebels is even more lost than when it began. I am heartened by the fact that popular cinema can still address (and prompt audience members to debate and think through) important socio-politico-philosophical issues of the day. Just in terms of acting as teaching tools, these movies can liven up a dreary classroom discussion about free will and hegemony.

As valuable as fiction is in helping us understand our socio-political reality, it can only take us so far. In order to really understand things, we need evidence. Most of the crit/cult theory I've read cites cherry-picked instances of people deprived of infinite choice and freedom and/or maintaining a subsistence level of wealth while those in power stay in power via hegemonic, patriarchal culture. The tacit assumptions are that: information desemination - in the form of popular culture, education, and other cultural institutions such as church, the government, or news agencies - is part of the root cause of power imbalances and that the world could be otherwise (i.e. equality is possible given human nature).

In order to further interrogate the line of reasoning behind false consciousness, let's take an ordinary claim. Let's say you think someone who just spent $5,000 on a new paint job for his car but lacks the money to pay for his child's health care, college education, or nutritious diet has somehow been conditioned by culture to value some material goods (e.g. car paint jobs) over others (school, food, health). How can we, as theorists, step in and say that this person is no longer capable of making decisions for themselves? I suppose the crit/cult theorists also assumes that in the long term, the indiviual and the group that he or she is a part of will suffer. His child will be more likley to fall ill or earn less money w/o health care, a healthy diet, or better schooling. As a group, they will have less opportunities. They will live shorter, harder lives - something (and this is crucial) we can all agree is undesirable. If they only saw the connection between their consumption of culture and the long-term undesirable consequences, then they would alter their behavior, rise up against their oppressors, and alter culture.

In order for this to happen, you need to establish that some conditions are objectively undesirable. Is living a shorter life objectively undesirable? Not necessarily. Is being able to retire at an early age if one so chooses objectively desirable? Sure. Even if we reject the notion that a person's worth should be judged solely on their monetary worth, we can accept the fact that the systematic impoverishment of a people is undesirable. So then how do we draw a connection between certain behavior that may give pleasure in the short term (getting that $5,000 paint job) and long term displeasure (impoverishment) in a way that a) everyone can understand and b) does not elevate the theorist to the position of truth-teller?

You need to look for instances when people who hold one opinion about how the world (or some small part of it) works revise this opinion based on information presented to them. We have the dual opposing influences of authority (e.g. the news media, the scientific community, both of which were grossly mistaken about human nature in 1930's Germany) and upstart revolutionaries (which are at least equally likely to become corrupt by power and get things wrong - see The Great Leap Forward, an extension of what was, at the time, revolutionary thought). Charisma and authority go a long way to swaying people about big issues like human behavior and economy, but what about small, manageable issues like, say, the length of two lines?
Maybe this is a shitty example because we're all very familiar with the illusion. My point here is that we initially see that the lower line is longer than the top line. If, however, an authority were to come along and, before our very eyes, remove the diagonal lines at the end of each line, we would see, with our own eyes, that the lines are of equal length. Now, is this proof that the lines are of equal length? Absolutely not. You could get out your micrometer and say, "actually, the top line is shorter than the bottom one." But actual, physical reality isn't what concerns me (actually, I think it is indeterminate, but that's another blog entry). What I'm interested in are the patterns of people's behavior, specifically what precipitates a revision of worldview. In most cases, people will believe that the top line is shorter than the bottom one until you remove the diagonal lines, at which point they will think that they are of equal length.

This example reveals a different kind of false consciousness, a short-term false consciousness. It all happened in front of our eyes. We can acknowledge that we were mistaken. We thought our information about the situation was complete and accurate, but in retrospect, thanks to the revelation from the authority figure, we know that it was not.

Those of us studying culture, information, media and how it relates to freedom, happiness, well-being, and choice need to make the claims about false consciousness more like this. We need to make the connections between short-term pleasure and long-term displeasure more obvious, more indubitable. Impossible, you say? Bullocks! We've got exponentially more data about people's shifting desires than we have had in the past (and by "we" I mean the public, though if we're not careful, it might all end up in the hands of a fortunate few. That really would be hegemony).

Its a hard thing to acknowledge that we're not very good at predicting what will bring us long term pleasure, as individuals and as groups. When we're wrong, we look for scapegoats (The Man, the government, the media, etc), and sometimes we're right, but other times, we made bad decisions based on imperfect information about the connections between those decisions and long-term loss. How do you convince a person that his desire to get a $5,000 paint job was the result of a culture intent on keeping him down? You lay bare the mechanisms of culture, not in some vague way, but in a concrete, indubitable way that shows how all people (not just a gullible few) are capable of being misled when presented with certain kinds of information.

To that end, I'm proposing a new research project (featuring testable hypotheses): Is the abundance and restriction of media choice associated with a greater discrepancy between gratification sought and gratification perceived? You can argue with someone else's definition of gratification (for you, it might be having a big house; for someone else, it might be having a car with a sweet paint job), but you'd be hard pressed to find a person who would argue w/ their own definition of gratification.

Uncertain entertainment

OK. I think I've got a dissertation topic: why we choose media.

I keep thinking that it has something to do with pleasure, but that we're not just hedonically motivated. Or that "pleasure," the end goal of hedonism, mutates and evolves in each of our lives so that to say that we are hedonically motivated tells us very little about why we choose certain experiences over others.

Let's take a concrete example. Today, I listened to a story from Stephen King's short story collection Just After Sunset. Why this story? Because I'd read/listen to other stories by that author and I'd enjoyed them immensely. Not only had I enjoyed them while I was listening to/reading them. I also would periodically recall emotions or ideas from the texts at various times, and that gave me pleasure and helped me cope w/ some rough patches. If we're to map out the decision making process that goes into choosing media, I think we need to take into account pleasure that comes well after actually experiencing the text. Hard to measure, but let's save the question of measurement for another time.

Anyway, based on past experience w/ other King stories, the low cost and availability of the story (free from my local library), my mood (more or less neutral, I just wanted to be transported while doing yard work, and if I got some insight into the human condition, so much the better), and the time available (I have lots, thanks to summer vacation). It was the wrong decision. At least for that one short story, I experienced pretty extreme displeasure. I experienced something that I'm sure many others have experienced: hating a media text but needing, masochistically, to finish the text, needing closure. Why was the text to unpleasurable? Because it conjured up unpleasant connections with my personal history. How could Stephen King know about that? He couldn't. But could I have known? That's an interesting question.

What do we know about a media experience before we spend time and money on it? When we re-watch movies, we know plenty, and sometimes, we experience great pleasure. Most times, we only have a rough idea of what to expect, based on author, genre, preview, or recommendation. We don't want to waste our time, but we want to be surprised. This requires a relinquishment or control, a trust in an author or authors that is paid for with our future attention. In this way, choosing to experience a media text is unlike so many other consumer decisions. I wouldn't want my car to surprise me. I wanted to know exactly what I was in for when I bought it. The same is true for every other consumer decision i can think of. The same isn't true for my experience with people. I wouldn't want to know utterly predictable people. Though they may bow to my every command, they would seem lifeless. So it is with media. We desire some unpredictability, some chance that what we experience may be undesirable.

I guess there's always the chance that one may be introduced to a new kind of pleasure, one that a consumer/user didn't even know they desired until they experienced it. The unknown experiences are fodder for our future desires and dislikes.

After choosing to listen to the King short story and hating it, I listened to a Radiolab podcast, and within the first 5 minutes, I experienced exactly what I wanted to experience. I was transported. I left my body. I also felt better about life and myself, if for a brief time (there, again, is the time issue. Is it better to experience a temporary boost in self-esteem than it is to get something embedded in your brain that will keep cropping up and putting things in perspective at later points in life? In a word, no. That's what makes great works of narrative so great. They stay in your head and pop up when you have various experiences. Hard to assess, but definitely a part of the worth of a mediated experience). I made a bad decision w/ the King, and a good decision w/ the Radiolab. What happened?

Part of it was a lack of information. If the King story came w/ a disclaimer that said, "Elliot Panek, this story will remind you of very specific instances in your life where you have failed, resulting in negative affect," well then I wouldn't have listened. That's a tall order for the media producer, but maybe, just maybe, some sort of information aggregator could keep track of certain things that were bound to trigger negative (or positive) affect for the user, screen the text for those things, and then give the user an idea of what he/she is in for. This would just be an extension, an elaboration of genre and its conventions. Totally doable given the pace of progress in IT.

Neither the media producer not the user wants too much of a chance of displeasure. They wouldn't want you to go elsewhere for media and you don't want to waste your time with displeasure. And yet some risk seems necessary. We seem to need to cede control, to some degree, at some times.

How curious it is that we spend time and money on something that might give us displeasure. Is this an acknowledgement of the quicksilver nature of human desire, or is this a failure of the media market to accurately inform the consumer whether or not the product is suited for a particular context? Obviously, its a large question, one hopefully fitting for a dissertation. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go watch the Celts play the Magic in game 1 of a playoff series. Sports is kind of the apotheosis of the uncertainly entertaining media experience. The Celts could win a quadruple overtime game, yielding a transcendent pleasure for me, or it could be a close loss for the Celts, yielding another evening of ennui. The choice is most certainly not mine.