All the Media Content We Cannot See

Like the majority of the electromagnetic spectrum, most of any given high-choice media landscape - be it YouTube, TikTok, or even Netflix - is difficult to see without some kind of aid, and thus easy to forget about. One might argue that the most important stuff - the content that has the most influence on individuals and society, i.e., the popular stuff - is easily visible through Top Ten or "trending" lists on the platform itself or through articles, podcasts, and conversations of cultural critics. But how much of the entire spectrum of content - or, if you take a human-centered approach to the question, viewing hours - are we observing when we talk about this tall head of the distribution tail?

The answer has implications for how we conceive of the culture we live in. Often, we assume we can get a pretty good sense of a culture by observing what media content it chooses to spend its time with. The topics, values, and aesthetics of popular content have long been thought to reflect and/or shape the preoccupations of the culture. This was all easy enough during the era of mass media when choice was limited, although even then it oversimplified the character of a culture. We look back on the late 1960's in America and think of psychedelia and unrest, but plenty of folks living in that place and time were likely oblivious to such trends. Still, it seems safe to say that you could get at least some idea of what most people living in a certain place and time were thinking and feeling by examining its popular media content. 

It's a commonplace that the number of choices for media content has exploded in the past decade or two. Truly understanding how content relates to culture - or trying to derive a sense of culture by examining content - has become trickier. In the era of broadcast TV, it wouldn't take much time for anyone to watch episodes of the 10 most popular TV shows. Out of the total number of viewing hours in a given culture, that might get you, say, 50% of them. The other 50% of the viewing hours would be distributed across less popular programming, so you could make a decent claim to "knowing" a culture by examining 10 popular TV shows. What would a similar approach get you now, if applied to Netflix?

According to recently released data from Netflix, viewers watched a total of roughly 90 billion hours in the first half of 2023. Of those hours, the top ten shows accounted for 4.9 billion - or roughly 5% of the total. Watching episodes of these ten shows, then, wouldn't be a very good way to get an idea of what Netflix viewers, generally, were watching (or, by extension, what they thought or how they felt about anything). It may be that the shows are in some way representative of the larger whole - in terms of their genre, topic, tone, aesthetic, values, etc. - but given the relatively small proportion of the whole it represents, there is reason to suspect that we are missing a lot about this group of people and their preoccupations if we only take into account the most popular content. 

But this is where many of us start, and by "us" I mean scholars and researchers as well as cultural critics, content creators seeking to create content that resonates with an audience, or marketers. What other option do we have? 

One alternative would be to take stratified samples from further down the distribution tail, an approach used in this article from The Hollywood Reporter. It's important to note that such an approach requires that the platforms make their data available in such ways as to make this feasible, and in this respect, Netflix has done us a huge favor. It is more difficult to get underneath the trending surface of TikTok or YouTube to try to get even a rough idea of what the rest of it looks like. 

And with YouTube and TikTok, the problem of unaccounted-for content is likely much worse. 

Let's do some back-of-the-envelope* calculations to try see how little of the content universe we're seeing when we examine, say, the top ten TikTok videos from last year. There are roughly 1.1 billion active monthly TikTok users. The average user spends 95 minutes on the app per day. So, that's a total roughly 104.5 billion minutes per day, or 381.5 trillion minutes per year. The most viewed TikTok video of 2023 had 504 million views and it is roughly 30 seconds long. Obviously, the next nine had fewer views than this, but I'm finding it difficult to obtain raw view numbers for each video (it's easy to find the number of followers, but plenty of people watch TikTok videos created by users they don't follow). So, let's err on the side of overestimating and say that each video is 1 minute long and is watched 500 million times. By watching the top ten TikTok videos, we are accounting for 5 billion minutes of viewing. What proportion of the total are we seeing?

Before we do the math, it's worth remembering our tendency to fail to see meaningful differences among very small proportions. We can pretty easily tell the difference between 20% of something and 5% of it but fail to differentiate between .1% and .01%, even though the difference in magnitude of the latter is more than twice the difference in magnitude of the former. Often, we just think of anything below 1% of something as "very small," whether it's .5% or .05%. But if we're really trying to know something - a culture, a media diet, etc. - it's important to correct for that bias and recognize just how small the proportion really is. 

Watching the top 10 TikTok videos of 2023 would account for less than .001% (one thousandth of one percent) of all TikTok viewing. Given that the top 100 videos would have fewer views than the top video, and given that most of those videos are under 1 minute in duration, watching the top 100 videos (a feasible, if time-consuming, task) would account for less than .01% of content viewed on TikTok. 

Even if we are studying a particular topic or domain within these high-choice environments - say, political messages or health-related messages - sampling only the most popular videos doesn't get us anywhere near the complete or representative sample that it once did in the low-choice days of mass media. Most viewing is happening outside of the sample, further down the distribution tail. Until we reckon with the vast size these media environments and the diversity of users' media diets, it's hard to know what we're missing.

*If anyone has more accurate usage data, I would love to see it! I don't have supreme faith in these data, but it's the best I could find right now. 

Hardwiring and Software

At last week's symposium on media choice here at Drexel, the term "hardwired" came up a few times. This term pops up a lot these days in discussions of cognition and I wonder whether its use obfuscates as much as it explains.

The particular context in which it was used last week related to news: how and why certain people attend to certain news sources. People, so the argument went, are hardwired to seek out arguments and evidence with which they agree, and when they do happen to encounter counter-attitudinal arguments and evidence (i.e., stuff with which they don't agree), they are hardwired to interpret it as biased. When used in this context, what does "hardwired" really mean?

Hardwired reactions to stimuli in our environment are automatic and, as the metaphor would suggest, more-or-less permanent. Hardwired cognition/behavior are the products of adaptive processes that occurred over thousands of generations. We are born with these reactions; we don't need to be taught. Our startle reflexes, our orientation to faces, and our fear of spiders are all hardwired. Then there are reactions that are learned and, through repetition and conditioning, become automatic. It's easy to just lump both of these kinds of reactions together because they both involve automatic, quick processing of information without any voluntary control. But the hardwired reactions, I think, are harder to change than the automatic learned reactions because they have been around longer.

So let's assume that the aforementioned tendencies relating to news are, indeed, truly hardwired. None of us had to learn to seek out evidence we agree with and to view evidence that we don't agree with as biased. These information processing strategies evolved over many generations. Perhaps they're extensions of our need to preserve a stable sense of self or a coherent picture of our environment and where the rewards and threats lie or our social standing within a group of allies. This leaves us with a few important (and oft ignored) questions about our hardwired reactions to our information environment.

Can hardwired reactions to stimuli be "rewired"? Not easily, if at all. I don't think you could condition folks to seek out counter-attitudinal news and expect them to pass this tendency on to their offspring through their genes (which is what I take "rewired" to mean).

Can hardwired reactions to stimuli be overridden? Yes. Actually, I think this happens all the time. All of civilization, it's been said, is a kind of imposition on many of our hardwired reactions to stimuli, an attempt to override and otherwise control (i.e., repress) reactions that would be destructive in the long run to large numbers of people trying to live together (i.e., society). The repression of impulses is so ordinary that we forget the many ways the contours of society keeps them in check, through laws, rules, social mores, and restricted availability.

How strong is a hardwired predisposition? Put another way: how hard would it be to override a hardwired reaction to stimuli? This is another case in which the question of magnitude (what I like to call the "how much" question) is ignored, and I think it's ignored strategically. If you ignore the fact that some hardwired reactions are far easier to overcome than others, you could say that an inborn impulse that is not that hard to control is just like another inborn impulse that is almost impossible to control - they're both "hardwired". If it's somehow to your advantage to say that some behavior is unchangeable (say, if you're defending ideologically polarizing news coverage because it caters to our hardwired orientation toward information), you'll note how it's hardwired and leave it at that.

Just how hard is it to change behavior that is hardwired depends on the behavior, maybe on when it evolved and what's at stake (i.e., how great the reward or punishment for behaving in ways inconsistent with the predisposition). You can get most people to overcome their hardwired desire for sweets easier than you can get them to overcome their hardwired desire for sexual gratification or desire for novel stimuli or inclination toward competition or cooperation. Hardwired reactions or behaviors vary in the extent to which they are capable of being overridden. It is possible to know how hard it is to change a particular hardwired behavior through experimentation.

What the heck does this have to do with software?

The design of software affects what types of information are available to us in certain places at certain times. There are various reasons we're averse to the idea of restricting availability of information in any way. Information is speech, and speech should be free. More information and more freedom to choose just seem like inherently good things. But really, our access to information is restricted, in some sense, all the time. We see a fraction of all available information, if only because we can only process so much information and the amount to which we have access via the Internet has grown exponentially. The fraction of the total news information to which we pay attention is determined primarily by the aforementioned hardwired reactions to stimuli and software that makes certain information available to us based on our prior impulsive behavior (i.e., what we click on without thinking too deeply about it). Perhaps our hardwired reactions to stimuli determine our news consumption behavior not because they're all that hard to change, but because nothing bothered to stand in their way.

Here's some good news: experimenting with information environments is actually much easier than experimenting with our environment in general (i.e., the one we walk around in everyday). Simply installing browser extensions can remove ads from our information environment or restrict access to whatever websites we choose. Algorithms can recommend counter-attitudinal news stories. Installing a "Respect" button on comments sections, next to the "Like" and "Recommend" buttons, can increase the likelihood of exposure to counter-attitudinal messages.

You can't get rid of those hardwired impulses to seek out information we agree with. But can you override them? I don't think we've explored that question fully yet.

The discussion of hardwiring gets at an important underlying issue: how fixed are any of our characteristics? It's an emotionally loaded question. There's a lot at stake. But it's exciting to be able to explore the possibilities of changing ourselves and our hardwired impulses by changing our software.

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.

What are you doing on that phone?

I wrote a sort of stray observation in the conclusion of my dissertation about a certain attribute of new media technologies: the way in which screens on portable technologies are typically oriented to face toward the user and remain obscure to others. The concerns over privacy vis a vis these media relates primarily to strangers (e.g., governments, corporations) knowing very private things about us and possibly using them against us. But in another way, these devices give us more privacy, privacy in our immediate physical surroundings. The screen orientation makes it harder to see what someone is watching, reading, or doing on their device, but what's more, there is an expectation that others not snoop and try to see what the user is watching/reading/doing.

I've been thinking about this, thinking about how it relates to the fact that we consider it to be rude when others are not paying attention to us but paying attention to their devices instead. I'm not talking about the moments when interaction is clearly expected (e.g., a job interview, a first date). Most of our lives are made up of moments where we are in the presence of others that we could converse with, but that it is not explicitly expected: hanging out with old friends, a lazy Sunday afternoon with a spouse. I think that part of the reason it feel can so alienating or discomforting to be in the presence of someone who is using a device is precisely because we do not know what he/she is reading/viewing/doing.

Here's a counter-example: someone you're hanging out with is reading a book. They're not talking to you, and you can't see precisely what they see (as you would if you were watching TV together), but you know the type of experience he or she is having. With a book, we know where we stand. We know what we're competing with. There is a sense of the psychic distance between ourselves and the person with which we share physical space. With a phone or a laptop? The person could be doing work, seeking out a better-looking partner than you, reading that website you hate, or that one that you love. I suppose that part of the anxiety comes from the fact that even if they're doing something you don't like, you can't do anything about it because you must respect their privacy.

There are ways to test this effect. It would probably work best with significant others, who have a long-term relationship and incentive to stay on each other's good sides and probably have some existing feelings regarding the other person's behavior. Get one person in a room with another who is either reading a book or a magazine, or get the person in a room with another who is on a phone or laptop. You could even have them in rooms with people using tablet PCs that are in one of two orientations: in the first condition, the screen is visible to the other person in the room; in the second condition, the screen is not visible to the other person in the room. Do the levels of anxiety or social exclusion (and the feelings of pain that come with it) increase when someone shares a room with a person using media technologies and they cannot see what the person is doing with those technologies?

If this turned out to be the case, then maybe we need to refine our media use etiquette rules. It's not necessarily a problem when people use digital devices around one another, and even if it is, it's probably unrealistic to expect people who live with one another to abstain from using digital devices around one another for long periods of time. Instead, perhaps we need to have more shared screen time. This is likely the idea behind technologies like Wii U or Chromecast: trying to give us the shared experience that television gave us while maintaining the interactivity and expanded options of the Internet. The only issue might be that we're left with an age old problem: who holds the remote? Who decides on the shape of the shared experience?

Maybe that's the trade-off. In order to avoid the social exclusion that comes with absent presence, we must relinquish some degree of privacy and control over our experiences.

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. 

Current-cy

What, exactly, do you lose when you lose the internet? This guy didn't use the Internet for a year. What was he missing, exactly? Why did he want to do this? What was he sick of? Maybe he was sick of the present, the constant present.

Generally, I think its totally unproductive (and all too common in academia) to start talking about high falutin' nebulous concepts like "constant present" without grounding it in actual experience. In fact, this whole idea of constant present-ness came to me when I was reading through my students' last media use journals of the spring semester, in which they reflected on their media use habits and considered ways in which they could change them. So it arose from an observation of others' experiences as well as a consideration of what the absence of  some medium/media would be like.

It occurred to me that most media content is "current" or "present" content. It may not always be "news" in the traditional sense. It may concern what is going on in the lives of our friends or something they are thinking about at that moment.

Take a moment to think about every media experience you had today so far. How much of it would fit into these categories (which, I believe, all refer to or are part of the present)?

• News
• Events in people's lives that happened within the past week
• People's reactions to news events (an extension of news)
• Reactions to what others are saying about their lives (an extended conversation)
• TV shows as they air for the first time (like Game of Thrones) and the conversations around them

It appears that a lot of our media use is part of a collective experience of the present or a collective conversation about the present.

What about non-current media experiences: movies that came out years ago, novels or research articles or essays from years ago. Do these make up a smaller portion of our media diets and if so, are we any the poorer for it? What's different about these experiences with media experiences that are not directly connected to the present?

These experiences seem somehow more solitary, and perhaps more intimate, to me. As a reader/viewer/listener, you feel a sense of one-on-one connection with the filmmaker, writer, or characters, even if you can't wait to go online and blog or tweet about it later.

You're also a bit more outside the sway of current social forces. Of course, all of our thoughts and feelings are influenced by current trends in thought and the collective mood of the culture, but when you're experiencing some media message from the past, your thoughts are less of a reflection of everyone else's thoughts at that time. Online, we all talk about the same things at the same time, even if we have different viewpoints about those things; it's agenda setting on a much grander scale, applying not just to news but to all aspects of our lives via social media. Stepping outside the stream of the present that we experience via most of our media diet means striking out on our own to find our own topics of interest.

Maybe having a greater portion of our lives comprised of experiences and conversations of current events has no ill effects in and of itself. Maybe all it does is create a thirst for the past, which we associate with permanence, in contrast with the ethereal, unpredictable, novel stream of the present. Maybe this thirst for the past and permanence drives us toward religion with its ancient roots.

The experience of dipping into the past by seeing a great movie that has no connection to the present, if we do this too often, can be escapism, an attempt to hide in another world because things aren't going well in the real, present world, a way of giving up, disconnecting in the worst sense. But dipping into the past, getting out of sync on purpose, has its place.

This is all the more unexpected because we have greater and greater access to media experiences from the past. It is easier than it has ever been before to dip into the past, our own personal past, or entertainment experiences from the past. And yet we do not do this all that often, I suspect, preferring the virtual company of a conversation about the present. The ability to sample the past and to combine ideas from various eras and places, I think, is just as much a creative act as trying to think of something new.

What Future Does Professional Media Content Production Have?

In the Media Literacy class I’m teaching this semester, my students are engaging in a role-playing exercise in which they assume the roles of four groups that, traditionally, play a role in the development of a new medium: governments, advertisers, technology developers, and content producers. First, the students research the role that these groups played in the creation and popularization of print, radio, TV, film, internet, etc. Then, they form new groups comprised of representatives from each of these groups and discuss how to develop a heretofore un-developed medium. The first example I thought of for the un-developed medium is: virtual reality.

Most of us have an idea of what virtual reality could be. And this imagined reality of VR could have government regulation (determining how the content will be distributed, if the roll-out of VR will be subsidized like a utility, how to regulate violent/sexual content, etc.), advertising (product placement in virtual reality? Pretty much an advertiser’s dream!), and technology developers (Apple VR might have a cleaner look than Microsoft’s somewhat cluttered-looking VR), and content producers (custom-made luxury environments for you to relax in). Sounds like a good fit!

I’m going to do this exercise again later in the semester, and I’m having no trouble coming up with several other “media technologies of tomorrow”: augmented reality glasses, superior surveillance technology, a portable instant-fMRI machine, affordable 3D printing. Some of these technologies are already gaining a foothold in the market. It’s easy to see how governments, advertisers, and technology developers would be involved in the creation and development of these technologies. But where would the content producers fit in?

The more I thought about the exciting media technologies of the future, the more trouble I have thinking about how professional content producers (e.g., screenwriters or the equivalent) will fit into the picture. I’m quite confident that there will always be an appetite for well-told stories. People skilled at telling these stories, through words or pictures or sounds, will have a place in our media environment. But I suspect that people will devote less time to consuming those stories than in years past. During the golden age of radio and television, people spent hours every day consuming content created by professionals. Increasingly, we spend more and more time using Facebook, Twitter, and other activities that don’t involve much in the way of content production (yes I know, lots of conversations on FB & Twitter are about content produced by professionals, but still, most of the aggregate value of these sites, I would contend, is generated by the users and the creators of the venue, i.e., the technology developers). In thinking about the media technologies of the future, it’s hard to think of a place for the writers, the producers, the directors. I’m sure there will be a handful of greats who produce content we all talk about, but perhaps a shrinking middle ground, and a shrinking window of attention and time we all spend consuming professionally produced content. 

Aside from making my group role-playing project a bit more difficult to design, its hard to think of a downside to this future. Definitely something I'll come back to in class. 

The Ethical Issues of Analyzing Time, Desire, and Self-Control

My tentative dissertation project (becoming less tentative as my defense date draws closer) has to do with time, desire, and self-control. One basic premise of the project is that each of us has short-term desires and long-term desires, and that these desires are often in conflict with one another. We might say that "part of us" wants to eat that chocolate cake or spend time on our favorite leisure website, and another "part of us" wants to eat less fat and carbs and spend more time working on projects, exercising, or volunteering. This, in and of itself, doesn't seem that controversial.

Through parents/caregivers and the education system, most people learn at an early age the consequences of too-frequently indulging their short-term desires. The more immediate, painful, and affective the negative consequence, the easier it is to convince yourself to refrain from future indulgence. Even before our parents/caregivers, evolution gave us in-born, visceral reactions to things that are good for us in the long run (eating nutritious berries = yummy!) and things that are bad for us in the long run (eating poisonous berries = vomit). But evolution doesn't provide the fine tuning, and in a fast-changing, complex environment, our consequence estimations need outside assistance. A different kind of convincing-of-the-short-term-self needs to happen when the feedback isn't visceral and immediate.

People have been smoking tobacco for roughly 5000-7000 years, but it wasn't until the last hundred years that large numbers of people knew that it hastened their death. Of course, most ancient smokers died from other ailments when the lifespan wasn't long enough for them to die of lung cancer. Once it became long enough, and once scientists had found a connection between smoking and cancer, a large number of people who would've enjoyed smoking in the short-term stopped or cut down (or at least felt guilty) because they had been informed by some trusted "other" that doing so would bring about long-term benefits. This isn't just self-control. Its informed self-control.

In some ways, this is the role of culture in general: to produce informed self-control (Freud's super-ego). We've all got the easy behavioral imperatives figured out: don't eat stuff that makes you puke; avoid situations that evoke terror. Rules exist because some of us (or all of us under some circumstances) may be inclined to behave in ways that are prohibited by those rules. Rules are not so much "made to be broken" as made to correct what was "broken" about our perceptions of consequences. For better or worse, this has become the domain of doctors: first physicians and perhaps now psychologists and psychiatrists. They make rules based on observations of seemingly disconnected actions and consequences. They are experts in consequences. Did psychologists, educators, or scientists aspire to the role of rule-maker? Probably not, but they're a necessary bi-product of a complex world in which our finite senses can't keep track of the many connections between actions and consequences. To believe otherwise is to succumb to nostalgia for a by-gone world.

Things get messy when we get personal about our analysis of time, desire, and self-control: media use (my area of research) and, even more personal, marriage and sex. There have been some terrific articles and commentary about marriage and fidelity in the wake of Anthony Weiner's virtual infidelity and NY's passing of a gay marriage law. A defining characteristic of marriage is the pledge of individuals to stick together. Its an attempt of the long-term-thinking self to override the future short-term-thinking selves so that the long-term self can benefit. But who is informing that long-term-thinking self? What is their evidence? What is their agenda?

This leaves us with an uncomfortable reality: those who can demonstrate the negative long-term consequences of things you know are pleasurable in the short-term and you think are not harmful in the long-term are telling you what to do, and people tend to not like being told what to do. For good reasons, too. Those in positions of power abuse it for their own gain. If I own stock in a cookie company, I'll fund research and coverage of research suggesting that another indulgence is particularly harmful, leading people away from that indulgence and toward cookies. Similarly, certain relationship experts might promote a certain view of monogamy because they benefit from its success in the marketplace of ideas, not because its any more accurate at predicting negative consequences than any other theory. The same might be said of a media effects researcher. Those who reject the findings of so-called experts analyzing this complex causal world can simply blame another aspect of that complex world that isn't under their control, freeing their short-term selves from blame. If people who aren't in long-term, monogamous relationships aren't happy, its not because they couldn't exert the self-control recommended by experts; its because they're being judged by an unfair, retrograde society intent on maintaining a certain kind of social order. If people who play lots of violent video games are more aggressive, then its because you measured "aggression" wrong or its due to some variable the researchers didn't control for. Basically, this leaves everybody believing what they want to believe, deferring to no one, and assessing consequences based on personal experience and the limited experience of those around them.

Since I don't want this entry (or anything else I write) to be an empty exercise in hand-wringing, I'll suggest some priorities for research and reporting on research.

We'll have to move from a proscription paradigm to an explanation paradigm, one that is supported by replicable empirical evidence. It is best to demonstrate how to find the links between short-term behavior and long-term consequences, to let people "see for themselves" as much as you can. Our society has become more complex, making it difficult to see the connections. Much of the study of the world, in science and the humanities, has become equally complex: full of impenetrable jargon and statistics. We've got to make explanations clearer, better educate ourselves so that we have some basic fluency in these languages, and support an education system that helps students understand how to find connections for themselves. Yes, we live in an extremely complex world, but the good news is that we've just scratched the surface of how technology can be used to explain concepts, patterns, and connections to large numbers of people in a customizable, individualized way, for free. Behavioral scientists and theorists might be at the forefront of finding patterns in behavior across time, but they can't maintain the trust of the public unless the public can see for themselves.

Not only can the public see for themselves, but maybe they can do the restricting themselves, too. We've all got a conscience. We just don't have the societal restrictions to assist it, and physically/temporally proximate temptation makes it harder to listen to that voice. We're not all tempted by the same thing, so the restrictions really shouldn't be one size fits all. If people can design their own restrictions, you avoid the possibilities of reactance and the totalitarian manipulation of taste that inspires it.

So, I'd like to run an outside-the-lab experiment to provide evidence that supports my dissertation hypothesis, but I'd also like people to be able to try the experiment on themselves, to plug in their own individual variables.