The Pros and Cons (mostly cons) of Satire

Last week in our news literacy class, we had a great, thought-provoking guest lecture by Dannagal Young. Young’s work is part of a growing body of research providing evidence of the benefits of watching satirical news programs such as The Daily Show.

So far, we have evidence suggesting that Daily Show viewers vote more than non-viewers, participate more in political campaigns, score higher on political knowledge, and consume more news from other news sources. This seems to answer the critics who worry that satirical news programs might lead to cynicism. But perhaps it doesn’t.

There is an assumption that cynicism would manifest itself as (or co-occur with) apathy. If The Daily Show made viewers cynical, then we wouldn’t expect them to be more civically engaged than non-viewers.

Cynicism or Being Principled?

I’d critique the assumption that cynicism’s connection to apathy is the real worry. I’d define and measure cynicism as negativity about something combined with an inability to respond to evidence. So, would a liberal person acknowledge evidence that, say, unions make countries or states less competitive, or would a conservative acknowledge evidence that gun control laws dramatically reduce injury and deaths. Would they just say "you're misinterpreting the evidence" or "you're not looking at the evidence in proper context" or "you're ignoring this other important piece of evidence". An inability to change one's view based on new evidence is, to me, a problem.

But other people (highly partisan people) might refer to this orientation toward new evidence as “principled”: you think that unions are good no matter what, military intervention is bad no matter what, corporate mergers are bad no matter what, government regulation is bad no matter what. So, are you being cynical or are you being principled? In either case, I suspect that exposure to certain kinds of satire news (The Daily Show, or Rush Limbaugh, who could be understood or defended as a satirist) increases the frequency and intensity of this orientation. Meanwhile, websites that present information on the same topics but do so through presenting evidence in a more-or-less straight-faced manner, like fivethirtyeight, might decrease the frequency or intensity of this orientation.

Dannagal Young pointed out, rightly, that getting people to really consider evidence that contradicted existing beliefs would be pretty hard. In some sense, we are “hard-wired” not to do such a thing. There’s plenty of evidence to suggest that the resistance to certain kinds of evidence is a matter of identity preservation. But it seems worth considering the extent to which media can reinforce this instinct to preserve one’s identity.

Angrier Candidates

Consider the difference between the rhetoric and reputation of two candidates: Bill Clinton vs. Elizabeth Warren. Or, if you’d prefer to compare conservatives: George W. Bush as a presidential candidate in 1999 vs. Ron Paul. In both cases, the former candidate runs a campaign based on a kind of compassionate rhetoric while the latter candidates run based on distrust and anger at established authorities. Which of these candidates’ rhetoric resonates with voters? I’d argue that the satire of Michael Moore and perhaps that of Jon Stewart cause viewers to favor rhetoric that is based on anger against the status quo rather than rhetoric of compassion. Is this necessarily bad? I’m not sure. But it certainly doesn’t move us any closer to a world in which an informed electorate is selecting a candidate based on evidence as to who might be the most effective candidate. It’s just survival of the angriest.

Increasing skepticism, but of whom?

As Young pointed out during her guest lecture, humor and satire have been used to prompt audiences to question authorities since the days of ancient Greece. But the humor also stops the audience from questioning the arguments made by the comedian (or to view the evidence differently). Humor prompts audiences to let their guard down and cultivate a kind of affinity for the comedian and his.her views. Humor is an effective way to stop people from questioning the authority of the comedian. It reduces people’s ability to counter-argue. Again, will this help people select the best candidate? I think it just makes people less likely to consider evidence that is inconsistent with the worldview implicitly endorsed by the satirist.  

Hard-wiring is not fate

So, can media challenge our existing worldviews by cultivating mindful consideration of the issues of the day? Last week, I hosted a symposium on media choice at Drexel University. One of our guest speakers, Talia Stroud, had an argument similar to Young’s about how we are “hard-wired” to defend our ideological in-group or “tribe”. We are predisposed to political or ideological polarization. The instinct to read other viewpoints and arguments as somehow biased and flawed reflect deep-seated, automatic way of acting and thinking. Stroud presented the results of years of research that, I thought, reflected a terrific persistence and a refusal to accept hard-wired predispositions as unchangeable. She presented the result of study after study in which she and her colleagues tried to reduce ideological polarization when people are exposed to viewpoints that differ from their own. Time and again, the interventions not only didn’t work, but often made people more polarized! Finally, she had seen evidence of reduced polarization when she presented news website users with a “respect” button alongside the ubiquitous “like” button. When people are prompted to respect a viewpoint other than their own along with the ability to endorse it through a comment or a “like”, some of them will do so. This subtle change to websites can affect discourse, and I think this change in discourse could potentially reduce ideological polarization.

Even if a large number of people weren’t ever oriented toward objectively considering evidence for or against a politically-charged topic (e.g., man-made climate change, effects of reducing unemployment benefits) in the past, are we to let this dictate what we’re capable of? Are we mistaking predispositions for unchangeable fate? Are we not to even explore the possibility of change? To do so would seem, well, cynical. And Stroud's research shows that there is already evidence that simple tweaks to the media choice environment cause changes in behavior and, perhaps, thinking, despite whatever hard-wiring we have. 

who wants to know

It's been another thought-provoking International Communication Association annual conference. Among other effects, it's caused me to consider writing half-formed thoughts in this blog. Basically, these thoughts would be tweets but for that lack of brevity. Perhaps they'll take the form of rants, provocations, or polemics.

So, privacy. About six years ago, I blogged about the topic. My opinion on the matter (that is, my opposition to privacy absolutism) has not changed, nor (frustratingly) has the public "debate" about privacy. Mostly, I get the sense that privacy situationalists are an increasingly rare breed. Privacy seems to be an issue on which many on the left and right agree: very few people want other people spying on them. On the aforementioned entry, I raised one possible benefit of living in a world where we occasionally ceded our privacy to trusted authorities: reduced threat of being attacked through judicious use of surveillance. Another payoff of relinquishing privacy I wrote about might be an increased tendency to select options with delayed payoff: when no one is watching, you're more inclined to indulge in immediate gratification (fine in moderation, but not so good if it's all you're choosing).

Here's another possible downside to privacy absolutism. Privacy, carried to an extreme, negates our knowledge of one another. If we become distrustful of one another, no pollster, researchers, policy maker, etc. will be able to know anything about human behavior and be able to produce empirical evidence of how we think, feel, and behave. In some sense, privacy is the enemy of knowledge of human behavior.

I suppose there's an alternative though, one I've been exploring recently: the quantified self. It's amazing what we can learn just by tracking our own thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. Still, I sense that there are limits to what this approach can produce. We can understand ourselves through these means, but can we understand each other? If privacy concerns limit our approach to understanding human behavior to self-knowledge, I sense that we'll lose something important.

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.

(Mis)Understanding Studies

Nate Silver and his merry band of data journalists recently re-launched fivethirtyeight.com, a fantastic site that tries to communicate original analyses of data relating to science, politics, health, lifestyle, the Oscars, sports, and pretty much everything else. It's unsurprising that articles on the site receive a fair amount of criticism. In reading the comments on the articles, I was heartened to see people debate the proper way to explain the purpose of a t-test (we're a long way from the typical YouTube comments section), but a bit saddened that the tone of the comments made them seem more like carping and less like constructive criticism. Instead of saying someone is "dead wrong", why not make a suggestion as to how their work might be improved?

One article on the site got me thinking about a topic I've already been thinking about as I begin teaching classes on news literacy and information literacy: how news articles about research misrepresent findings and what to do about this phenomenon. The 538 piece is wonderfully specific and constructive about what to do. It provides a checklist that readers can quickly apply to the abstract of a scientific article, and advises readers to take into account this information, along with their initial gut reaction to the claims, when deciding whether or not to believe the claims, act on them, or share the information. It applies to health news articles in the popular press, but I think it could be applied to articles about media effects.

Now, the list might not be exhaustive, and there might be totally valid findings that don't possess any of the criteria on the list, but I think this is a good start. And really, that's what I love about 538. I recognize it has flaws, but it is a much needed step away from groundless speculations based on anecdotes that are geared toward confirming the biases of their niche audience (i.e., lots of news articles and commentary). And they appear to be open to criticism. Through that, I hope, they will refine their pieces to develop something that will really help improve the information literacy of the public.

The piece got me thinking about the systematic nature of the ways in which the popular press misleads the public about scientific findings. They tend to follow a particular script: The researchers account for most likely contributors to an outcome in their studies and test these hypotheses in a more-or-less rigorous fashion. The popular press does not mention the fact that they accounted for certain possible contributing factors because of limited space and the need to attract a large, general audience. When people read the news article about the research study, they think "well, there's clearly another explanation for the finding!" But in most (not all, but most) cases, researchers have already accounted for whatever variable you imagine is affecting the outcome.

In other cases, the popular press simply overstates either the certainty that we should have about a finding or the magnitude of the effect of one thing on another thing. Again, if we look at a few things from the original research article (like the abstract and the discussion section), we should be able to know whether or not the popular press article was being misleading, and we wouldn't even have to know any stats to do this. 

The popular press benefits from articles and headlines that catch our eyes and confirm our biases. That's just the nature of the beast. Instead of just throwing out the abundant information around us, it's worth developing a system for quickly vetting it, and taking what we can from it. 

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.

Facebook Photo Album as Everyday Storytelling Device

Let's say you go on vacation for a week. You travel to some interesting place. How do you tell people about your vacation?

Social media is, among other things, the way that we tell people we know (and, sometimes, people we don't know) about things that happened to us. It's a kind of everyday storytelling medium, a way in which we can relate to the choices made by a filmmaker or novelist. As with any form of narrative, Facebook does not include every event that happened from every point of view. There are two "editorial moments" as which people decide what gets left in the story and what gets cut out: the moment at which they decide to take a picture and the moment at which they decide to post it. In addition to determining what gets left in or out of the story, the person assembling a Facebook photo album can re-arrange the order in which pictures are presented.

I can think of several reasons why this kind of temporal re-arranging may take place. You may want to "set the stage" for people looking through your photo album (assuming they encounter it in a linear fashion, starting at the beginning and clicking the "next" button as they go through the pictures). You may wait until the end of your vacation to take pictures of, say, the hotel in which you stayed. But you may put those pictures at the beginning of your album, to orient the viewer. You may also save a picture that you took of an amazing sunset on the second day of you vacation for the last or next-to-last picture of the album, using it as a kind of climax to the story of your vacation (although, maybe it's just me who does this sort of thing).

Do you group all of the pictures of food together? There's a kind of organizational logic to this from the standpoint of the picture arranger. And yet, I would argue, it leads to an inferior experience for the picture viewer. There's a kind of tedium to seeing picture after picture of food. But if the pictures are placed among other events and thing - trips to the beach, happy people, monuments, etc. - then it might feel more like you are experiencing the vacation as the individual experienced it.

But one wonders how much time people spend on telling stories through Facebook. Would people care about having an abrupt ending to an album? The difference between telling a story and simply putting things up is something a viewer might pick up on, at least sub-consciously.

ABRUPT ENDING

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. 

A New Kind of Bad Television

I've been re-reading parts of Amanda Lotz's fantastic book "The Television Will Be Revolutionized". Written just 7 years ago about the state of television, it manages to be neither especially prescient nor obsolete despite how rapidly the world of TV is changing. I suppose this is because it clearly describes the relationships among content creation, funding, distribution, promotion, and consumption at one point in time. It doesn't get lost in "blue skies" rhetoric, as Lotz puts it, nor does it dwell on how great content is (another Golden Age of TV) or how consumers are finally in charge. While reading, I thought a bit more about web series and how and why so many of them suck.

Perhaps part of my reaction to these series is simply that they don't resonate with me, but neither do many shows on TV and I can still sense that there is some crucial difference between those shows and web series. I stated earlier that while some web series bear superficial similarities to professionally produced TV content (in production values), they lack a certain something(s): proper pacing, really good acting, good dialog, funny jokes. They remind me of the films I used to make as a 20-year-old film student. Part of me feels entitled to slag off others because I, too, produced content that I'm quite sure was utter crap and bilked others out of $ to help fund its creation. I guess you could argue that I'm just bitter that I wasn't more talented, but before judging me, assume that my argument is at least in part based on an intimate familiarity with the quality of amateur film/TV.  My films and other student films were "awful" in many of the same ways as some web series, only they lacked the polish and distribution and promotion channels of today's amateur TV.

That professional TV has a certain snap that web series don't is not surprising when you consider the fact that creators of professional TV are likely freakishly talented, the top .0001% of people who create content that is intended to appeal to others, and/or they have been at it for 10+ years. Part of the differences, I think, are due to the lack of experience of web series creators.

But the Lotz book, in particular the chapter on distribution, have me thinking about how crowd-sourced funding like Kickstarter yield a different kind of content than the kind of content that has gone through more traditional channels: pitched to execs, tested before small audiences, acceptable to advertisers, in competition with thousands of other ideas for shows.

Let's imagine a show creator who shoots a couple of short episodes of a show and puts them on YouTube. They get over 100,000 views. To finance the rest of the web series, the creator starts a Kickstarter and asks the people who like his videos on YouTube, directly, to help fund the creation of more episodes. These aren't family or friends, so they have no reason to pay hard-earned money to the creator other than wanting to see more of the content they like.

Part of the challenge of making good TV is maintaining a certain level of quality and novelty. Regardless of whether you're telling a serial story, creating a series of standalone episodes, or a reality show, you need to maintain a level of quality and novelty that keeps audiences coming back. This, it occurs to me now, is incredibly hard. Its something that those in the TV business, collectively as an industry with secrets of the trade and individually as showrunners with 10+ years experience, have gotten quite good at over the years. Nothing about the aforementioned Kickstarter scenario yields the kinds of shows that get audience's attention and keep it. Viewers who contribute to the Kickstarter may think that they'll enjoy the next episode(s) of the web series, but its hard to know that for sure, or keep it going indefinitely.

Its not as if I think that professional TV is necessarily all that great. As I said before, I'm aware of how commercial interests can yield lowest-common-denominator dreck that doesn't appeal to large swaths of viewers. But I'd argue that it's mostly an issue of the values conveyed in the work or perhaps a certain type of humor not synching up with would-be viewers. They all still have some mastery of pacing and rhythm that is hard to achieve and really hard to maintain year after year. Web series are likely better at appealing to niche values and esoteric senses of humor, but they're often bad in other ways.

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. 

Hey, let's put on a show!

It's the start of a new semester (or quarter, here at Drexel) and I'm excited to be co-teaching a class on the future(s) of television. We're skyping in a variety of guest speakers, including the producer of two web series. This got me thinking about the nature of web series. Do they have more in common with home-made YouTube videos or professionally produced TV content? Why do people make them? Why do people watch them?

After watching a few episodes of several different web series, I get the sense that they're somewhere in between a series of YouTube videos made in someone's back yard and a television series. This is true of how their produced, distributed, and promoted, but it also feels true (at least to me) of the finished product. Certainly, the look of some of these series is virtually indistinguishable from video content made for television in the traditional mode of production. The move away from expensive sets and toward more hand-held camera work made the aesthetic of "professional TV" easier to imitate. A generation of young people seem to have absorbed (either from film school or just watching tons of TV and film) how to compose a shot. I've watched a few minute-long promos for web series and they look like hip new shows on HBO or Fox. 

But the actual episodes lack something, and most of the ones I've watched lack the same things. The pacing seems slow. It seems slow when you compare it to professional TV and seems glacial when you compare it to YouTube clips or GIFs. I recall thinking during the early days of online video (2005-2011) that no one would ever watch a video longer than 3 minutes online. But I've seen the way college students have incorporated Netflixed 20-minute episodes of their favorite shows into their media diets, so I think that it's not an attention span issue. It's a pacing issue. In web series, more time elapses between jokes. The shots seem longer in duration. 

Also, the jokes seem, well, worse. I know this sounds like arbitrary, groundless criticism, and there's something weirdly personal about bad-mouthing a web series. You're not critiquing a millionaire. You're critiquing someone who bet their life savings on a passion project. Some of these shows are promoted and sometimes funded through word-of-mouth, and word-of-mouth often starts with friends, so in many cases, the audiences are pre-disposed to liking (or saying they like) the show. Early audiences for web series seem divided into two groups: anonymous, cynical "haters" who permeate every corner of online discourse and friends who don't want to see the creator of the show emotionally, professionally, and financially destroyed. 

Unlike professional TV, the content didn't have to pass before a group of experienced judges. People love pointing out how homogeneous TV content is due to the fact that it has to either please advertisers or garner big audiences to stay afloat. They like to point out the many times stuffy execs passed on shows that became hits. These are good points, but still, the system almost certainly weeded out scripts that were too slow-paced or unfunny to entertain people before the shows were actually produced. TV networks and advertisers were flawed proxies for audiences, but, I'd argue, not as flawed as a show's creators and their friends. The web series environment is not a good environment to produce the constructive feedback that is necessary to generate content that many people want to watch. 

Unless, of course, you look at it differently. Maybe making a web series is this generation's version of starting a band. You're making an artistic statement that resonates with your generation, not trying to create the next Two and a Half Men. A handful of successes give creators the impression that their shows can become hits. And getting a decent sized audience (let's say 100,000 viewers) is easier online than with TV because you're pulling from such a large pool of potential viewers (anyone with a broadband connection or a smartphone), much larger than any TV show creator had when they made their show. Get a few opinion leaders to post links to your show and you've got your audience. Keeping them is another matter. In the world of infinite content and distractions, I think it would benefit web series creators to make single-season shows that die before audiences have a chance to lose interest. 

But I think there's an allure to creating a show even if it doesn't become a hit, in the same way that there was an allure to being part of a band even if it never became really popular. People whom you don't know (potential boyfriends/girlfriends, really) get to see you do something interesting, funny, cool. And you get to express yourself and maybe hit it big. 

It's not a precise analogy. I doubt that web series creators will be seen as "cool" in the same way that people in a band are/were seen as cool. But if I were 16-27 and I wanted to do something that attracted the right kind of attention, I might get some people together and make a show. 

What You Search For Is All There Is

I'm still slowly making my way through Thinking, Fast and Slow, and every now and then, ideas from the book pop into my head when considering some type of media use. Today, I was thinking about searching for information online and how the bias of "what you see is all there is" (WYSIATI) might be applied to it (WYSFIATI). Essentially, people have trouble factoring in the effects of relevant information to which they don't have access but that still affects outcomes of interest. People assume, wrongly, that what they see (i.e., the information to which they have access) is all there is (i.e., all the information that is relevant to the outcome of interest).

The types and scope of information to which we had access was largely dictated by physical proximity, our social circles, books, newspapers, TV shows, movies. These sources gave us an incomplete picture of reality. There's nothing wrong with this per se, as long as the individual knows the extent to which and the way in which their information is incomplete. In Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman cites numerous experiments in which people are asked to make decisions based on information which they are told has a particular likelihood (e.g., 50%) of being true. But the more common flaw in decision making seems not to be the extent to which people trust a source, but the extent to which they assume that the sources are supplying them with complete relevant information.

Media users often employ some kind of skepticism toward the information with which they are presented. For example, viewers often discount what they see on Reality TV: they assume that the behavior of people on such shows is authentic in some sense but not in others.

But what about searching for information? You start off with a question about an upcoming decision. Sometimes, you find a relatively concrete, straightforward answer. Other times, you're searching for something harder to answer: whether or not to have children after 40, say, or whether or not to vaccinate your children, or whether or not to travel to the Middle East, or whether o not that lump on your shoulder is a tumor (in my case, thankfully, it was not).

Again, it's important to say that we never had perfect information to help us make these decisions. As a culture, we probably weren't hip to this at first, but in the recent past, and certainly once the internet came along, skepticism (or rather, cynicism) about mainstream media went, well, mainstream. It is true that our personal social networks, newspapers, or books were incomplete and biased sources of information. I think that the information we acquire through online search is incomplete and biased in different ways, but I wonder if the very act of searching increases our erroneous belief that we're getting complete, or near complete, information. The act of searching, of picking your own source, is likely to make you think that you're acting independently.

But search really magnifies certain biases in ways that mainstream media did not. Search results are, of course, not all that there is. They are based on what others click on (and a "click" is as much an indication of immediate curiosity as it is of the veracity of the information) and based on what we've clicked on in the past. So, confirmation bias probably influences search results. But the act of searching from among many (sometimes hundreds or even thousands, if you're especially diligent) sources makes you feel like a careful information consumer, someone who's not simply being spoon-fed information by those interested in making a profit.

Perhaps mainstream media was always interested in making a profit. They also were (and continue to be) interested in maintaining the status quo. It's been pointed out many times how this maintenance of the status quo was a bad thing, how it keeps populations from questioning despotic regimes, antiquated laws, bigotry, etc. But getting free of status-quo-enforcing sources of information has it's potential downsides. We may be disappearing down information rabbit holes based on shock value and pre-existing notions of how the world is.

But the point I wanted to make here relates to the certainty we have when we search that what we find is all there is. It seems to me to be counterproductive to refer to this as the illusion of agency or the illusion of choice, as one might be tempted to do. All decisions are made from incomplete information menus that are influenced by others who do not necessarily have our best interests in mind. But you can be more or less aware of the degree to which the information presented in those menus is complete and how it may be biased. The very act of searching makes it a bit harder to see these things clearly.

The object of media literacy is not to eliminate bias in one's media diet or finally obtain complete information, but to increase awareness of bias and incompleteness.

Post script: what I've really been describing is "What You Find Is All There Is" (WYFIATI). "What You Search For Is All There Is" really describes the sense that the world is defined by what you're curios about or interested in, which is a separate but related cognitive bias.

Hoaxed

A couple of viral stories, or memes, circulating through the information ecosystem over the past month got me thinking about hoaxes and viral media. They're both stories about interactions between strangers. They have the elements of any good story: conflict, a moral element, a character with whom you can identify. They both incorporate pictures of written documents which have the effect of serving as proof of the events (they make the stories slightly more believable than if there were no pictures at all). One took place on an airplane. The other took place in a restaurant. They both turned out to be hoaxes. Many people, including major news outlets, believed them at first.

My initial thoughts on hoaxes and new media revolved around the premise that hoaxes happen when any information dissemination technology is new. They expose the fact that we have placed too much trust in the new source of information. Think of War of the Worlds Halloween broadcast (radio), the quiz show scandals of the 50's (TV), Lonelygirl15 (online video), Manti T'eo (online dating). Whether intended or not, hoaxes help audiences or users develop a proper skepticism toward information from the new technology.

But this latest rash of hoaxes seem like something else. This just seems to be par for the course in the era of decentralized, virally spreading information. It's easy to create and spread a hoax online and an audience can only be so skeptical. This kind of hoaxing and unmasking happens a lot on Reddit. People pretend to have cancer, or make up a story around a photo, e.g., "my 5-year-old daughter made this" in order to garner greater attention or sympathy. As good as digital media is at spreading lies, it seems equally equipped to unmask them. Crowd-sourced Sherlocks put pieces of evidence together to determine the truth of any of these stories.

The situation raises a couple of questions:

Can an online information consumer really spend the energy being that skeptical about all the information he/she encounters online, all of the stories like this one? The signal-to-noise ratio isn't quite so low that people will stop believing certain sources, but that could happen. But with a site like Gawker, I'm not convinced the average reader, after having read a fake story on the site, would be any less likely to believe or go to the site for information. But perhaps that is because Gawker readers seek a certain kind of information, which leads me to my next question.

Does it really matter if stories like these turn out to be untrue? Does that erase all of the meaning? It matters if a story about an attack on the White House turns out to be fake. But these morality play stories go viral in part because they spark a conversation about morals and behavior. The conversation and the thoughts shared about the topic still seem valid to me. Perhaps there is news and there is gossip. Both serve a function, and with the latter, we're more tolerant of the occasional falsehood.

----------

After listening to an excellent podcast in which Chuck Klosterman, Bill Simmons, and Chris Connelly discussed what we know about the Kennedy assassination 50 years after it occurred, I had another question related to truth and lies in the digital age: are we, in general, developing a more complete understanding of the world around us, or are we somehow moving further away from that? We have better tools for recording, seeing, hearing, and analyzing. We should be better at answering questions about what happened. But those tools developed at the same time as the hoax-spreading machine known as the internet.

There is some theoretically knowable answer to the question of who killed Kennedy and why. But information and knowledge do not move in tandem. William Gibson once said that the future is here, but that it was just unevenly distributed. Maybe knowledge of the world around us is like this. Those with a certain orientation to the technology are moving closer to this knowledge while others move further away.

Post script: There was an interesting article on the Reuters blog about this topic. It features quotes from Jonah Perretti (BuzzFeed) and Nick Denton (Gawker) and is definitely worth reading. Here's a terrific quote from it: "the reasons that people share basically have nothing to do with whether or not the thing being shared is true." The article acknowledges the two types of information circulating - news and info that let's people feeling "fleeting instances of comfort or joy" that are more difficult to verify. But even if you're dealing in the latter, if you repeatedly pass on stories that draw some of their appeal from being real (and let's face it: these little gossipy stories make for sub-par fiction) that turn out to be untrue, you become like the friend who's always telling tall tales and loses all credibility. Not as bad as the news organization that loses credibility, but still, I think people will seek out reliably true "gossip"-type news, shunning sources that get repeatedly duped.

The Circulation of Trauma

Teaching a class on images of war has been an education for me. It is not my area of expertise, which perhaps made it all the more fascinating. I've had the opportunity to meet many wonderful guest speakers, think about things I don't normally think about, and make new connections when thinking about the subjects that I spend most of my time thinking about.

In our most recent class, we screened the powerful documentary Under Fire, which concerned post-traumatic stress disorder among war journalists. After the screening, we spoke with one of its producers, neuropsychiatrist Dr. Anthony Feinstein, and one of the journalists depicted in the film, Pulitzer Prize winner Paul Watson. Both were as candid and thoughtful as people who encounter trauma could be.

Watson's experiences as a war journalist are the stuff of classic tragedy. His telling of his experience being the photographer who helped change American military policy through his photos of dead American soldiers in Mogadishu in 1993 is the emotional climax of the documentary. It is also the basis of a series of poems, a play, and an opera that will be performed in 2014 in NYC. I've always felt a bit queasy about turning one person's suffering into another person's art/entertainment. Maybe it's the commodification that bugs me, the building of a career on the suffering of others. Even if the message affects others in some positive way, that other exploitative layer is there. Watson's pain also seems incredibly personal and private. In some respects, the troubles with the use of Watson's emotional and mental trauma for the purposes of art mirrors the trouble at the heart of his story: the depiction of death and suffering as a kind of desecration, no matter how noble the intentions. One idea I was left to mull over after that evening was how we can discuss trauma without it overwhelming us, or infecting us.

This relates to my musings on the circulation of ideas and stories about personal suffering online. When do our consumption of these ideas and stories and the conversations they give rise to provide us or the sufferer with solace? When do they prompt us to dwell on the suffering? When do they help us work through the suffering? These are "difficult" topics to think about, to speak about, to hear about. Watson had the feeling that there was something fundamentally wrong about recording and distributing these horrible images. Another part of him knew that they were important for the world to see.

Watson knew that some images he saw would overwhelm an audience. When he encountered piles of dead children, he didn't photograph them. He depicted the horror obliquely, showing the children's schoolbooks scattered on the ground. That ability to take in some overwhelming horror of real life and to retain it's essence through storytelling is, I'm understanding, an invaluable part of being a reporter, an artist, and maybe being a compassionate, honest human being.

Mobile media revealing our selves to ourselves

Mobile phones have many, many purposes: entertainment, art, communication, education. One of the more controversial applications of this technology is using it for monitoring. When certain people have the ability to covertly monitor others while not being monitored themselves, there is a power imbalance. It is possible for those doing the monitoring to judge and punish those who they catch doing something bad when, in fact, this is something that they do themselves but no one is able to observe them doing it. I'm not sure this actually happens all that often or will be as likely to happen in the future as most people believe, but for the time being, let's assume this concern about mobile media as monitoring device is a valid one.

But what about self-monitoring? The possibility of using mobile technology for self-monitoring and self-feedback has not yet been fully realized, and I think it may help people overcome two significant obstacles to behavior change.

The first obstacle is being aware of the patterns in your own behavior: the environmental cues that cause you to unconsciously respond in a way that isn't in your long-term interests, the moods and thoughts that precede worse moods and thoughts. It will be tricky to use mobile tech to reveal these patterns without being too obtrusive. I've tried out some experience sampling technology on my phone and its hard to even get it to work right, and when it does work right, it may just be too much of a nuisance to put up with. It feels like one more thing you have to do, like a diet, and almost all diets fail. But its conceivable that you could design a less intrusive way of tracking thoughts, feelings, and behavior throughout the day.

The second is one I've been thinking about a lot: people do not like to be told what is good for them by others. They may be a bit more accepting of such advice if its coming from a trusted expert (say, a medical doctor), but even then, it doesn't feel good to be told what to do. People will start to look for reasons to doubt the expertise of the advice giver. If we give people the tools to make connections for themselves and to use that new knowledge to alter their choice environment, there is no external force telling them what to do. If anything, they are telling their selves, their future selves, what to do.

We all do this already. We resolve to do things in the future that are in our best long-term interests but then fail to do so in the face of temptation or distraction. Mobile media, because it is with us at all times in all contexts, can be a tool with which we cope with temptation and distraction. Ideally, it will not proscribe particular ways of being, but will merely be a tool for individuals to closely observe and then structure their lives.

Modern existence necessitates being part of an increasingly complex (i.e., hard to understand) set of interactions with an increasing number of people. It is difficult to know why you feel the way you feel, or do the things you do. Designing an unobtrusive, secure self-monitoring application and using it in tandem with some choice-limiting technology is a way to exist in such a society. Potentially, mobile tech is a layer of technology between all those aforementioned applications - entertainment, art, communication, education - and the self who is equipped with the older "technologies" of the brain, eyes, ears, and nose.

Choose your metaphors wisely

The term "digital detox" is now in the Oxford English Dictionary. This suggests a certain cultural awareness of the concept of media overuse which, to someone studying self-control and media use, is heartening. But I wonder about the choice of words.

"Detox"'s meaning, recently, related to food consumption, or the lack thereof. When you traded in the fast food for celery and refrained from consuming anything but tea, you were "detoxing", or "cleansing". But, of course, the term detox originally achieved notoriety when it was used in reference to addictive drugs like heroin. When I think of the term, I still think of it in terms of drugs.

Even beyond that single term, we are apt to think of new experiences in terms of older, more familiar ones. More and more, I hear people talk of Facebook or Candy Crush "addiction" which, again, conjures thoughts of hopeless alcoholics or strung-out meth-heads. Perhaps, in our effort to blame anyone but ourselves for the fact that we're unable to eschew immediately gratifying options for activities that will help us achieve our long-term goals, we want to trump up the power of our indulgences, and we do this by likening our habits to the almost-literally-irresistible urge of the crack addict to smoke more crack.

If we have to understand our new experiences with habitual digital media use in terms of older experiences (and, as much as people love to bad-mouth metaphors as some sort of crutch that keeps us from seeing new things as they truly are, I think this is the only way anything new can be understood at all, at least at first), then food and dieting would probably be a better metaphor than drugs.

Information (that is, the content of all media, digital or otherwise) is like food (and unlike, say, cocaine): we need it to survive. You can't really say no to media any more than you can say no to food. Getting too much of it is bad, but not nearly as bad as injecting large doses of certain drugs. Many more people struggle with tempting foods than with tempting drugs, and I think media over-use and habitual media use should be understood as things that are as common and as benign as bad eating habits, not as rare and harmful as drug addiction.

As time goes on, we'll understand our relationship with digital media on its own terms. But until then, its important to at least consider how our comparisons to other experiences (both in thought and language) affect our perception of threats and responsibilities.

I Always Feel Like Somebody's Watching ME

While listening to a new, poppy-sounding, dance-able Nine Inch Nails song about surveillance (and recalling an older, poppy-sounding, dance-able song about surveillance), I thought about how the topic of privacy and surveillance recurs in the news and in people's everyday conversations. Edward Snowden might just be the beginning of more elaborate, widespread considerations of these topics. Certainly, it's something that many young people have an opinion on, and the songs made me think about the ways in which it is woven into themes of popular television, films, and music.

If the Administration is to be believed, the US government isn't actually looking at everyone's data though they possess the ability to look at anyone's data. There's a logic to this: if your goal is to find potential terrorists (or, hell, if your goal is to find juicy bits of gossip), you wouldn't waste your time looking in detail at everyone's data. You'd try to develop algorithms for identifying people of interest and then dig deeper into their data.

Most acknowledge that authorities (governments, corporations) can "watch" us in this sense. Even the authorities themselves acknowledge that it is technically possible. But who is likely to believe that the authorities are telling the truth when they say that they're not looking at them, in particular?

Certainly, the degree to which one trusts authorities plays some role in this. But I think there's something else at play, something that I've been digging into in my recent research: narcissism. To assume that one is being watched, that one is a "person of interest", is to assume that one is interesting enough to be watched. It would follow that a certain type of person who tended to have narcissistic thoughts would be more likely to think that they were being watched and would express greater concern regarding privacy and surveillance.

Those who exhibit narcissistic tendencies in the age of digital media are in a bind. They want to get more information about themselves and their thoughts out there because they believe it's worth hearing, but they might be more concerned about the nefarious use of this information if they assume this information to be valuable (not just incriminating). They're the most exposed and the most concerned, so the thinking goes.

There's some preliminary evidence suggesting that those higher in narcissism have fewer privacy restrictions on some of their social media, which is, in a way, the opposite of what I would expect. Maybe if an individual high in narcissism were primed to think about corporate data miners or government surveillance with a news story, they would be more likely to change their privacy settings than another person. Maybe not.

If nothing else, the iconography and slogans of the pro-privacy movement are telling: Big Brother isn't watching us. He's watching you.

Do you have a Candy Crush Habit or a Candy Crush Addiction?

Most of my recent research concerns media habits and/or what you might call "unconscious" media use. These are the times when we open up a tab on our web browsers and go to a website without thinking too deeply about why we're doing this or considering the long-term value of such an act. Over time, such behavior become habits, and habits can be hard to break. It seems that if habits are sufficiently difficult to break, we call them addictions.

But I, like many others in the field of psychology, am not too keen on applying the term "addiction" to habitual media use. Why not? If you're playing Candy Crush Saga five hours a day and you feel unable to stop playing, what is the difference if we call this a bad habit or an addiction?

Well, I suppose it has to do with how our culture currently understands addiction. We treat it as a disease that requires professional intervention. We assume, as is the case with most diseases, that the afflicted is not responsible for their affliction and that it is unlikely that they can get better on their own. They need help. This diagnosis is well-meaning in the sense that when people are going through something bad (and the feeling of being unable to stop doing something is usually bad) it would be worse to heap the extra guilt that comes with responsibility for their current condition (and for altering the condition) on top of their existing troubles. In addition, professionals have years of experience dealing with addictions and decades of research to help develop systems for fighting addiction.

But there's something that's lost: the individual's sense of self-efficacy, the sense that they can do something about the behavior. In some cases, it's possible that self-efficacy can be an important part of altering habitual/addictive behavior, that the individual finding a way to change their behavior is more effective and efficient than sending all of those individuals to professionals and/or through a series of institutions.

As more people find themselves with habits/addictions to games like Candy Crush, it's important to address the following questions: What role does self-efficacy play in breaking habits? If we call the habit an addiction, does this diagnosis reduce the person's sense of self-efficacy thereby making it harder (or perhaps more expensive) to quit?

This isn't to say that simply labeling this kind of behavior as "habits" isn't without drawbacks. People may not take the threat that their behavior poses as seriously if they call it a habit (most of us have bad habits, after all). Even when we do call the behavior addiction, we're increasingly liberal in our use of that term which waters it down (much like the term "stalking", which is used in a casual, everyday sense).

So, whether we call this kind of behavior "addiction", I think, is not just a matter of semantics. It is possible that diagnosis affects self-efficacy, which affects likelihood of behavior change. Whether you call it addiction or habit, the end game should be the same: understanding how people stop doing things that they, at first, feel they are unable to stop doing. But it's important to recognize the role of words and diagnoses in that process.

The Two Webs

There are two dialogs on human behavior (which includes political, economic, and social behavior) taking place on the web. In effect, there are two webs.

One web consists of data on human behavior and commentary about this data. This one connects some folks in academia to folks in policy circles and the private sector around the world. This is Big Data.

The advantages of this mode of inquiry is that it harnesses the power of new media technologies to provide more information to help improve our predictive power when trying to understand something as enormously complex as individual and collective human behavior. Many of the critiques of quantitative study of human behavior were grounded in the fact that studies simply didn't have enough information to predict and explain the variance in behavior. Whereas other sciences (physics, chemistry) had enough information about a system to predict outcomes within that system, social sciences did not. But if we were to assume, for a moment, that a team of researchers had access to every single bit of information about every human thought, feeling, or behavior for thousands of years, then that team's ability to predict human behavior would be comparable, I think, to those in other sciences. With better predictions come better answers to questions: how best to minimize suffering, or the spread of disease, or human's impact on the environment, or whatever.

Of course, this mode of inquiry is not without its flaws (or at least perceived flaws). The collection and analysis of so much data on human behavior is viewed as being exploitative in some way: those collecting the information benefit and those who are the subjects do not. There are privacy issues: privacy is seen as a prerequisite to mental and emotional health as well as a means of maintaining some power over determining the course of your life (the actual value of privacy would be difficult to determine within this purely quantified conversation about human behavior). There is also the fear that someone with enough information about human behavior will be able to manipulate people to suit their ends (but if those collecting and analyzing data discuss findings freely and don't hoard secrets, this critique doesn't make much sense to me). It can easily be abused by people thinking there's a causal relationship when then there is only a correlational one. Statistics, when misused, create the illusion of certainty. Statistics could always be misused, but the more powerful and widespread they become, the more likely misuse might be and the damage that could be done.

You might call this the rational web. It views behaviors and events as probablistic (or it should, anyway) and it takes into account the degree to which outcomes are affected. If, say, it was determined that people's political party identification determined the amount they were paid when controlling for occupation, abilities, etc., you could find an answer to the question of how much difference it made in terms of pay (maybe Republicans make $4000 more on average when controlling for other relevant variables). In fact, there is an expectation that you answer the "how much" question.

The other web consists of rhetoric: emotional appeals to pre-existing, deeply held beliefs about human behavior. The most commonly used technique here is to select a few emotionally charged stories and try to get the audience to empathize with them. As access to the web has increased, it has become easier to find a subject (that is, the individual at the center of the story) whose situation exemplifies the pre-existing beliefs about human behavior held by the author of the story and the intended audience. Its easier to find the emotionally charged stories, the one or 3 or 100 personal stories that, when you look at parts of them the right way, support your pre-existing belief that, say, capitalism or socialism is harmful or that a certain policy does more harm than good. This technique connects some other folks in academia with the public at large, particularly disenfranchise members of the public worldwide.

Here, I think one possible danger of the wide-spread use of this technique might be that the echo chamber effect (where certain factions become less able to take the perspective of others and become more hostile towards others) gets stronger. Confirmation bias runs amok, and fewer people take into account new information in order to make better decisions. Any holder of an opinion, no matter how wacky, can find others supporting their opinion. This social support, this sense that one is not alone in one's beliefs, is essential to the persistence or propagation of an idea or ideology. Even if one is in the minority, all one has to do is draw an analogy to a group that was in the minority that eventually became the majority (the rebelling colonists in early America or civil rights crusaders in the later 1950's) in order to justify one's beliefs.

You might call this the emotional web. Rather than being probablistic, it is principled. It rarely asks the question "how racist is a statement?" or "how much privacy is being sacrificed?" or "how much freedom is the right amount of freedom"? In this way, it seems irreconcilable with the rational web.

You can't easily categorize certain websites as one or the other. Two of my favorite news sites - the New York Times and Slate - have some stories that appeal to statistics and analyses of statistics and other stories (usually editorials) that appeal to emotion by cherry-picking individual stories. In fact, a journalistic standard seems to be to combine the two: start with an individual's story and then zoom out to the larger trend. Hook the audience with emotion and convince their inner skeptic with data.

Still, I can see, at the very least, certain blogs that are more emotional or more rational, and it would be interesting to see if certain people gravitated toward either emotional/rhetoric arguments or rational/data-driven ones. Last month, I saw a great paper at the International Communication Association's annual conference by Brian Weeks titled "Partisan enclaves or diverse repertoires? A network approach to the political media environment" that suggested that the self-selection ideological bias (dems watch only MSNBC, repubs watch only Fox News) is a misconception and that personal media repertoires are more diverse, at least ideologically, than many believe. They may be diverse (or rather, balanced) in terms of their emotional or rational content as well. But maybe they are not, in which case we really are two different groups of people having two fundamentally different conversations about human behavior. Definitely an avenue worth exploring.

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.