The promise and threat of A.I. in creative domains

Though we've been expecting AI to get good enough at writing to actually perform a decent number and variety of writing tasks "by itself" (it still needs humans to engineer prompts), we hadn't been confronted with that reality until recently, when ChatGPT became more widely used. To test it out, I gave it some of the (relatively simple) prompts I give my undergraduate film history students and saw what it came up with. Then, I asked it to write a pilot episode of a teen drama set in Montana, a grant proposal for a research study on social media use and political polarization, a research paper on the environmental impact of microplastics, a quiz on 1970's media cultural studies, a review of Beck's new album, an amicus brief on microplastics, and a summary of the 1998 NBA Finals in the style of Proust. The results, as many have noted, aren't perfect but are a lot closer to perfect than what we're used to seeing from programs. It's hard to objectively convey the quality of the output and the limitations of the tool; it's best to just try it out yourself. 

I'm sure such tools will improve, but it's hard to say at what rate and to what degree, so I'll try to just stick to evaluating the impact of the current iteration of generative text programs like ChatGPT on two facets of writing: assessment (specifically, educators' ability to assess students' understanding of concepts, thinking, and communication skills) and its applications in various domains (i.e., journalism, creative writing, scientific writing). 

In terms of assessment, the ability of students to avoid actually doing the work of writing for an assignment and to avoid detection has increased significantly. However, the truth of this statement is highly dependent on the assignment. If the assignment just requires students to gather information (particularly older info on an extensively covered topic, person, or event) and synthesize it into a simple, readable essay or article, then ChatGPT seems to be quite good at that. But what about, say, watching a particular video on YouTube and applying something from a particular reading to that video? I would assume that ChatGPT can't easily extract the information that's in the video, so it would have a tough time with this task, and that it's ability to do anything with a particular reading is contingent upon that reading being freely available and accessible online somewhere. If the reading is in a textbook that doesn't appear online (or only appears on a few hard-to-access pirating sites), then this will be harder for ChatGPT to work with than, say, the Magna Carta or any other text that's in the public domain. But in any of these cases, I think that A.I. co-authoring (where ChatGPT does some of the work and the student changes and adds a few things) will be essentially impossible to detect. 

Another approach to ChatGPT's threat to assessment is to simply proctor writing assignments. That's easier to do for short writing assignments but difficult for longer ones, and impractical for online classes. Still, as a professor who has an interest in fairly and accurately assessing his student's writing, I'm leaning toward more in-class writing assignments and fewer outside-of-class writing assignments because of how challenging it will be to tell the difference between A.I.-generated writing and my students' writing outside the classroom. 

But the topic of applications of AI is more interesting to me, and in some sense pre-empts questions about assessment. If AI can accomplish much of what we're trying to train our students to accomplish, what is the point of such training? The rapid adoption of ChatGPT has forced me to reconsider the relationship between writing and thinking. Writing is often the medium through which thought is expressed, though not the only one; spontaneous discussions and conversation are a good alternative. When is writing chiefly a vehicle for thought and when is it more an integral part of the process of thought? Those who defend the sanctity of human writing, I surmise, would say either that writing is very often part of thinking, or that we may not be very good at being able to tell the difference between writing-as-vehicle-for-thought and writing-as-thinking. Therefore, ceding the task of any but the most formulaic types of writing to AI risks sacrificing the ability to think. 

We still want to get better at thinking, and we still want our students to get better at thinking (e.g., critical thinking, creative thinking, logical reasoning, problem solving). Even in a world of prevalent AI, having those abilities will make us better at prompt engineering, better at judging the value of what ChatGPT and similar AI spit out, and better at making refinements to that output. The same would apply for non-linguistic AI: prompting an AI architectural design program and judging/refining the results; prompting an AI coding program and judging/refining the results. In any application I can think of, humans are still part of the process. Whether AI is producing a kind of structural scaffold for ideas, identifying sources of information, or generating new ideas, it has to be set in motion, its output needs to be evaluated, and in its current iteration, its output requires a fair amount of refinement. That process of prompting and refining can be similar to a good conversation or collaborative improvisation ("yes, and..." thinking). 

I sense that there's a widespread antipathy toward applying AI in creative domains. I don't consider myself an AI optimist. I acknowledge how tempting it will be for students, businesses, creators, and governments to use AI in an indiscriminate manner, not bothering to vet or refine its output. I acknowledge that such use could cultivate a kind of passivity and (further) overreliance on technology. More people would get out of the habit of "thinking for themselves." Creativity would be increasingly derivative in the name of efficiency. 

But does this warrant an outright ban on AI? What would such an approach sacrifice?

I feel as though we've been good at articulating the risks of AI (aside from the aforementioned, there's scaling up spam and disinformation, and deceiving job recruiters or potential partners on dating sites). We're less good at articulating its potential upside. I think of that upside chiefly in terms of resource reallocation (which, yes, sounds very cold and business-speaky, but hear me out). 

Let's treat ChatGPT and the like as co-authors. They generate first drafts or templates but don't write the entire text or finished product. Human writers' role in the creative process shifts from crafting sentences and paragraphs to gathering primary original sources and identifying needs in their audiences and communities. What if writers could take the time they would have spent struggling to write formulaic copy and instead spent it cultivating twice as many primary sources as they would have otherwise, or co-writing twice as many stories, or ten times as many stories? Consider all the un-written stories or accounts of events; consider what's missing from historical accounts and news coverage, in part because the people who know how to create thorough and entertaining writing only have so much time. Some people's stories are told, some people and events are remembered, but the vast majority are forgotten. What if we could fill in some of those blanks? We don't have to be indiscriminate in our use of AI to turn data into stories that no one cares to read. Remember, humans and their understanding of what is valued are still part of the process. And what if we could offer those stories in twice as many accessible formats? If editors and readers valued these qualities more than they feared AI's downsides, we could use AI to improve our information environment. 

The genie is out of the bottle. If one country or group of people wants to spend time trying to stuff the genie back into the bottle, that won't stop other countries or groups of people from using it. We needn't be totalizing in how we conceive of the application of AI in creative domains. We have been discriminate in our use of technologies in the past, often making mistakes, attempting to correct those mistakes by introducing limitations or redesigning the technology, fitfully moving along but rarely un-inventing anything. Maybe we should look around and see where the successes and failures are right now. 

Futures of Twitter: Scenario Testing

Yes, I've railed against the appetite for future forecasting in this blog before. In fact, pretty much every post from the past few years is, in its own way, a screed against the kind of prediction of complex systems of long periods of time that news readers and journalists who interview academics can't seem to get enough of. And yet, when something "big" happens - a pandemic, the election of Donald Trump, Elon Musk taking over Twitter - I feel the same insatiable pull toward forecasting that everyone else feels. These are important events with far-reaching implications, and so despite their complexity, we can't seem to just say, "who knows what will happen!" We have to venture a guess.

And not just any guess. When we see worst-case-scenarios as plausible, we detest a future in which we ignored the threat so much that we have to predict doom. The unpleasantness of comprehending those futures is outweighed by our fear of feeling guilty about (and of being guilty of) not having done enough to prevent them. The other side of the argument is that there has never been a time in human history when worst-case-scenarios weren't plausible, and to spend time constantly ringing alarms is both joyless and unproductive, and that our inability or unwillingness to recall the false alarms of yesterday keeps us from learning anything about how complex systems actually work, to actually improve our prediction accuracy, and - by extension - to improve our world. I do get both sides of that argument, and so to me it seems unresolvable. 

So, to further refine my stance against long-term predictions about complex systems (the global economy, geopolitics, culture, developments in technology, etc.), I'll say that I prefer something less like predicting whether some event will spell doom for society (super vague, no timeline for when "doom" will occur, what shape it will take, etc., and so unfalsifiable) and more like fivethirtyeight's scenario testing. You start with several plausible scenarios - each one mutually exclusive to the degree that it's possible, and fairly specific about outcomes and timelines but not so specific as to be inevitably falsified by some minor quirk of history. This, at least, would allow us to learn something if our predictions are wrong, allow us to do a post-mortem and see what we missed, what variables we weighed too heavily, etc. Of course, this is dissatisfying if you are a doom-predictor because all the learning in the world won't amount to a hill of beans after the apocalypse that you failed to predict! But assuming there's at least a few people left on planet Earth, learning will be a good thing. To my mind, entertaining somewhat optimistic scenarios isn't mutually exclusive with being prepared for (though not actually predicting) the worst. 

In that spirit, here are a few scenarios regarding Musk's takeover of Twitter, some more optimistic than others. They use three metrics of success/failure: financial success (does the company turn a profit, stay solvent, continue to exist), cultural relevance (does the general public care about what's said on Twitter as much as they do now, more than they do now, or less than they do now? Does some other platform become the proxy for vox populi that Twitter is right now?), and "externalities" (affective polarization, political violence, political revolutions, cancelling/calling out people. Externalities could be both "good" [revolts against dictatorships, publicly shaming those who deserve it] or "bad" [downfalls of democracies, publicly shaming those who don't deserve it]).

Scenario 1: Financial success with lower cultural relevance and few "externalities." The most intriguing part of Musk's takeover to me, so far, is his apparent willingness to blow up the existing way that Twitter makes (or attempts to make) money. Perhaps the changes he instates drive user count WAY down, but this won't necessarily make Twitter less of a financial success. He could charge a portion of users $8, or pay the 100 most followed $1,000,000 and charge anyone who tweets more than 100 times a year $50 (a kind of 'lottery-ticket' model that, when you think about it, isn't that different than would-be filmmakers shelling out for expensive equipment and film school for a crack at a studio contract). My personal favorite idea is Willy Staley's "congestion pricing" plan - when a certain number of users have tweeted about a topic, the price of tweeting about it increases, which would - in theory - encourage people to tweet less about trending topics and more about a diverse array of topics. Or maybe a revived Vine drives profits and allows Twitter to continue to be a loss leader. Regardless of how he does it, it's possible that Twitter becomes profitable.

Meanwhile, the platform loses some of its cultural cache. The behavior (on Twitter and off) of Musk and a handful of high-profile Twitter users who would have been regulated under the old regime turns off journalists and tastemakers to such a degree that they stop paying attention to it (regardless of how outlandish it is) and pay more attention to how YouTubers, TikTokkers, and podcasters react to the day's events. Twitter will always have the brevity and "portability" of text on its side - it's easier, in the course of conversation, to tell someone what another person Tweeted than to try to describe even a short video. So, maybe a Twitter alternative (short text, highlighting trending topics) pops up and steals at least part of the cultural spotlight from Twitter. 

Regarding "externalities," there's no convincing evidence that what people say on Twitter causes political violence, revolutions, voter intimidation, cancelling, etc. These things happened before and they continue to happen, but it's just as easy to point to what people are saying on TikTok, YouTube, and podcasts as it is to point to what people are saying on Twitter as the cause of it, and so the argument that a Musk-led Twitter is leading to the downfall of society never really gains traction. 

Scenario 2: Financial success with the same level of cultural relevance and no apparent increase in externalities. Same as Scenario 1 except people (journalists, podcasters, YouTubers, TikTokkers, and - by extension - people who pay attention to what those people have to say) keep paying attention to Twitter. Maybe what's said on Twitter doesn't change all that much, or maybe it turns into a different kind of dumpster fire that people can't ignore. This is basically a kind of 'status quo' scenario. Sure, somethings change (the way Twitter monetizes users, the number of users, the character of the userbase), but no seismic changes to culture or to Twitter as a corporate entity. To me, this still feels like the most likely scenario. Habit and inertia are powerful forces - people will want to keep using the platform they've gotten into the habit of using, and reporters will want to keep referring to Twitter as vox populi. The bulk of everyday users who don't engage with trending topics will muddle along - perhaps as long as they have no interest in reaching large audiences with their tweets, they'll be allowed to use the platform for free. 

Scenario 3: Financial success with the same level of cultural relevance and "bad" externalities. In this scenario, there are a few instances of political violence that can be clearly and obviously linked to what people say on Twitter. Musk will point out that people are saying the exact same things on other platforms like YouTube and TikTok and that his company is being judged by a double-standard, but the sizable portion that already has it in for him won't want to hear it. On a "normal" ad-supported social media platform, this would start a death spiral - advertisers pull out, revenue craters, and they can't keep the lights on. But it's interesting to consider what would happen if Musk pivoted away from an ad-supported model, which he already seems to be doing. How bad and/or obvious would the externalities have to get before governments blocked the platform? I suppose middle-layer companies (occupying the space between users and platforms) like Apple, Alphabet, and AT&T might say 'enough is enough' and drop Twitter, but then maybe Musk uses Starlink to do an end run around them! This sounds a bit far-fetched to me, but you never know. 

Scenario 4: Financial failure. Enough high-profile Twitter users leave that the platform becomes less attractive to many everyday users, and the ad-supported models becomes unviable. Musk's attempts to charge subscription fees results in users trying to circumvent the fees, leading to draconion crack-downs, further turning off everyday users who head over to YouTube, TikTok, podcasts, Reddit, and Twitter clones. It's odd to think of a platform that still has cultural cache going belly up, but to some extent this is what happened to Vine. If you can't make the numbers work, your impact on culture is a moot point - you just cease to exist...or you get acquired, sold off, merged, etc. What might Twitter's afterlife look like if that happens? 

This, I think, gets us to focus on particular observables - financials, number of users, the extent to which people are talking about/paying attention to what's said on Twitter, political disruption - which is all I'm really hoping for in conversations about the future. 

How platform-specific is influence?

In the past, I've railed against making predictions about the future as a way to understand the present. This is different than predictions used as a way of dealing with uncertainty through humor - a pretty common, totally understandable reaction to crises. I'm thinking more of op-ed hot takes that seem to want to be taken seriously.

Predictions like this are often so vague that they're impossible to prove wrong. For example, if I predict that Twitter/Facebook/Reddit will die/fail, how and when will I know if this turns out to be true? If their userbases, sometime over the next 5 years, decline by 35%, have they died/failed? How about 50%? Do we have to wait another 5 years to judge the prophecy? There's also the problem of lacking a counterfactual. If something horrible happens after someone uses social media, we can't compare it to a world in which they did not use social media. It's possible the horrible thing would have happened anyway (or perhaps something even...horribler?), just through some other mechanism. There is no disincentive for continuing to make bold, wrong predictions because there is no mechanism for keeping score, no highly visible public record of wrong takes (though spectacularly wrong takes do tend to catch flak).

And yet I'm finding it hard not to use the occasion of Elon Musk's (apparently successful?) attempt to buy Twitter as a time to indulge in some predictions. I'll compensate for this indulgence by offering something more in the spirit of this blog - using the occasion as a way to gain insight into something more general about the uses and impact of social media. But first...

I can think of two likely scenarios:

Scenario 1: very little changes. Twitter use habits, like any kind of habit, are hard to change. There have been many instances in which social media platforms have done something that users have not liked, but most users do not then abandon the platform. We can more easily recall the instances in which they did abandon the platform: MySpace and Digg come to mind for me. But it seems that nearly every significant change to a platform - be it functionality, moderation policy, or ownership - tends not to result in a wholesale change in user behavior. The "culture" of Twitter may change, but linking this to Musk's ownership can be a tricky claim to verify, as cultures are always changing. In this scenario, there is no massive change in Twitter discourse (i.e., who participates and what is said or amplified) that can be directly and obviously linked to Musk's ownership of the platform. A handful of influential Twitter users on the Left will defect, as will a few hundred thousand less-influential users (including many journalists who will write about the experience). They will be displaced by a few newly influential users on the Right and a few hundred thousand less-influential tech bros and Far Right/Alt Right users. Musk might put the worst of the Far Right users in seemingly random "time outs," less out of any political conviction and more to reassert dominance get a laugh at their righteous indignation at having their trust betrayed. Losing the revenue they generate through ad exposure or subscriptions won't hurt, but the board will chastise him for playing fast and loose and he'll promise to be better. Pundits will pin everything the Right does on Musk and Twitter, but the connection won't be obvious and the claims won't be of interest to anyone outside of a bubble of journalists, news junkies, and academics. I consider this the more likely of the two scenarios. 

Scenario 2: things go poorly, less because of how Musk changes the functioning of the site and more because of the signal it sends to current and potential users. Far Right fringe groups and apolitical trolls will see Musk's unwillingness to regulate content as an invitation to push things as far as they can, inciting small-but-significant numbers of Far Right "activists" to engage in terrorism and assassination. A handful of violent political acts will be linked to Twitter in a way that will seem obvious and undeniable, not just to readers of New York Times opinion pieces but to the average politically-disengaged citizen, who will come to associate Musk and all his brands (e.g., Tesla, SpaceX) with toxicity rather than innovation. Musk will then belatedly recognize the damage to his brands and sell the company. 

So as to make these scenarios more falsifiable, I'll say that one will happen by the end of 2023. 

With that out of the way, I'll return to the title of the blog post, returning to a topic that I'd like to write about at greater length in the future: what is the nature of influence on social media platforms, and how does it differ (in duration, scope, domain-specificity, etc.) from mass media or face-to-face influence?

In thinking about the possibility of influential Twitter users defecting to another platform, I realized that platform-abandonment might involve losing one's audience and the attendant influence. All fine and well to say "follow me to YouTube/TikTok/Substack/Tumblr/Medium/Mastadon/whatever!", but it's hard to coordinate a mass exodus to another platform, and harder still to sustain that interest over time, especially when the new content home offers more of an a la carte content experience rather than the smorgasbord we've come to expect from popular platforms. Smaller platforms have trouble handling large influxes of digital refugees. Perhaps especially high-profile influencers will easily move their following to another platform (or to podcasting), but what of the Twitter users with followings of 500 to 50,000? How portable is their influence? 

Those who jump ship may lose some of their audience but find a more intimate relationship between themselves and a smaller group of followers on another platform, and this may be more rewarding for them. Those who stick around a less-regulated Twitter may find themselves in more direct battles with other users with whom they disagree than had previously been the case. The 'block' function and tweaks to the much-discussed-but-poorly-understood algorithms will help determine how easy it is for users to tolerate dissent in the name of maintaining influence. But no matter how it shakes out, I think we can learn something about influence by seeing what happens to the public personae of Twitter users with decent-sized followings who leave Twitter. Maybe Twitter's loss will be YouTube's/TikTok's/Substack's/Tumblr's/Reddit's gain, both in terms of users and in terms of cultural influence, however one chooses to define and measure that slippery concept.  

Polarization, Partisanship, and News After the Storming of the Capitol

 You know that it's been awhile since you last blogged when the back-end interface of the platform has changed since you've last checked in. I've been working on my first book, leaving me less time and inclination to write here. But since this seems likely to be a historic 12-month period, it would be a shame not to write a bit more about it as it happens. 

My last entry was a dispatch from the early days of the pandemic. In it, I lamented the news outlets' over-reliance on speculative headlines (on a recent New Yorker podcast, David Remnick put it best when he said that "prediction is a low form of journalism"). Nearly ten months later, some of the predictions about the impact of the pandemic have, inevitably, turned out to be correct while many more have turned out to be wrong. I'll admit that I vastly underestimated the drawn-out nature of the pandemic, how gradual the accretion of suffering would be. Still, there is one set of predictions that I'm happy to see proven wrong: predicted timelines for vaccine developments. Journalists did the best they could in crafting their predictions, deferring to the experts, but the experts were wrong. Anyone (even experts) trying to predict some phenomenon that unfolds over a long period of time and involves billions of people is bound to be correct only by chance. 

Since then, the news cycle has shifted, focusing on the ascendance of the Far Right in America, an ascendance that dramatically culminated in the storming of the Capitol. The storming was a media event if there ever was one, but one that illustrated live television's inadequacies. I tuned in to cable news around 2pm that day to watch the Congress debate the counting of electoral votes, and watched, live, as the protests escalated and transformed. The camera, the reporter, and the anchor all had a kind of distance or detachment from the event. They noted how unusual and upsetting the event was, but did so in a measured way, acknowledging the incompleteness of their facts, repeating only what they could confirm. 

Access is a funny thing in the news environment of 2021. When things are calm, established news agencies still have the edge over citizen journalists and bloggers when it comes to access. They can get interviews with powerful politicians and business leaders that others can't. But when it comes to spontaneous "breaking" news like the storming of the Capitol, the roles reverse. Traditional journalists, with their obligation to verification and their brittle reputation for delivering truth, must vet information before disseminating it. Also, there are only so many of them, and if they happen to be stationed somewhere outside the center of the action, then they cede the spotlight to citizen journalists on social media. 

And so as I watched an incomplete picture of the storming on TV, my wife, sitting on the couch next to me, kept me apprised of what citizen journalists were reporting on Twitter. TV did relay most of what was on Twitter, just on a bit of a delay. By the next day, traditional print news sources like The New York Times would be able to pull it all together and craft a kind of coherent narrative, something that live TV and citizen journalists can't really do in the moment. 

As a media scholar who finds himself writing a chapter about the internet and journalism, I've been focused on the news landscape and the role of news not just in covering events like the storming of the Capitol, but also in causing them. The basic argument is that fringe news outlets foment the kind of aggrievement and detachment from reality that were necessary pre-conditions for the storming and other acts of politically-motivated terrorism. 

We know that there are more news outlets to choose from than there were before the popularization of the internet, and that some of those news options espouse extreme and politically polarized views of the world. These views likely reflected and catered to existing differences in worldview, but also likely reinforced the beliefs of these news consumers and probably made them more extreme. There's something that seems to be almost inevitable about this: if you have a means by which to widely disseminate a larger number of well-produced accounts of the day's events and there are pre-existing differences in worldviews and interests, people will use the internet to serve those worldviews and interests regardless of whether there's any money in it for them or not. 

And yet mainstream news outlets such as CNN, CBS, NBC, ABC, BBC, AP News, NYTimes, and the Washington Post continue to exist. Even after the first wave of disruptors like Buzzfeed and Vice tried to displace them, the legacy news outlets are quite far ahead of them in terms of reach. As far as I can tell, mainstream news has not been killed off by disruptive outsiders. Their audiences are diminished, sure, but they're still the leaders in terms of audience. They've just been joined by these other, younger news organizations that tend to espouse more extreme worldviews. They adapted, adopting some of the disrupters' journalistic practices and probably drifting further from the political center in the process, but still don't seem, at least to me, to be wildly different than what they always were. 

I guess what I'd like to know is how news consumption habits have actually changed over the last 20 years. In most analyses that I've read, the more partisan, extreme news sources get all the attention while mainstream news outlets like NBC, ABC, and CNN, all of which are far more popular, go unremarked upon. Did some of the audience for these mainstream outlets switch to non-mainstream outlets, or did non-mainstream outlets pull non-news-consumers off the sidelines? Did the number of news-avoiders grow or shrink? 

I'll also be curious to see what impact the storming of the Capitol has on all of this. Right now, it seems like such a spectacularly vivid illustration of...something. Like any event, I'm sure it will be interpreted in many different ways, but one possible interpretation is that it is the end result of a partisan information environment. Might this be a kind of breaking point, and might some force - either through legislation, tech self-regulation, or news consumer demand from the proverbial average American - finally stem the tide of polarization? Will the market share for hyperpartisan news outlets plateau or possibly decrease, leaving an ever-evolving ecosystem of iconoclastic bloggers and podcasters to fight over that share? Those who decry partisanship at least have something convenient to point to, even if others don't buy their argument or if the passion of the moment wears off.  

But there I go, predicting again. In my defense, that's the whole point of this blog: to speculate about the future of media. I certainly wouldn't call it "news."

Experts Worry: Predictive News Headlines in the Age of COVID-19

Cataclysms, personal or shared, have a way of distorting your perception of time.

March 12th, 2020 was the day that I felt the Coronavirus crisis escalate. That day, I felt as though I was living simultaneously in three distinct realities. First and most vividly, there was the physical world around me. It was one of those blissful early spring days - bright and breezy. Some friends were meeting up at the local watering hole for a happy hour that was tinged with a different energy than previous ones. I think we knew it might be the last time we'd see each other in person for awhile, but this didn't make us glum. Instead, there was a kind of enhanced camaraderie, laughing at the craziness of it all, because what else was there to do?

Then, existing in what seemed like another universe, there was the reality that existed inside my computer and phone, on news websites and social media: a world quickly falling apart. There was an ever-escalating series of fear-evoking stories, every one of them true.

And then there was the thing itself: the unknowable reality of threat posed by the virus. Though the virus itself is knowable insofar as we are able to know viruses and what they do to various types of human bodies, the matter of immediate concern - the precise way the virus will spread through a given population and affect each individual person - could not be known. That reality is contingent upon too many things to be knowable, at least in mid-March, and perhaps now in early May and for the foreseeable future. The threat of the virus depends on future government policies at federal, state, and local levels, future workplace policies, the speed with which treatments will be developed and manufactured, and the future behavior of billions of individuals, as each individual's decision to, say, stay home and watch Netflix or say 'fuck it' and go out to a bar (when bars were/will be open) affects all downstream outcomes. Scientists of various stripes can imperfectly predict the spread of the virus and its deadliness by looking at various models based on prior behavior, but they cannot as yet know with absolute certainty (or really much certainty at all, it would seem) who the virus will infect in a particular social context, when it will infect them, how long it will stick around a population, who or how many it will kill.

As I moved into the gently mandated quarantine stage of the event, I started to think more about the disjuncture among these three worlds. A couple of months previous, I'd had time to think about the ways in which the social internet (news, commentary about current events on social media) presented its users with a distorted view of the world. The long and short of it is this: it enhances threats.

In the case of the virus, the threats are multiple. There is the virus itself, and then there is the effect of virus containment on the economy. Also, as always in the U.S. and perhaps elsewhere, there is the threat of the other political tribe: Would Trump invoke martial law? Would protesters spread the virus? Would liberals exaggerate the threat to make Trump look bad?

The key word in all of these questions is 'would.' I came to realize that many of the headlines I read contained words like 'would,' 'could,' 'may.' Some of the bolder ones contained the word 'will.'

They were about bad things that had not happened yet. 

On a podcast from mid-March, Malcolm Gladwell recounted something he had read that day that quoted experts from the University of California San Francisco, a leading medical school. The experts predicted that there would be more than 1 million Americans deaths from the virus.

From March 17, 2020 on the New York Times: 'There may be two to four more rounds of social distancing.'

And later, from CNN.com on April 14th, 2020: 'US may have to keep social distancing until 2022, scientists predict.'

From May 4th in the Washington Post: 'Draft report predicts covid-19 cases will reach 200,000 a day by June 1.' This article alluded to a leaked report from the CDC that also predicted that there will be 3,000 deaths per day in the second half of May.

These headlines were accompanied by opinion-piece headlines that would have seemed more at home on less prestigious news websites a few months ago. From the New York Times: 'One simple idea explains why the economy is in great danger'; 'Stop saying everything is under control. It isn't'.' 'More severe than the great recession.'

Most of the headlines and stories quoted experts who offered informed predictions about the virus or the economy. Right away, I thought of Phil Tetlock's work on expert political judgment. Tetlock found that when political experts of all ideological stripes were forced to make falsifiable predictions about a range of outcomes, they were not much better than chance or non-experts. The more famous the experts were, the worse their prediction records were. In his book The Signal and the Noise, Nate Silver reviews the incentives experts have to make predictions, why they are rewarded for more outrageous predictions with more coverage and fame, and why they are not punished for being wrong.

There are various lessons you might take away from Tetlock's ongoing project to assess the ability of experts to forecast a range of outcomes. The one I keep coming back to is that forecasting any outcomes that involve a large number of people's behavior is really difficult. The more people that may influence the outcome (that is, the more people who's individual behavior is part of the system you're trying to observe and extrapolate from), the harder the outcome is to predict.

Some of the predictions about the virus and the economy that dominated headlines were not falsifiable, as they did not provide a time range and thus could eventually be proven true even if they were not true on a particular date (they would never be false, but simply not true yet). But many were falsifiable: they made specific predictions about the duration or magnitude of an economic recession or depression; they made specific predictions about the number of infections or deaths resulting from the virus (the falsifiability of which assumes you accept data collected by authorities).

Sometimes, the experts would try to convey their levels of uncertainty in their predictions. Sometimes, they would not. Most times, this uncertainty level would not be conveyed in the news article; it was almost never conveyed in the headlines.

Aside from the inherent unpredictability of large groups of people, there is another reason why many forecasts relating to the virus or the economy will turn out to be wrong. Predictions like this can function as warnings that are then heeded by people who take action, which prevents the predicted outcome from occurring. Nate Silver calls this a 'self-cancelling prediction' or 'self-cancelling prophecy.' Similar problems plague predictions about environmental catastrophe: the more dire the predictions, the more likely they are to spur innovation or regulation that prevents the predictions from coming true.

I wonder if some folks are engaging in a kind of deliberately misleading, exaggerating framing of virus threats. Perhaps journalists and those who post on social media are aware of the shortcomings of the data they are working with, aware that they are focusing on the most dire scenarios and ignoring others. They do this because they believe, rightly, that the more dire the predictions, the more likely they will be to spur action that will prevent the more dire predictions from coming true.

I think that people often derive the wrong lesson from self-cancelling predictions. They do not prove the predictions to have been correct. It is possible that the prediction would have been wrong had no action been taken. In and of themselves, they do not provide much evidence of the accuracy of the prediction. I think the better lesson to draw from the possibility of self-cancelling predictions is that in order to have faith in our predictions in which those who learn of the prediction might plausibly affect its outcome, we must understand the mechanisms by which the predicted outcome will or won't occur. We must be able to account for the effects of particular behaviors in isolation (e.g., the effect of social distancing on viral transmission; the effect of carbon monoxide on sea levels) in order to really understand and predict complex phenomena.

The recent spate of predictive headlines brings to mind another domain examined in Nate Silver's book: weather predictions. Meteorologists' predictions of the weather on any given day were often wrong; no surprise there, as weather is another complex, hard-to-predict system. What's interesting is that the errors were systematic: meteorologists tended to predict rain on days that turned out to be sunny more often than they predicted sun on days that turned out to be rainy. As a reason for this, Silver noted that meteorologists were 'punished' for one type of wrong answer more severely than they were for the other. Most people saw sun on a supposedly rainy day as a pleasant surprise, while they tended to get angry at meteorologists who failed to warn them about the negative outcome: rain on a supposedly sunny day.

Many of the predictions dominating news headlines will inevitably turn out to be wrong, but will they be systematically wrong, wrong in a particular direction? I suspect that most journalists and news consumers see virus infections, deaths, and economic hardship in much the same way people see rain: they would rather the predictions turn out to have been too dire than not dire enough.

However, this creates a problem. If the predictions about virus infections and deaths are unnecessarily dire, this will cause consumers to spend less and investors to invest less, leading to worse economic outcomes. If the predictions about the economy are too dire, policy makers, business owners, voters, and consumers will push for re-opening too soon, resulting in worse health outcomes. All unnecessarily dire predictions will likely harm people's mental and emotional health, and any wrong prediction will harm subsequent trust in news sources.

I suspect that predictions in most mainstream news outlets will overestimate negative outcomes associated with the virus and underestimate negative outcomes associated with the economy. Of course, there's a political element to the predictions (those on the Left tend to be more concerned with the virus while those on the Right tend to be more concerned with the economy), but beyond that, I think the negative outcomes associated with the virus (mass death; dying alone) are more vivid, more viscerally repellent than those associated with the economy (lagged rises in social unrest, substance abuse, domestic abuse, and violent crime that typically accompany prolonged mass unemployment) which tend to be more diffuse and less easily depicted.

What to do about all this? Well, before going any further, it seems worthwhile to test all of my assumptions. In the spirit of putting my money where my mouth is, here are a few falsifiable hypotheses:

• The number of 'predictive headlines' (i.e., headlines that relay information about an event or state of the world that has yet to occur at the time of publication) has increased since the middle of March 2020. 

• Of the predictive headlines that are falsifiable at present, more headlines will have overestimated threats than will have correctly estimated or underestimated threats. 

• The more vivid the threat, the greater the magnitude of the error in prediction. 

• News consumers exposed to more dire predictions will be more likely to take action (or intend to take action) than those exposed to less dire predictions. 

• The inclusion of information about the confidence levels of experts (e.g., swapping out the word 'will' for the word 'could' or 'might') will have no effect on news consumers' behaviors or intentions. 

To motivate journalists and those who post on social media not to post speculative 'news,' perhaps we could shame the behavior with a catchy, albeit misleadingly reductive moniker: 'eventually fake news,' or something like that.

I can understand the desire to compulsively speculate at a time like this. Typically, there's a certain amount of uncertainty in the world. You might not know some of the details about what will happen over the next year, but you often have a rough idea of what it will be like, what you'll do, where you'll be. At a time when so much is uncertain, maybe we can't help ourselves from making predictions, even if we know most of them will turn out to be wrong. But even in times of great uncertainty, there must be something we can learn from our wrongness. Right?

‘The Curdling of the Internet’: The Open Public Sphere Internet as Threat Amplifier

A weekend retreat to a cabin in the woods provided me with time to finally get around to reading Jia Tolentino’s essay, ‘The I in the Internet.’ In a way, I’ve been thinking about what Tolentino describes as the ‘curdling’ of the internet for the past two years, since our research team started reviewing research on various forms of online hostility. More broadly, I’ve been thinking about the effects of social media on societies for the past decade.

I’m generally opposed to sweeping pronouncements about the negative effects of the internet, smartphones, or social media, mostly because it doesn’t seem to fit the evidence. Social media use, by itself, doesn’t seem to have much of an effect on well-being or depression; that is, if one person spends three hours a day on social media and the other spends one hour, or no hours, the person who uses more social media is no more likely to feel bad about themselves or about life in general. There’s also evidence that the internet exposes users to a wider range of opinions, rather than sorting users into filter bubbles or extreme echo chambers. Bad things may be happening in today’s world, and social media use might have increased at the same time, but that doesn’t mean that one caused the other to occur.

And yet, despite the apparent lack of evidence of a strong, negative effect of social media use on individuals, I can’t help but wonder if we, as researchers, are missing something, and how we might adjust so as to capture those things.

One way Tolentino’s feeling and the lack of individual, direct effects on social media users can both be true is if the internet/smartphones/social media are having a profoundly negative effect on society in general, but it occurs in some kind of indirect way. The most concise way of describing my hunch about this would be the ‘threat amplification’ effect. These technologies amplify certain voices, making certain kinds of people and behavior that were formerly invisible more visible. A sub-set of highly active social media users see the platforms as battlefields on which an ideological war is being fought, and so they post information that furthers their agendas, and/or a subset of especially passionate people simply express how strongly they feel about some issue. These expressions are perceived as threatening by a sub-set of other users, not necessarily because they contain explicit threats of violence, but maybe because they clash with some fundamental belief of theirs, or portend an escalation in the encroachment on their rights (e.g., the right to free speech; the right to exist; the right to defend themselves). These posts stick out to many people, draw attention to themselves in the way that any perceived threat in our environment sticks out to us. If future visibility of posts is determined through the amount of attention paid to them (via algorithms or 'most read' lists, etc.), then we tend to see more and more of these types of posts as time goes on.

Also, well-meaning users (journalists, re-tweeters, etc.) draw further attention to these posts in an effort to make sure that others see the threat because to ignore the threat would be hazardous. They might do so out of a sense of duty and compassion to others (i.e., they see others are in danger from the threat and must warn them) but might also do so out of self-interest, or in-group-interest. By drawing otherwise apathetic individuals’ attention to the threat, they may enlist them to join their fight. In such a way, much of the online discourse comes to resemble either a threat or a response to a threat.  

If we react to this by leaving the internet, by not participating, this may preserve our piece of mind, but it cedes the public forum of the internet to those holding more extreme views. So, perhaps we try to meet the threat with an equal and opposite assertion of our beliefs or values (which may, of course, be viewed by others as extreme and threatening). Or perhaps we just conform to the now-established norm of value-assertion-through-strong-takes in order to be heard (because in order to gain greater visibility in the form of likes, shares, and subscribers, it helps to conform to norms of what is popular), or simply because humans are prone to unconsciously conform to social norms of expression. All of these would lead to an internet that actually is becoming more threatening (again, defining 'threats' not in terms of what was intended, but how they are perceived by someone), and exposure to it would likely lead to increased polarization, depression, abuse, harassment, toxicity, etc. The internet may not have started out that way, but it could be the case that it is becoming that.

And that’s the tricky part. The internet that Robert Kraut analyzed 20 years ago in his landmark study of the effects of internet use had certain kinds of content and certain kinds of experiences and perspectives posted by users, and the internet that the research summed up in Hancock et al. has other content/experiences/perspectives, and today’s/tomorrows internet has/will have other content/experiences/perspectives. And if those three stages of the internet are sufficiently different from one another in terms of their contents, they may have very different effects. Thus, though we haven’t observed strong negative consequences of social media use, it’s impossible to rule out them occurring in the future, or right now, given the publishing lag and, perhaps, that we're looking at the wrong outcome variables.

The negative effects of internet use may not be depression, narcissism, or physical aggression. They may manifest themselves in voting behavior (e.g., voting for increasingly partisan, extreme candidates, so as to counter the perceived threat from the other side), or some other behavior that reflects a distrust in others (e.g., unwillingness to live in certain places or send one’s kids to schools with certain types of people, a kind of self-segregation). Eventually, this kind of mutual distrust may manifest itself in physical violence. Or perhaps we’ll view one another as very, very different and threatening, but ultimately leave one another alone, co-existing peacefully if not without mutual resentment (stranger things have happened).

But here’s an important limitation: everything I’ve called ‘the internet’ up until this point really refers to part of the internet: the open ‘public sphere’ internet: Twitter, Reddit, comments sections on news websites, the part of YouTube in which YouTubers engage in a kind of running commentary about the world; maybe certain users on Facebook and Instagram who use those platforms in this way. Tolentino does note that she's mostly talking about the 'social internet.' This is the part of the internet in which a single individual can post something that reaches many other individuals (one-to-many). But many of Tolentino's observations also seem to apply to news online, which is tightly linked to Twitter (the bubble that journalists live in is the bubble of the open public sphere internet). It’s worth remembering that the internet is a lot more than just this. It is Netflix and other streaming services: ‘top-down’ platforms in which content is created by a small group of professionals and consumed by a large audience. It is small-group communication via messaging apps (one-to-one, or several-to-several). Tolentino’s observations about online hostility probably don’t fit as well to small group communication online (which is 'social' and is online, though maybe it's pedantic to call it part of the 'social internet), and they only apply to Netflix and other mass media insofar as they try to reflect the zeitgeist of the open public sphere internet.   

The Open Public Sphere Internet as Difference Revealer

Now that there are so many people participating in public discourse online, the open public sphere internet has exposed groups to one another that are so unlike one another to begin with, in terms of their values, experiences, and perspectives, that independent of how aggressive or antagonistic they are, this difference is so shocking and threatening that people get freaked out. That is, it isn’t necessary to have people act in a hostile way toward another group, or in a strategic way so as to counter the messaging of others. Merely by expressing themselves, by showing who they are and what they believe, they may set others off.

Human difference was depicted and conceived in a certain way by mass media. It was often visual, concise, and fictional. So yes, traditional/legacy media depicted difference, but in a circumscribed way, made generic through the use of tropes and bracketed as fiction. While we weren’t consuming images of difference via mass media, we spent our time around people who are not terribly different in terms of beliefs, values, and experiences. We spent a lot of time around family, friends, schoolmates, and workmates. If we were out of sync in our beliefs or values, we often avoided those subjects in order to avoid conflict.

The differences that we see online are differences in values being expressed. Those differences always existed (there were always people who believed something that you would have found abhorrent), but we didn’t have to see them every day. We probably were never going to be particularly good at reacting to these differences. Many of us probably always would have perceived them as a threat to our own values. So, it could be argued that the internet is the first technology, the first moment in history, where we really have been confronted with values differences as they have always been. Of course, these online expressions are not pure reflections of any group's beliefs, are manipulated in various ways (though when we’re quickly scanning a feed and clicking on links, we may not recognize this). Nevertheless, despite the fact that they are not representative of the larger group, they are expressions of the beliefs and values of many real people. And maybe we feel this when we go online; we feel how real they are. They are not fictional characters dreamed up by a screenwriter. These are actual people who actually believe the exact opposite of what we believe.

It’s not surprising that people feel threatened by those differences. And so many folks react to the threat with a kind of siege mentality, and then many subsequent cultural expressions and public life become a reflection of that. And the only alternatives seem to be to carve out small clusters within online life via group messaging apps or forsake social media entirely.

What impact does the curdling of the open public sphere internet have on the world?

Why does any of this matter? Is it just a bunch of people bickering in cyberspace or does it have some clear connection to the rest of civic life? If some of us decide ‘to hell with it’ and only use social media for small-group communication and leave Twitter to the trolls, what would it matter?

I do wonder if the relationship between what is said on the open public sphere internet and power (political power, economic power) could change, or is changing. Perhaps when the open public sphere first became widely used in the United States, most people, including journalists and politicians, saw it as a kind of proxy for public opinion, overlooking the fact that only certain types of people expressed themselves. The apparent connection between what went on in the run-up to the 2016 election (expressions of extreme partisanship, particularly an insurgent group of Trump supporters engaging in a kind of online battle on behalf of their chosen candidate) and the outcome of that election (the election of that candidate) supports this view. 

But what if, in the coming months, the same open public sphere internet were to heap praise on Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren while continuing to deride Donald Trump and deriding or ignoring Joe Biden, and Biden or Trump end up winning the election? What if that inconsistency between opinion on the open public sphere internet and a democratic election outcome were to happen a few more times in high-profile elections in different democracies? Many people might come to believe that opinion on, say, Twitter, neither reflects nor causes shifts in larger public opinion. Once this is acknowledged, I do wonder if at least some people, either in the general public or in positions of power (e.g., widely-read journalists), would be less likely to take their cues from opinion expressed on the open public sphere internet.

There’s a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy aspect to it, I think. When people believe that Twitter is a bellweather, they look to Twitter and are subsequently influenced by opinion on Twitter. The evidence on which they initially base their belief that it is a bellweather might be suspect, but that doesn’t matter: once they believe it, they essentially bring it into being by assuming that it is public opinion writ large, are influenced by it as such, and, through their writing, influence others. That is, opinion leaders see a popular trend on Twitter and write about it as though it were popular more broadly. Others take cues from the opinion leaders and act on that information, turning it into a truly popular opinion. However, if opinion leaders stopped believing this (and again, it wouldn’t matter whether the reason they stopped believing it made much sense or was supported by evidence), they might ignore it and thus Twitter and the like would lose its power to influence public opinion writ large.

Maybe people in a certain social stratum are already leaning this way, avoiding social media (or at least the open public sphere internet) themselves, raising their kids to avoid it as well. These people are often quite powerful: upper class, working in tech, politically active. If they start ignoring opinion as expressed on the open public sphere internet, I can imagine all of it becoming like certain comment sections of certain news websites: it exists, it is ugly, but most readers simply ignore it, and it doesn’t really have much of an impact outside of itself.

In any case, it’s important to not simply assume that the open public sphere internet has a stable relationship with public opinion in general. I think it’s also worth thinking about the popularization of the open public sphere internet as the first moment in human history that we saw how different our views of the world really are, how directly they conflict with one another (there is also much agreement, though the current iteration of the open public sphere internet doesn’t seem suited to highlight that). It’s hard to imagine such a moment going smoothly. But perhaps it’s a matter of getting over the initial collective shock of it. Or perhaps we just need a little time to ourselves.

What's Wrong with News?

Since Jimmy Wales came to speak at the University of Alabama last weekend, I've been thinking more about WikiTribune, his new-ish news curation/creation venture. This seems like a rare opportunity to contribute to the building of a tool that has the backing of the creator of one of the most popular, influential, important websites in the world. Of course the venture might fail, because most new ventures fail and because news is a tricky thing to get right, maybe trickier in a lot of ways than building something akin to a library or encyclopedia. WikiTribune seems to be functioning right now as a collectively curated news aggregation website; it might evolve into something else in the future, but I'll assume that's what it is for now.

What might be the starting points for a platform like this? If news is broken (which seems a fairly uncontroversial take in 2019), what part of it could be fixed by a Wiki-type platform?

First, there's the issue of factual accuracy. A decent way of getting a newsfeed that only has news that is factually correct is just by linking to stories that are from sources that can be held accountable, that have a reputation, and that typically follow standard journalistic practices. You weed out the parody stories, the polarizing disinformation, the deliberate attempts to poison discourse with fake news. This seems like something a dedicated group of volunteers could do.

I feel like the factual accuracy problem isn't as widespread as some believe, that networks of upvoting and sharing bots only make it seem as though a handful of untrue stories are being very widely read and believed. Of course, there are most likely relatively small pockets of people who are actually believing in false stories and act on those beliefs, and despite their relatively small numbers, they can be very harmful to society. And various characteristics of popular social media platforms such as Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook (such as algorithms that don't vet information, the ability for anyone to post and share anything, being too big and too fast to moderate) increase the footprint and influence of false stories beyond what they were in the pre-internet says.

I doubt WikiTribune would lure the type of folks who seek out false stories away from their favorite hyperpartisan sites, but who knows what might happen if it eventually became even a tenth as popular as Wikipedia. Maybe it would end up as a kind of standard system for current events information vetting, a better middle layer between journalism and audiences than social media currently is. Most people would then recognize the false news stories and sources in a way that most people did before the internet: as a kind of inevitable fringe to the information ecosphere, relegated to a recognizable outskirt rather than popping up in the midst of a feed of journalism vetted in the traditional way (as tends to happen w/ news via social media). It's important to know whether factually inaccurate news exists, how much of it exists, and who is sharing and reading it, but it's also important to think about where, in our information environment, it resides. Is it concentrated or distributed? In the center or on the periphery?

During his talk, Wales brought up the problem of clickbait headlines: headlines that mislead audiences, play on our emotional, tribal, impulsive tendencies, exploit a kind of shallow curiosity. So, maybe WikiTribune curators use a kind of rough guiding principle: avoid posting clickbait headlines (or maybe just rewrite the headlines. Often, the stories are fine, but the headlines seem like they were written by search engine optimizers). Obviously, clickbait is a term with a fuzzy definition, but that's nothing new, and certainly doesn't stop websites, publishers, etc. from moderating various kinds of vaguely-defined content standard. Get multiple experienced coders to rate each headline's clickbait-iness, and when they agree, don't post it or re-write the headline.

Wales also brought up ads and their effects on content, one of which is to essentially incentivize the creation of clickbait headlines. But I guess I'm a bit unclear on how to account for the fact that many of the sources to which WikiTribune links are ad supported. Related to this, how does WikiTribune work with paywall news sites? Wales seemed to be pro-paywall, to endorse the idea that if more news sites were subscription-funded rather than ad-funded, the quality of information would improve. Would WikiTribune just give you a taste of the article, a kind of abstract or summary, something a bit more than a headline, some kind of compromise that would give the reader some value while not totally substituting for the story itself, perhaps pushing users to the full article in the way that Wikipedia might push users to the source material? That seems reasonable to me.

He also brought up algorithms. Perhaps algorithms also, in some way, guide news consumers and creators toward more clickbait-y headlines. If you have humans in the loop, maybe it would be easier to slow or stop the prevalence of clickbait and false news.

He also brought up the fact that Wikipedia is not totally open and it's not a democracy, and I think that's a way of setting this apart from the primary news aggregator of our time, Reddit. Reddit is ostensibly open, and is a kind of democracy: registered users submit and vote on content, thereby increasing or decreasing its visibility. Over time, this has led to certain kinds of news stories ending up on the front page. You might call it a product of 'hivemind.' It has a certain narrow tonal range, and a certain focus on particular topics that reflects the interests and values of the voting public.

There is recent talk of moderators playing a bigger role in directing what gets posted in subreddits, and the inevitable push-back by those who value unfettered speech and a democratic public sphere above all else. I doubt that push-back will fully subside on Reddit because voting for the noteworthiness of content is a defining characteristic of the platform. It's not ancillary in the way that 'likes' are to Instagram. But if you start a new site that simply doesn't have that as one of it's defining characteristics, you don't necessarily have that problem. Sure, a lot of people believe strongly in a flat hierarchy, an open democratic sphere, but I think that enough people have been repulsed by what that yielded to want something else.

Somewhat more controversially, we might consider the question of tone and emotion in news, and whether or not that needs 'fixing,' or could be fixed. Personally, I'm turned off by the abundance of outrage and fear that many news stories in 2019 evoke, but I recognize that an argument can be (and has been) made for the value of anger and fear in this sphere. Here, I think it's more a matter of personal preference, and not everyone would agree on this, but some would like, sometimes, to see a newsfeed that features less fear and anger. I feel like that's where a lot of popular democratic news feeds, like r/news on Reddit, end up: a kind of distilled outrage and fear.

Here, we need think about the purpose of news. Is it a kind of 'immune system' for societies that's sole purpose is to detect threats and alert us to them? Well then, it seems entirely appropriate that news would invoke anger and fear. Should news be more broad, emotionally, than that? Should it invoke wonder, curiosity, gratitude? You have subreddits like r/upliftingnews that cater to another point on the emotional spectrum, so it's not as if there isn't already a place for that in many people's information diets.

Then there's the matter of filter bubbles/echo chambers, and I don't know that there's much that WikiTribune could do about that. I think worries about filter bubbles and echo chambers are somewhat overstated and/or that we'll never fully solve that problem, and while we wait around for the perfect solution, we're making do with a pretty lousy news ecosystem that's run, by default, by impulsive clicks and a lack of accountability. I think pure democracy was one potential solution - giving the power of vetting and curation to anyone and everyone - but we've seen how well that went.

Wikipedia never solved the filter bubble problem when it came to creating an encyclopedia. The editors don't remotely reflect the readership, in terms of race, gender, education level, ideology, etc. Wikipedia isn't flawless, but it seems to be working well enough, and I gather that there is a sense within the organization that they should try to broaden the diversity of people who edit it to include more women and people of color. Should it also try to include more people who identify as politically conservative? Does it make sense to pursue intellectual diversity among information curators as well?

It looks like the current version of WikiTribune features a way to follow particular feeds curator by particular Wiki-editors. If that's the case, then what's to stop a couple of ultra-liberal or ultra-conservative editors from setting up feeds full of clickbait and partisan vitriol? Is there some overseer that decides when editors have gone too far, similar to the way that admins on Reddit ultimately have control over volunteer moderators? Might that decision as to what goes too far be motivated by one's ideology?

Yes. But I get the sense that Wikipedia has already dealt with similarly motivated people who have tried to turn Wikipedia into a more partisan information environment, and it has some sort of mechanism for dealing with them that seems to be largely effective. Is the mechanism entirely democratic and open? Probably not, but now might be the time that some of the public revisits the relationship between direct democracy and news curation and distribution.

Even if something similar to WikiTribune existed in the past (and I get the sense that that's the case) and ultimately failed, that does not determine whether WikiTribune will fail. There are many, many cases in which a creation didn't succeed because it was timed poorly. Maybe we had to wait to see how poorly open, democratic, free-for-all, algorithmic, impulsive curation of news would go before there would enough demand for something like WikiTribune to be sustainable. I'm just happy to see someone trying something like this right now.

A World Without Frames

I had the privilege of seeing Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, speak at the University of Alabama, courtesy of The Blackburn Institute. In anticipation of seeing him speak, I'd been reflecting on the value of Wikipedia in a post-2016 world. Since the 2016 U.S. Presidential election, it seems as though the discourse on social media has become more toxic and less fact-based, that traditional news outlets don't quite know what to do with Trump and his international equivalents, and that non-traditional news outlets are creating and disseminating biased and false information about our world. All the while, Wikipedia continues to churn away, largely free from the toxicity and contentiousness that has gripped the rest of the internet and, seemingly, the rest of the world. How did they do it?

I went into the talk with a slightly more specific version of that question: is it the particular approach/model that Wikipedia uses that is responsible for its relative success vis a vis the Truth, or is it the particular domain in which it operates - that of the encyclopedia? Wales didn't quite speak to this question, but he did talk about his relatively new passion project: the WikiTribune. In a way, the fate of that venture will answer the question, as it applies the model and logic of Wikipedia to the world of news and current events. Wales' working theory seemed to be that ads were largely to blame for the degradation of news: the way that the online ad economy works puts all websites on an even playing field, all competing against one another for attention. News sites do not just compete with other news sites; they compete with parody news sites, entertainment sites, gossip sites, etc. He praised the recent move toward the subscription model, noting that the New York Times has seen recent financial success pursuing this model. Subscriptions prompt users to think, 'what is the overall value of this product, in the long term?' That's a key shift in thinking, from what you click on in an impulsive manner to what you value, a shift from short term thinking to long term thinking. So, if we get rid of the ads, do we improve the quality of news and discourse around news?

My suspicion is that there is another factor at play: whether the content pertains exclusively to current events. News must privilege certain stories over others in a way that an encyclopedia or a library does not, assuming it has a front page (can we conceive of a news site without a front page, regardless of whether said front page is personalized?). Here, the decades of research on framing and agenda setting is relevant: by virtue of editorial decisions about what to cover and what not to cover, news gets us to think about certain issues or events (or certain aspects of those issues/events) and ignore others. Encyclopedias do not direct attention in quite the same way. Sure, it could be argued that within a given entry, an encyclopedia/wikipedia chooses to emphasize certain aspects of the subject while ignoring or downplaying others, and thus frames the subject in a way that shapes perception. But I'd argue the way in which Wikipedia has incorporated different perspectives on contentious topics into entries reduces this effect.

Can you do the same thing with news? Is that what WikiTribune will be?

I haven't a clue. But it was kind of thrilling to be in the room with someone who was taking a stab at solving a problem of this scope, someone who was uniquely positioned to stand a decent chance of succeeding.

The Now Audience and the Later Audience

Game of Thrones is wrapping up its run on HBO, and watching the show and the reaction to the show has rekindled my interest in storytelling and audiences. I'd like to avoid discussing the actual qualities of the show, as other online voices seem to have that pretty well covered. I'd like to focus on the abundance of voices and the qualities of the conversation about the show, and how it resembles conversations about the endings of other popular TV stories.

Twitter, Reddit, and the blogosphere (i.e., the 'now' audience) give us a segment of the public's immediate reaction to a story. As such, it seems to come packaged with the story itself: we get the show, and we get reaction of this part of the public along with it. For a long time, we'd gotten the judgments of professional critics alongside the release of cultural products like TV shows, books, and movies. These judgments would maybe help audiences to sift through the large quantity of content and decide what was worth their time, or perhaps open a door to a new way of interpreting those works. And surely, many audience members thought of critics as elitist, their opinions being worth no more than the opinions of anyone else, and thus ignored them.

I doubt that many people use the immediate judgments of the audience that is vocal on social media as a guide to help determine what they should watch and what they should ignore (perhaps the mere fact that people are talking about a show, even if they're trashing it, serves as the signal that the show is worth watching). Instead, I think it's mostly of interest for people who are already watching. Most of the conversation seems to be commiseration: finding the voices that echo the way you, as a viewer, feel but perhaps could not articulate in that way, and then amplifying those voices through upvotes, likes, share, and retweets.

It is tempting to see the reaction to an ongoing story like Game of Thrones as the reaction to the show. However, the segment of people who talk about the show online is just a small portion of the overall audience for the show, and certainly not a representative sample of that larger group. It's hard to know what the rest of the audience makes of the show, and, in the absence of any information about that larger segment of the audience, its easy for our brains to just fill it in with adjacent, semi-relevant information (see the availability heuristic): the reaction on social media.

Beyond that, there's also a widely held assumption that the reaction on social media drives subsequent reaction or opinion. This view acknowledges that the voices on social media are but a sliver of the overall public, and that they're not a representative sample, but assumes that they wield an influence over the larger public. This may not occur through some conscious subservience of the public to the opinion-leaders on Twitter, but, again, maybe because of an unconscious mental heuristic. The social media reaction is the initial impression, and initial impressions greatly influence subsequent impressions, as people tend to ignore other relevant information (in this case, actual qualities of the show).

There's no doubt that news media plays a role in this process as well. Whereas news outlets in the past would have noted the number of people tuning in to a broadcast and used that as a kind of index of cultural importance, the news media now can talk about the reaction to the show on social media. This coverage amplifies those social media voices. I'm betting that more of the news articles about the ending of Game of Thrones are about the online reaction to the show than was the case with the endings of previous TV shows, and so the social media reaction to shows is likely 'louder' than it once was, making it more likely that the general public sees that reaction as the reaction to the show.

This topic - the relationship between voices on social media, news outlets, and public opinion - is much larger than Game of Thrones or popular TV in general. How much do people who post on Twitter or, more broadly, on social media really influence the culture at large? The answer, of course, depends on a variety of factors, though I think that many just assume it drives the interest and opinions of the rest of the masses for the above reasons.

When might this not be the case? When might the social media voices not reflect or influence the reactions of the larger public in subsequent years? I've been thinking about the importance of a mechanism to make visible, or monetize (same thing?), the non-immediate reaction of the larger public (i.e., the 'later' audience). In the case of news events, perhaps historical documentaries are the mechanism. Years after an event, we tell a story about the event and often contextualize the immediate reaction of the public at the time (it's hard to think of a better example of this than Ezra Edelman's O.J.: Made in America). The perspective of the historical documentary is a corrective one. But most news events don't get this treatment. Most news events are of such great importance to the people living through them and of such lesser importance to later audiences that there's not enough incentive to create a mechanism for registering anything other than the immediate social media reaction.

In the case of popular stories like Game of Thrones, the mechanism for capturing non-immediate reactions of the larger public are international streaming video sites like HBO GO, Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, and Disney +. Years from now, these shows will be available in media markets to audiences who have likely forgotten, if they were aware of it in the first place, the initial reaction to the show on social media. The reaction, which was an overwhelming part of the context in which the show was viewed at the time it was first released, won't be any part of the context in which they watch the show. In terms of financial incentives, the importance of the 'later' audience is far greater than that of the 'now' audience: there is far more money to be made off a show in, say, the Chinese media market from 2025-2035 than from English-speaking media markets in 2019 (i.e., the media markets that are most likely influenced by or reflected in the online reaction to a show).

For a show that is specifically tied to a cultural moment in time and may not have much of a life after its initial run, the subsequent streaming market in other countries may not be as important (although the ongoing success of Friends, what I think of as a pretty dated product of the 1990's, suggests that we may overestimate the importance of universality in determining a show's subsequent success). But Game of Thrones strikes me as the quintessential example of a show that isn't built for a particular time or place, and was probably sold to HBO as such. Of course, the show reflects some of the values of its creators who are embedded in 2010's United States culture, but it is not nearly as embedded in that cultural context as the social media reaction to the show. The online reaction to the show is certainly about elements of the show itself - character arcs, pacing, etc. - but it also reflects the experiences, emotions, and politics of the people writing about the show in 2019. When people watch the show 25 years from now in another country, I think they'll mostly just see a show about dragons and deceit (which are pretty timeless motifs).

To an extent, I've already seen this disjuncture between the 'now' audience and the 'later' audience with The Sopranos. That show ended just as the 'now' audience was finding its voice online. Critics had already noted the way the show had lost its footing, and then came an ending that seemed, at the time (and perhaps even now), designed to piss off the 'now' audience.

But how is the show experienced by the 'later' audience in 2019? It's likely that much of the 'later' audience still finds fault with the final seasons of the show, but they don't watch single episodes or even single seasons in isolation, and they don't have time to dwell on whether or not the episode or season disappointed them before moving on to the next episode or season. Often, they consume the show as a whole. More important to this discussion, they likely don't go searching for the social media reaction to the show as it was aired 20 years ago. Some of that reaction is still there on the web, and, in some way, the reaction to the ending feels more dated than the show itself. The Sopranos, like many other shows that occasionally ran afoul of their most ardent and vocal fans, has a long shelf life. Even Lost, a show I thought of as the best example of a TV show with a disappointing ending, is apparently being reappraised.

It's impossible to know for sure what the 'later' audience will think of a show, but watching the long-term success of shows like Friends and The Office on streaming platforms, and watching the amount of money streaming services like Netflix will pay to keep them, has me thinking about the ways in which it is easy to overestimate the market power, and perhaps the cultural power, of the 'now' audience.

Why do some people believe smartphones and social media are harmful?

I try to read and listen to critiques of smartphones and social media with an open mind. Typically, these critiques note the addictive qualities of these technologies and lament their effects on our abilities to engage in deep, sustained contemplation and substantive social interaction. A decade of experience conducting research on the uses and effects of social media has taught me to be skeptical of these claims. The first thing we would expect to see, if these claims were true, would be vast differences between those who use smartphones/social media a lot and those who use them a little or not at all. Among younger folks, we'd expect differences in academic achievement. Among everyone, we'd expect differences in happiness, well-being, depression, and/or the nature of their relationships with others. Even if such differences existed, this would not necessary suggest that these technologies caused changes in individuals. Perhaps individuals possess some existing characteristics (such as a lack of a clear sense of purpose in their lives) that, ten years ago, would have caused them to watch a lot of television and be unhappy, and that now causes them to spend a lot of time on Facebook and be unhappy. When I look at the sum total of what studies have found over the past ten years, I don't even see much evidence of the correlations you would expect to see if the claims were true. To the extent that there are correlations between use and negative outcomes, the magnitudes of the effects tend to be small (far smaller than is suggested by the level of concern they've prompted among many).

This doesn't rule out the possibility that within the more recent past (say, within the last year or two), smartphones and social media may have started to have the kinds of negative consequences about which many people worry. Research moves at a slow pace, and the technologies and the ways people use them are changing. Personally, it's hard to look at some of the freshmen I teach in large lecture classes, who are seemingly unable to stop using their phones, and not think, 'Maybe the worriers are right after all. Maybe we had to wait until a generation of young people had a chance to develop technology use habits at a young age to really see the effects of the technologies on people.' I'm passionate about doing whatever we can to establish solid evidence of the effects of smartphones/social media use on mental health, academic achievement, and relationships. I'm passionate about improving our measures. I don't want to set the bar for evidence of pernicious effects unrealistically high. I just want to see solid evidence before I believe the worriers.

At the same time, I think it's worthwhile for those who worry about the effects of smartphones/social media to consider alternative explanations for what they see. If there turns out not to be evidence of smartphones and social media's pernicious effects, why might it seem as though they have those effects?

I think part of it has to do with the people that worriers observe. Often, they observe young people: children and adolescents. The adults they observe, including themselves, often have the types of jobs (academic jobs; journalism; social media managers) that allow them flexibility in how they spend their time. This is what children and journalists have in common with one another: they have flexible schedules. There are no clear boundaries between work, play, and social time. Under these circumstances, social media, it would seem, can be pernicious. It can be habit-forming to an extent that feels addictive, crowd out deep thought with shallow distractions, put you on a hedonic treadmill that feels impossible to get off.

But these are not the circumstances of the average person.

Most people, in the United States and in the rest of the world, have more structured lives. They spend large periods of the day working or care-taking family members. Do they use smartphones/social media while they work and care-take? I'm sure some of them do. In the absence of smartphones/social media, would some of those folks have engaged in other non-work/non-care-taking activities such as socializing with co-workers face-to-face or watching television? Probably. In any case, it's clear that research on leisure use of smartphones and social media at work ('cyber-loafing' is the humorously antiquated name for this) and use while care-taking is important, but also clear that we should not assume that social media plays the same role in the lives of individuals with more structured lives as it does in the lives of those with less structure.

What I suspect is that many people, perhaps most people, spend most of their days engaged in work that is not especially stimulating or fulfilling, but that pays the bills. At the end of the day, they want to relax. Ten or twenty years ago, they might sit down in front of the television and unwind. Today, they might break out their smartphones (perhaps while also watching TV) and sift through social media posts, exchange messages with friends, and catch up on the day's events. This kind of use would serve roughly the same function as TV use ten or twenty years ago - relaxing after a hard day's work - while helping them to feel connected to far-flung friends and family (an especially valuable perk to those who work at home and may feel isolated).

Does their smartphone/social media use come with some bad side effects, such as exposure to an aggressively polarized online culture war, or exposure to plenty of misleading or untrue information? Sure, but when was it otherwise? Didn't exposure to TV come with plenty of bad side effects, such as exposure to a skewed version of reality, one that often trafficked in violence and ugly stereotypes? I don't mean to rely on the TV comparison as a way of excusing the many problems with online life. But I think it's worthwhile to bring up so as to correct the belief that our leisure time, in the past, tended to be especially productive and pro-social.

Perhaps the lives of certain people (those with flexible schedules) have changed a great deal due to the popularization of smartphones and social media. Perhaps they are suffering and they're angry at the creators and supporters of smartphones and social media, and in their anger, overreach in their claims about the effects of smartphones and social media. Perhaps not! But I hope to make the case that to believe that smartphones and social media are not problematic for the majority of their users is not something that only industry shills do. There is a sensible reason, if an untested one, to believe this.

White Flight Part 2: When the upper class disconnects

It's been awhile since I've published anything in this blog. Mostly, it's been the incentive to publish in peer-reviewed journals in order to attain tenure that's to blame for the lack of blog productivity. I continue to have stray, undeveloped thoughts about media uses and effects, and there are a few drafts of blogs waiting to be finished, but in the meantime, here's one that's been percolating of late.

There are reports from the past year that many highly-educated, upper-class or upper-middle-class parents are raising their kids with minimal or no screen time, primarily out of fear of its addictive qualities. It seems to start with lay theories of people who work in the tech industry and/or people who live in Silicon Valley - people with a very idiosyncratic perspective on media technologies. One could look at this particular group of parents as experts, given their unusual access to the ways in which these technologies are developed, marketed, and used. But it's also possible that their experience skews their perception of the extent to which these technologies actually are addicting or otherwise pernicious.

One possibility is that the parents are right, that the technologies are pernicious, at least when used in what they deem to be excess. Another possibility is that they're mistaken, that the technologies are merely a new form of communication, like books or telephones, not bad in and of themselves. For now, I want to set aside that issue and focus on the repercussions of a certain type of young person - an upper-class young person - dropping out of the social media universe (or never participating in it in the first place).

There might be a new kind of digital divide, one in which upper-class young people are not participating in or contributing to online social spaces. Those young people will, of course, communicate with one another, through face-to-face social networks if not through technologies that upper-class parents look at with less fear (the good ol' fashioned phone; Facetime/Skype; maybe even texting). They'll use the internet, of course, but primarily for work, or the consumption of curated content with high production values.

Meanwhile, the hurly-burly social media universe - the YouTubers, the memes, the bullying and the overnight fame, the narcissism, confessions, and anonymous social support, all overcrowded with ads - will continue to exist. If the hostility and hate speech get worse and worse, and if other people become helplessly addicted to its pleasures? Well, that's their problem. It's hard not to think of the 'white flight' of privileged families from the sites of fear and anger of yesteryear - urban centers. Privileged young people's image of the unruly social media universe will be akin to the caricature of urban life that children of the 80's grew up with: they will see the most sensational worst-of-the-worst stories, and have no personal experience with it to temper these simplistic, negative depictions. When they get to college, whether or not they grew up on the internet could be as important as whether they grew up in a one-stoplight Midwestern hamlet or Brooklyn. The social distance between a lower-middle class child who spent hours on social media from age 9 and an upper class child who read books and played Dungeons and Dragons at his friend's house, even if those two kids grew up across the street from one another, might be immense.

Among the many fears that social media evoke is the fear of the filter bubble: that subtle social media algorithms and quirks of human behavior will work to balkanize societies. Ten years after the popularization of social media, evidence seems to suggest that the opposite has happened, that we vastly overestimated the power of those algorithms, underestimated the extent to which offline social networks of old were already balkanized, and underestimated the serendipity and unpredictability of evolving online social networks. If balkanization occurred, and if it is occurring again, it may be between those who were/are socializing online and those who were not/are not.