Meaning, they're not the uncontaminated purveyors of truth they like to think they are. They also collectively ride various mimetic waves across the mediascape. They're better than online disinfo peddlers of course--they still adhere to standards, but that delta is narrowing.
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McLuhan is laughing in his grave. This is what he meant by that cliché and cryptic 'The media is the message.' The content of the media doesn't matter, the way the media warps our brain into thinking about it (and the larger world) is what matters.
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Whether we're some uneducated, frustrated loner reading InfoWars on an old PC, or some highly-educated, upwardly mobile (in a world where that's now rare) professional reading the NYT on an iPad, we're all just anxious, exhausted chimps banging on like and share buttons all day.
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Final beef: 2. The professional engineers of the spectacle, the journalists, seem the most taken with their creation. Typically, good dealers don't use. But the spectacle is so blinding, so uncoupled from any reality anymore, you can comfortably live inside it, and we do.
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Replying to @antoniogm
Let’s get away from the handwaves and introduce
@kevinroose’s recent work as evidence, which I assume you are referencing. Here’s the article that seems most relevant:https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/07/business/facebook-midterms-misinformation.html …2 replies 0 retweets 1 like -
Replying to @jasonkincaid @kevinroose
Right, one of many such takes. It was refreshing and well-reported. I also find it hard to reconcile with the tenor of the discussion that preceded it just the week before. Also, I'm going to be the FB skeptic here for once: how do we know that there's less misinformation now?
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In other words, how is this not a recursive feedback loop where things seem better because we all say they are? Getting data on FB is hard (they're no help there), but it seems that crappy stories still run riot on FB, as a brief glance at CrowdTangle reveals. What's changed?
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Replying to @antoniogm @kevinroose
I agree with you here — my sense is that the only thing that changed is that we have evidence that when Facebook concentrates its resources to fend off misinformation on a particular election day, it can avoid obvious catastrophe (this time...)
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Replying to @jasonkincaid @kevinroose
But how was this not a catastrophe (other than the result)? Did the metrics actually change vs. 2016? I haven't read a single piece that compares something measurable between then and now (and again, it's understandably hard to get hard numbers as an outside observer).
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Replying to @antoniogm @kevinroose
Your skepticism is warranted — it’s too early to know, especially with so little data. I’d view an *obvious* catastrophe as an election-day hoax that reached liftoff to the point we all knew about it. But we may yet learn there were pernicious campaigns operating on a large scale
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Right. Here's what I think will happen: there might be another big disinfo blowup left, but mostly we'll consider the problem as fixed as it's going to be, and start wigging out over some other aspect of FB (as we once did about privacy, say).
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