The hype machine

The book by this title from Sinan Aral suggests that social media might adapt their LIKE BUTTON to a set of six buttons to indicate the responder's impression that the post is liked by:

"I as an individual",

"My friends & I",

"My family & I",

"My community & I",

"My culture & I", and/or

"My profession & I".

This may seem like a benign (even superfluous) augmentation, but it's designed to shift awareness away from organism centricity to the wider range of social subsystem correlations that we'd like to nurture. Moreover, it will provide data on the shifts in focus that a given post elicits in that post's audience.

Thus for example posts that elicit a focus on politics when the topic is some natural process (like a pandemic) that we need to bring technical knowledge to bear on will automatically show up as a professional topic with few professional likes. Likewise when experts (say in astronomy) make assertions about elements of culture with which they have limited experience.

O-centricity & COVID

 The COVID-19 choices given to us by nature (not people) have always been simple: Wear masks together or shut down your economy if you don't want way more than 2 folks in the US to die every 3 minutes. 

Our organism-centric thinking instead imagines the problem is other people, e.g. (i) wanting to tell you what to do, (ii) trying to trick you into paying more taxes, or (iii) out to get your boss, etc. This latter way of thinking is an evolved trait that's had survival value in the past, but does not have survival value in this case.

symptom vs. disease

 Don't confuse the symptom (like a giant pus-filled pimple) with the disease. The cure for the latter likely involves constructive adaptation to the new speed at which ideas can be replicated across the globe electronically.

what narrative to chose

This depends on the audience. An audience equipped to work toward a healthy future might be better served with balanced narratives, allowing them to make decisions based on their own interests. Such narratives are likely to focus on demographic information and on incoming data (often statistical) about processes afoot. 

If you instead want to decide for (e.g. to simply manipulate) an audience, your narrative should be one-sided and focus on personalities or organism-centric anecdote i.e. on paleolithic triggers like fear, "bad-guys", and xenophobia. In this electronic information age, the gullibility of audiences to these strategies has proven itself again and again, from the invention of radio in the early 20th century through to today's internet of social media.

cartoon obsession

Leadership concepts evolved in modest-sized groups and communities, but modern communications extends them to larger communities where leadership becomes a media figment rather than a relationship. 

The mismatch is especially apparent in election years, because figment promotion eclipses the statistical  process challenges that are hitting our communities where it hurts.  

Hence discussion of mindfulness, measurement, and mitigation of the latter might be worth a bit more attention, even if there is a windfall in money for cartoons.

the anecdote lurch

Data on whole communities is something that can provide a heads up on trends in community health on all levels. Alas, our visceral reactions are more attuned to anecdote than to "data about many". 

Electronic media (starting with radio, then TV and now the internet) are therefore able to trigger visceral reaction to anecdote, while the "data about many" (which signals real developments in the bottom line) is ignored. The result is a plethora of unbalanced narratives with strong feelings on all sides, which are often uninformed to the real trends and issues tht we'd all like to manage.

shared adaptations

Thanks to our evolutionary history over the last million years (and then some), we share:

• recognition of our family as different from "non-family", although known as "nepotism" when overdone, as "subsystem correlations that look inward from our genetic code pool"  is a key element of our social structure,
• recognition of our culture as different from "other culture", although known as "discriminant racism" when overdone, as "subsystem correlations that look inward from our idea code pool" is also a key element of our social structure.
• obsession with organism-centric anecdotes (especially about folks who are either "super bad" or "super good") as distinct from statistically significant data (Zzz...) on processes that are key to our individual and community health in the world around.

Although we share these things, we might also want to recognize the need for balance with the bewildering array of unique tasks that each of faces in buffering correlations that look in and out from our boundaries of self, family, and culture. Electronic media that panders to one or another unbalanced aspect of these paleolithic traits is a fast path to social systems with no community at all, something that I for one would prefer not to hurry.

Balance narratives...

...but be cautious, because the opposite of an unbalanced narrative is automatically also unbalanced.

anecdotes & o-centricity

Modern electronic communications give audio-visual anecdotes new power, but their appeal to our paleolithic adaptions (like organism centricity in general and our attraction to leader worship in particular) can also decrease our awareness of quantitative developments in the larger processes that affect community-level health. What are some ways to help out with this problem?

verbal diarrhea

Try resisting the temptation to pass it around.

yellow reporting

New roles for technology historically give rise to often unexpected consequences, that stem from the fact that our paleolithic adaptations did not take them into account. The list includes tools for transportation, housing, and fighting. It also includes communication technologies. Invention of the printing press for books and newspapers, of radio, of television, and of the internet are some of the more memorable examples.

Yellow journalism historically is associated with communications that are rewarded by their consumers not for their usefulness but for their sensationalism, or for the fear and/or xenophobia that they trigger, etc. Yellow reporting in that sense is of course now born again in new ways with modern social media, and that rebirth includes not only reporting about policy issues and matters of belief, but also about science. The worst examples of this are linked to the personal injury suit industry, but empty sensationalism in routine scientific reporting is also all over the place. Might in that context a more sophisticated approach to balanced narratives be helpful for the general public, as well as for journalism professionals?