Michael Tae Sweeney: people think our current information environment is uniquely poisonous because of social media but idk I'm old enough to remember when the highest rated daytime talk show was telling people there were networks of satanists sacrificing thousands of children a year.

people think our current information environment is uniquely poisonous because of social media but idk I'm old enough to remember when the highest rated daytime talk show was telling people there were networks of satanists sacrificing thousands of children a year.

there was no halcyon past where everyone was reading academic journals and listening to university lectures to figure out the world. the same people who believe in q-anon now believed in john birch society shit 50 years ago and believed in blood libel protocols shit 100 years ago.

the american revolution too. in massachusetts, the patriots believed in a conspiracy that the british were going to convert their province to a crown colony and seize all their weapons (in order to leave them defenseless against the indians), which the british never had any intention of doing

One recurring theme in studying the history of the French Revolution is that everyone's brains were completely cooked on pamphlet conspiracism from the highest to lowest levels of French political life

people are like "ah but the technology of social media is so much more pernicious" and i really want people to think carefully about the technology of linear broadcast TV and how that worked. It feels familiar because we all grew up with it but its in many ways a worse machine than tiktok/youtube

I mean, sort of? Also every single TV show was calibrated by a team of professionals to keep viewers maximally engaged minute to minute and especially hanging on through every commercial break and coming back next week bsky.app/profile/naug...

tho Broadcast TV "algorithms" and strategies operated at weekly, monthly and seasonal intervals, not real-time, millisecond to millisecond

There's not (afaik) great research out there about this but I'm really convinced one of the reasons TV advertising works is that the addictive nature of linear TV's "keep you hooked through the next act break" and "try to find something good on" puts us into a state of defenseless suggestability

Ditto drive-time talk radio, which lowers our cognitive defenses both because of this linear nature and because our attention is partially occupied by driving (which is surprisingly cognitively taxing)

OH SHIT IT'S A SKINNER BOX

I love 80s and 90s commercials but fucking hate youtube ads (anything longer than 30 seconds is morally degenerate to me) but I've always attributed those feelings to youthful nostalgia. I've even watched a couple of those "one hour of 90s ads" nostalgia compilations.

TV metrics were about broad reach and develop content suited to as many possible likely viewers, while modern algorithmic advertising is narrowed to capture individualized engagement hours and match viewers with available content. They're not entirely comparable.

What there is good research on is that advertising works better and people make quicker and more impulsive decisions when their agitation and brain arousal are high. Violence threat and fear sell and they sell big.

You'd RUN to the bathroom to pee. You'd catch at least the last 15 seconds of the commercial break because you didn't want to miss any of Roscoe chasing them Duke boys.

and they weren't reacting to each individual user; they only had after-the-fact ratings from polling; there was no way to track what any given individual might have seen like there is now ongoing active monitoring of every click. It was a MASS algorithm, largely anonymous and representational.

i don't really think "finding some lies that will upset people" is something that requires big data to achieve tho

There was no pause or replays. Ratings were based on watching the show at the time it was on.

I agree that media entertainment has always been enabled by an ugly capitalistic distraction game, but that's really the extent of the nostalgia. A host of major policy and tech changes since the 80s has transformed the game into something much much more effective, and much more unethical.

all sorts of horrendous movements spread themselves via *radio*

Long before there was rush Limbaugh, there was Father Coughlin

And this guy en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_R....

John R. Brinkley - Wikipediaen.wikipedia.org

yah we all know limbaugh but small market AM radio everywhere was filled with nightmares as you knew if you ever drove through the emptier bits

I grew up listening to Rush with my Dad. There is a reason I will never trust the right with anything.

my dad (liberal) used to like listening to conservative talk radio to laugh at them I guess? It just annoyed me. But yeah, the local ones who weren't syndicated were really trash. Even my dad didn't like them

Growing up, our local AM radio station had a call-in show called Feedback which was just insane racist complaining. Nightmare stuff.

Between Houston, DFW, and SA-ATX. Basically, the Waco suburbs for hundreds of miles.

well, that too, but I was particularly thinking of the 1930s & 40s

the Rwandan genocide, famously

I'm so old I remember "Rush rooms"

that is a good point and I believe that network is a major reason we have a multi-year disaster in Ontario with irreversible effects

and it's nothing new en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aimee_S...

Aimee Semple McPherson - Wikipediaen.wikipedia.org

There’s a joke in “Wolf Hall” where Cromwell laments how, thanks to the printing press, some crackpot idea can spread all across Europe in a month or two.

I have tons of bad things to say about social media, but bullshit had been central to the entire history of mass communication.

Yeah one big reason I got into Twitter is because every time there was a news story, there were a bunch of people yelling about how it was wrong or taking things out of context. Now, a bunch of those people were also wrong, but not all, and it was a great way to learn about different perspectives

Even better than that was the technology of a hierarchical religious institution telling you what you were obligated to accept as true

In the 90s the local newspaper in my hometown ran James Dobson's column every other week. Mike Rose was the liberal counterpoint

Broadcast tv was literally designed to put your brain into a neutral, receptive state! TikTok is, at worst, doing that but with a personalized "channel" for each person

tho Broadcast TV "algorithms" and strategies operated at weekly, monthly and seasonal intervals, not real-time, millisecond to millisecond

Until CNN started broadcasting war 24/7.

CNN was extremely repetitious and boring, without much war most of the time.

I think it was worse then for this reason alone! We had fewer choices and a large portion of programming was crazy conservative.

And even the mainstream was actually super conservative most of the time.

Yeah - I don't even really know how to do this comparison. It's clearly different in some ways, but the comparative is unclear. It may also be a factor of new tech/media distributions.

As it matures, it tends to even out. But there’s a rush where it becomes overly trusted and thought to be a venue for secret knowledge

I literally quit TV as a kid in favor of YouTube because TV felt way too demanding of my attention, like, I thought it was the lack of a pause button,but oh my god, as an adult I’ve realized there was way more to it than that. I literally cannot go back cuz the way most TV is WRITTEN drives me batty

It literally takes 30 minutes for a plot point that could’ve taken 10 seconds. Then there’s a 30 minute commercial break! Not even the big-name YouTube stuff’s that bad (yet).

also fun to compare social to the absolutely insane news environment of late 19th / early 20th century. countless random hyper-local newspapers printing wild stuff, on par with the snake oil advertised alongside

Funny thing about social media. www.pewresearch.org/journalism/2...

Americans Who Mainly Get Their News on Social Media Are Less Engaged, Less Knowledgeablewww.pewresearch.org Those who rely on social media for news are less likely to get the facts right about COVID-19 and politics and more likely to hear some unproven claims.

Post