Michael Tae Sweeney: 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.

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)

Im apparently bungling the specific way the Massachusetts Bay colonists believed in conspiracies but the larger point still stands I think bsky.app/profile/tony...

I’m not sure if this is technically correct. Massachusetts was a crown colony by the time of the Revolution, its governors were appointed by the crown (rather than the proprietary governments of PA or MA); their concern was that officials would be paid by England rather than the Mass government…

Slightly tangential but worth underlining: driving is incredibly high as a cognitive load even though as a society we pretend it isn't. We focus a lot on phone use while driving - but the body of research suggests even chatting with your passenger *severely* reduces driving ability!

Drive-time talk is uniquely pernicious here in leading you down all a primrose path that a more focused audience would think “that doesn’t sound right” and either change the station or leave the room. The goal is both a frictionless experience in both production values and ideology

Getting saturated in Limbaugh 3 hrs a day, it turns out, is worse than any news feed.

The blood libel started with the death of William of Norwich in 1144. 880 years ago. The death of a child leading to the creation of a conspiracy theory that echoed through the ages, leading to denigration, demonisation, persecution, violence, and mass killings.

Twitter is just the unfiltered Letters To The Editor.

There's nothing at all surprising about how cognitively taxing driving is - especially if you're taking it seriously. Driving is a genuinely hard task.

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

Where big data comes in is when you can profile a personality trait and then HYPER-specifically target those people with ads. Funneling propaganda to "gullible people" was not possible without everyone else seeing it. This is exactly how the 2016 Trump campaign put him in the White House.

Big data brokers know all about you and can that data is used to PROACTIVELY target you as an individual by your IP and device IDs with bespoke content in real time. You are trying to equate a rabbit trap with a cruise missile.

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

On the plus side, radio wasn't *only* used by the worst forces in society. artsandculture.google.com/story/golden...

Golden Age of Black Radio - Part 1: The Early Years - Google Arts & Cultureartsandculture.google.com Google Arts & Culture features content from over 2000 leading museums and archives who have partnered with the Google Cultural Institute to bring the world's treasures online.

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.

I had to read that twice before I realized you didn't mean the band

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

i was thinking of rwanda when you said that en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_T...

Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines - Wikipediaen.wikipedia.org

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

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