Technology and Society
Terms and Conditions
June 22, 2017
It’s early and I’m not quite awake when the news shows a man being shot to death – a clip I’ve heard already many times, but this morning I’m not alert enough to turn away and fumble for the mute button. It seems cruel and invasive to show someone’s violent death over and over as if it’s part of an action movie. The child is trying to calm her mom out of love and the fear her mother might be “shooted” too.
Then the news anchor comes on to tell me what a brave little girl she is before it’s time for North Korea or health care or a commerical break.
This intimate moment has been turned into a public drama thanks to surveillance cameras mounted in official vehicles, raw feeds to bracket the POV we saw a year ago as the woman narrated the immediate aftermath of the shooting live on Facebook with the calm voice of a documentarian, possessed of a composure that she couldn’t sustain once her phone was taken from her. These instant films are a 21st century form of testimonio made by witnesses who tell stories that echo others, a cumulative loop of anguish repeating a story that’s news to too many of us, a daily gut fear for others.
Facebook never set out to be a platform for this genre. Social media is not designed to serve social justice; it’s engineered around marketing principles. Recruit an audience, engage them, keep them engaged. Learn everything you can about them so you can refine your marketing strategies. Encourage users to market themselves and accumulate an audience to get even more information and engagement. Since these platforms are where the eyeballs are, news media are letting themselves be enclosed where the ad dollars have migrated. Besides, news isn’t what we don’t see, it’s what’s already on the platform. What’s trending? What’s viral? Who has a story? What video can we can use?
All this is on my mind as I read about the latest ersatz drama over social media posts, fodder for anger and mass political pressure. Circulate, amplify, channel the anger toward some desired goal – all while “free speech” is being used as a banner for high-stakes provocations designed to confront and create more viral cycles of outrage because that’s the whole point. Sure, some folks in the audience might become better informed after hearing a viewpoint that’s new to them, but the real audience is out there online, already convinced, and legion. You don’t march in Skokie to explain the Nazi cause to its residents, you do it to provoke disgust and inspire those who are already sympathetic.
All of this is good for business, of course. We click, we watch, we comment, we share – and when that gets a reaction, we do it all over again. Some call this the attention economy or surveillance capitalism, but it’s also monetized emotion, encouraged, observed, magnified, and captured in metrics. It’s not new, of course. Advertising has always worked this way, and news media has depended on capturing attention (re