The Future of Online Content

The rise of the internet has proven revolutionary in every aspect, but perhaps the largest of all of these is its effect on the dissemination of news information, the redefinition of journalism and the emergence of an amateur, shadow fourth estate. An amateur content creator and futurist myself, I'm going to try to take a stab at projecting what is likely to happen to online informational content in the next ten years.

First, the trends that are in place right now:

• Print newspapers are dying.

• Content farms have emerged to serve ads to people who search certain terms. Being useful to actual humans is an afterthought—if it is a thought at all.

• Certain news bloggers have become famous and trusted. Some have even managed to be trusted on news issues despite not claiming to be journalists.

• Blogging has been introduced into a number of traditional news franchises. For example, Nate Silver's statistical prediction site, FiveThirtyEight, was picked up first by the New York Times, then moved to ESPN.

• SEO exists as a consideration. Some sites appear to be sources of neutral information, but are commissioned content designed to drive traffic to a third party. Often, content is "spun" through software which paraphrases, changes word order, and alters paragraphs to avoid detection as duplicate content.

Projections through 2023:

CC 3.0 BY-SA Willi Heidelbach, from Wikimedia Commons

• Dominance of freelance and quasi-freelance journalism. Journalism is already freelance heavy, and non-journalistic content produced for sites other than newspapers is already nearly completely freelance. Expect bloggers, vloggers, internet-famous twitterers, and others to take spots that previously would have been reserved for J-school grads. Of course, trained journos will still be needed, especially for the actual groundwork, major stories, and to staff the remaining major papers. [This article on freelancing gives a taste of what's coming to the workforce in general.]

• The rise of spun content. While a major publication like Washington Post would never allow the all-but-plagiarized output of spinner algorithms, less ethical publications, link bait empires, and sites making revenue from gray-hat SEO will almost certainly start publishing spun news if they haven't already. It will be the burden of well-meaning smaller outlets to check their incoming freelance work for originality.

 

• Buzzfeedization. Undisputed king of the link bait jungle, Buzzfeed provides listicles announcing the top five this, the top twenty that (although six is becoming hipper than five, and you can quote me). Iin the last couple of years, however, it has pushed its way to the news world, with notable coverage of the 2012 presidential campaigns. Buzzfeed's model puts news content, celebrity gossip, pop culture nostalgia, and "25 things only Vermonters know about" side-by-side, deinstitutionalizing the fourth estate and collocating it with the world of brain candy internet entertainment.

Buzzfeed and its ilk get much of their revenue from ads, and many of these sites operate within ad networks, as described here. Ad networks present a revenue stream and a link topography that further embeds the news into a landscape that prioritizes entertainment value.

• Paywalled sites begin to collapse. The New York Times bucked conventional wisdom in [year] when it added a paid option to its online offerings. Realizing that internet offerings were more detrimental to broadsheet sales than they were beneficial in the form of online ads, the Gray Lady decided to block viewers who want to read more than a set number of articles per month without paying. It is unlikely that this model will continue for much longer, as free content is available to nearly everyone.

• Solidification of meme structures. If you look up a how-to page on any normal household task (changing the oil in a car, say), you'll find that most of your hits give you instructions that are very similar. Because the task is simple, fairly uniform, and not at all novel, the general instructions haven't changed much over time, and don't vary from person to person much. On the internet, this effect is magnified to where even the verbiage is relatively identical. As content becomes reused more and more, uniformity becomes inevitable. Look for memes about how-to items, historical facts, popular science and psychology theories, and large-scale world events to become much more solidified, flattening out nuance and largely failing to question the wisdom of the crowd.

Some of this is already happening, as one can see from the historical treatment of Christopher Columbus. Of course, the traditional wisdom, inculcated over the course of centuries, is that Columbus fought the folk understanding of a flat earth to boldly sail west, and land, thinking he found India. There wasn't much said about his adventures afterwards, except perhaps that he was interested in bringing Jesus to the savages. Recently, however, there has been an uptick in skepticism regarding this view, and Ol' Chris has been recast as a profiteering opportunist, oppressor, and all around bad operator. The Oatmeal, a general-interest webcomic, illustrates (literally) the recently developed current opinion.

In this case, the memetic ossification of Columbus-as-villain is likely to be more accurate than the folk historical view, and the new meme structure is more robust than the old. There is no guarantee that this will hold for all other memes solidified in the various hiveminds of the internet, though, and much like the diversity of species in the natural world, those being pushed to extinction by artificial means far outnumber those being pushed out by their own lack of fitness.

Conclusion

The overarching "meta-trend" behind all these predictions is that it is going to become easier and easier to manufacture popular opinions by increasing the rate at which content is produced and limiting the number of brains involved in directing that production. The power of the media then becomes the power to change millions of minds at once, in subtle ways. This flash opinion creation changes traditional wisdom on the time frames of economics and politics, which in turn increases the volatility of culture. The revolutions of 2011 are likely just foreshocks.

Watch Your Hed

Headlines and ledes grab attention, and are often lies.

This is, of course, a follow-up to the "Update" segment of my previous post, in which I note that Fox News changed a headline from an inflammatory one to a less inflammatory one. Today's post is about why that sort of behavior is too little, too late.

A couple of posts ago, I talked about the "Information Problem", or how the surplus of content affects the way humanity makes decisions. I divided print and web material into three categories: content (less relevant, truth value unassignable), information (more relevant, but pre-interpreted) and data (most relevant, but difficult to understand without interpretation). News reporting, in general, should fit squarely into the "information" category; it should be pre-interpreted data reported from primary sources, and in general, should be unimpeachably true.

Now, that isn't always the case, and there are ways to report things that makes it appears as though the universe, not the medium, has a bias for or against a certain position. And I've written about that too. That needs to be taken care of, but in the end, each news user is going to have to strip bias from news. What's more devious, though, is the headline.

In a content economy, attention is currency. You can never make quick money by printing just the facts, reliably, and within a reasonable timeframe, even though that might be the most sustainable position. You're generally going to want to print news biased toward an audience, report on events that interest that audience, ignore things that don't interest the audience, and try to scoop everyone else all the time, even if you have unreliable or incomplete facts.

Even if you follow that formula, though, you still need to advertise. And the only advertisement that works on a news aggregator is the headline (and the lede, on occasion). So you have to make it count. In the end, if you make a statement that's shocking, you're more likely to get hits. It has been like this from the beginning of printed news. What's different in the aggregated news / 24-hour cable news ticker world is that far more headlines are read than articles, streaming at us as they do.

Unfortunately, shocking headlines are often a little bit misleading (or more than a little bit). This wasn't so much a problem before the Information Age, but now, each headline could easily be perceived as a tiny, unimpeachable fact. Which, of course, is inaccurate, and leads to misconstructed worldviews. Which messes with systems based on preferences and beliefs.

So, save the economy just a little bit, and try not to lie in your headline, even if you fix it in the article, or retract it later.

Truth, Or, Why We Should All Be Running Around, Screaming, With Our Pants On Our Heads

OK. This is the last post about Narratives and Narrative Engineering for a while. I really do want to touch on the other aspects, and this is going to be a pretty good note to leave on. Today's topic is: The crisis of believability in the Information Age. The groundwork: In order for information to be useful to an observer, it has to be true.

Humans are naturally driven to ascertain the truth value of propositions for themselves. Small children, when they're told something is hot, will often touch the object to be sure. After a few bad experiences, the child will learn to trust that when that particular speaker (be it a parent, sibling, or so forth) says that an object is hot, it is likely so. The human brain, a pattern recognizer, shifts the burden of proof from the individual to another, trusted, individual. This trust-based shift can extend to other entities—organizations, religious entities, and sources of information such as media outlets.

When two sources deliver conflicting information or opinions, we tend to side with a) the sources we have trusted frequently in the past and b) the sources that agree with our own existing viewpoints. But how do we choose what informational sources to trust in the first place? Here we find a gap worth exploring, but alas, I don't have a full range of studies to glean from to explain it. Suffice it to say that the actual truth value of propositions doesn't mean much in our perception of their truth.

Jonah Lehrer, who might actually be the most interesting blogger on the internet, wrote a feature for Wired's December 2009 issue called "Accept Defeat: the Neuroscience of Screwing Up". It's a tremendous piece about what it takes to be a good scientist, and well worth an entire reading. The part that interests me, however, is the bit where a brain scientist wired undergrads up and makes them watch videos of falling objects. There were two videos: one where the two, differently-sized objects fell at the same velocity, as they do in nature, and one where the larger object fell faster. The undergrads, who were unversed in physics, experienced activity in the anterior cingulate cortex, something of a BS detector in the brain, when viewing the accurate video.

Physics majors, however, had the reverse experience. The mental error alert popped up while watching the inaccurate video. In both cases, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which suppresses memory, was also activated. The brain actively attempts to erase that which it perceives as impossible or incorrect.

As we are presented with information that we cannot confirm or deny ourselves, our biases work in combination with each other to accept and reject information and conclusions. Unfortunately for us, information needs to be true to be useful to the one receiving it, but this is not the case for the one delivering it. Some sources may (and very likely do) deliver up information that is intentionally misleading or untrue in order to further an ulterior purpose. Other sources adopt a stance because they believe it to be the morally correct one, or as a means to capture a segment of the content market.

For the most part, it appears we know this. We're aware that not all institutional media outlets are to be implicitly trusted. And, of course, as human beings, we're going to touch the burner to see if it's hot—and to build a worldview that will work as a shortcut to the discernment of burner temperature in the future. I see five these shortcuts frequently trusted by content consumers (and have fallen prey to some of them myself). Here they are, along with their shortcomings:

Triangulation. This method entails checking multiple reputable news sources, and believing what's reported by a large number of them. This will definitely cut some of the clutter, but not all, as can be seen from the curious story of "Jenny DryErase". Humor repository site "The Chive" ran 32 images of a young woman telling the story of the ridiculous work troubles that caused her to quit her job via whiteboard. Various newspapers (including some international outlets) ran the story as if it were true, apparently never bothering to fact-check it. I don't blame them—the images appeared to speak for themselves. The whole exercise turned out to be a hoax.

A fake, satirical Congressman, Rep. Jack Kimble, was made up by a blogger, and reported by a Washington Post blogger as if he were real. There are plenty of other examples of why we can't just triangulate our way to truth and happiness.

APCs. Similar to this is the "APCs" concept discussed by Craig Silverman on his media corrections blog, Regret the Error. The idea is that you can judge a source's validity by checking its Authority, Point of View, and Currency. The problem with this is the very same as the triangulation issue—supposedly authoritative, neutral, current outlets occasionally make major mistakes. Besides that, blogs and other features appended to major outlets (like blogs) trade on the authority of their parent brand, making it difficult to control those things for the expected level of quality. Further, since we identified above that we as people form our opinions based on other preconceived notions, the "authority" and "point-of-view" values are essentially unavailable to us.

Bias Stripping. This method is as it sounds—read the clearly biased news, then try to mentally remove the perceived bias from the story. Along with sharing in a few of the problems already discussed, there is this: While we're pretty good at removing extraneous, editorializing content while we're reading, a bigger problem arises when news sources omit information in order to maintain a narrative. For all his own biases, Jon Stewart illustrates this fairly well. (Note: long clip.)

Third Party Fact-Checkers. Politifact, FactCheck.org, and Snopes are great sites run, I believe, by people who are honestly trying to produce bias-free content. But, two things: no one is bias-free, so being harder on one person and softer on another is liable to occur, at least insofar as one contributor is concerned. Two: what sources do these sites consider trustworthy? We've just gone through the idea that you cannot ever really tell for sure.

Finding the Median Between Extremes. This is simple: you take a clearly biased source and another clearly biased, but opposing source, and split the difference. As it has been shown that bias is often a symptom of an unfounded belief, for this to work, you would have to assume that the bias of the two sources a) represented two points on a spectrum that contained all the possible representations of reality, the most accurate being located at the center, b) were nearly equidistant from that center, and c) were intentionally biased. If they were unintentionally biased, it seems unlikely that both outlets would be systemically and systematically biased in the same direction.

It seems incredibly unlikely that any major dichotomy available in the realm of public discourse contains all possible accurate representations of reality, especially the political Left-Right dichotomy in America. (DO NOT read this as an endorsement of any political viewpoint that eschews the Left vs. Right continuum.)

In short, there's nothing we can do to be sure that any relayed information is accurate. I would highly suggest reading primary sources to obtain accurate information. Primary sources (like the text of bills, speeches, laws, etc.) tend to be long and boring, though, so that means that our ability to be informed is limited by time and attention, which in many cases, is just as well served in other pursuits. My head is starting to hurt a little now, I'll be honest.

Cue the pants.