The internet and the attention war
The internet and the attention war
The democratization of publishing made content abundant, but attention is still scarce
Last week’s post, Meta-messages and the Internet was about how the incentives of the pre-internet media ecosystem led to the production of centrist, broad-appeal content. This style of content, in aggregate, generated a unity meta-message, which primed Americans for behavior consistent with societal stability. This week I focus on the incentives of the internet media ecosystem, the content styles they favor, and the meta-message those content styles produce. It then considers the stakes and asks some concerned questions.
Before the internet, only TV or radio stations with expensive broadcast licenses, or newspapers with printing presses and truck fleets, could speak directly to the public.1 As we know, the internet rendered this old order obsolete by giving anyone with a computer and internet access a voice.
Once anyone could publish, the amount of available content exploded. This was great but created a problem: with so much content it was difficult for the average creator to attract attention. Because there was too little attention to go around, any creator who wanted it had to fight for it. That’s how the “attention war” started, as an obvious-in-retrospect second order effect of the internet democratizing publishing.
Once the attention war began, content creators needed better ways to get noticed.2 Every piece of content they produced doubled as an experiment in how to grab attention. Across billions of these attention experiments, people learned what styles and flavors of content drew the most engagement. It turned out the best ways to get attention were provoking outrage, appealing to factional identity, instilling fear, and inciting anger and hate. These “activated” or hot emotions moved the most people to like, comment on, and share a piece of content. Heavy engagement with hot-emotion content represented attention war victories, driving more creators to produce content with similar emotional effects. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Research backs up the power of hot emotions to motivate action. NYU professor of psychology Jay Van Bavel and colleagues analyzed more than half a million tweets and found for each word with both moral and emotional resonance – like “shame,” “punish,” and “evil,” but not “fear” (emotional only) or “duty” (moral only) – the number of retweets increased by 20 percent.
And it’s not just aspiring influencers subject to these attention war incentives, as Ezra Klein explains:
The old line on local reporting was “If it bleeds, it leads.” For political reporting, the principle is “If it outrages, it leads.” And outrage is deeply connected to identity — we are outraged when members of other groups threaten our group and violate our values. As such, polarized media doesn’t emphasize commonalities, it weaponizes differences; it doesn’t focus on the best of the other side, it threatens you with the worst.
[E]veryone in political media is competing for audience attention and loyalty amid a cacophony of choices... But we don’t just want people to read our work. We want people to spread our work... But people don’t share quiet voices. They share loud voices.
The internet didn’t just shape the opportunities available to new creators, it transformed the incentives for traditional pundits, as well. With content abundant, everyone has to compete in the attention war.
Like the pre-internet media, today’s media ecosystem isn’t the result of design or intention. Rather, it emerges from millions of independent actors assessing incentives and pursuing their self-interest:
Content creators, wanting to capture people’s attention, learn what works and do more of it.
Readers and viewers, seeking entertainment, distraction, meaning, and belonging, find and consume content that speaks to them.3
Unfortunately, the content styles best at driving the engagement creators crave turned out to be material that incites anger and provokes outrage. As a result, what emerges from today’s media ecosystem is a meta-message of disunity.
As the internet media ecosystem displaced the TV- and newspaper-dominated ecosystem, there were two effects: it silenced the old unity meta-message, which primed Americans for behavior conducive to stability, and replaced it with a new meta-message of disunity, which does the opposite. The net change from the old system to the new is the sum of both.
In January, two weeks after the Capitol was attacked by violent insurrectionists, President Biden addressed the country in his inaugural address:
Few periods in our nation’s history have been more challenging or difficult than the one we’re in now.
He named job loss, the pandemic, planetary crisis, and political extremism, and continued:
To overcome these challenges – to restore the soul and to secure the future of America – requires more than words. It requires that most elusive of things in a democracy: Unity.
The President said he was fully committed to uniting the country:
I know the forces that divide us are deep and they are real. But I also know they are not new. Our history has been a struggle between the American ideal that we are all created equal and the harsh, ugly reality that racism, nativism, fear, and demonization have long torn us apart.
The battle is perennial. Victory is never assured.
Through the Civil War, the Great Depression, World War, 9/11, through struggle, sacrifice, and setbacks, our “better angels” have always prevailed. In each of these moments, enough of us came together to carry all of us forward. And we can do so now. History, faith, and reason show the way, the way of unity.
He rallied the crowd to the cause of unity and suggested some specific ways Americans can help achieve it:
We can see each other not as adversaries but as neighbors. We can treat each other with dignity and respect. We can join forces, stop the shouting, and lower the temperature.
Then, Biden leveled with the country about the stakes:
For without unity, there is no peace, only bitterness and fury. No progress, only exhausting outrage.
The question this leaves us with is whether unity is possible when our media ecosystem’s overarching story is one of disunity. In this narrative context, are we capable of lowering the temperature? Of seeing each other as neighbors rather than adversaries? Can we stop the shouting and treat each other with respect?
Can those things be achieved when our media ecosystem incentivizes their opposites?
I’d love to hear your thoughts! Feel free, always, to comment below the post or reply to this email and let me know your sense of things.
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Notes:
https://www.nyu.edu/about/news-publications/news/2017/june/messages-with-moral-emotional-words-are-more-likely-to-go-viral-.html (https://www.pnas.org/content/114/28/7313)
https://www.vox.com/2020/1/28/21077888/why-were-polarized-media-book-ezra-news
Hence the adage, “Never pick a fight with a man who buys ink by the barrel.”
The harsh mathematical reality that internet content supply >> demand means the median outcome for a creator is a tiny audience.
“Wait,” you may be asking, “isn’t a big part of the problem caused by Facebook?” I’ll come back to this in a future post, but the short answer is the effects of Facebook’s algorithms are real, but secondary. The main reason today’s media ecosystem works the way it does is the architecture of the internet and the incentives it creates, not Facebook’s product choices.