Trust Me, I'm Lying left me humbled. I thought I was on top of my media game and was able to separate the wheat from the chaff, so to speak. I was wrong.
I knew the situation was bad. I even quit following "the news" three years ago because I thought it misrepresented reality to a larger degree than it represented it (and for the sake of my own wellbeing). But Ryan Holiday's confessions from his career as a media manipulator paint a darker picture than I could ever imagine.
📝 The constraints of blogging create artificial content (shamings, planted stories, sensational speculations, etc.), which is made real and impacts the outcome of real-world events.
📝 Trading up the chain: How to turn nothing into something! Send stories to small, traffic-hungry blogs with non-existing editorial standards and have them being picked up by bigger and bigger outlets until your fabricated story is national news.
"The world is boring, but the news is exciting. It's a paradox of modern life."
📝 Top stories always polarize people. Threaten people's belonging, belief, or behavior and you will have a hit that spreads!
📝 The economics of the web has made it impossible to portray the complex situation of Detroit accurately. Photographs of abandoned houses were shared like crazy while photos of the same houses with their despairing residents included were "too sad to share," creating less incentive for media. Simple narratives beat complex realities.
📝 On User Engagement: Provoke a person enough for them to be motivated to leave a comment. In the process of registering to be eligible to comment, a user has to go through up to 10 pageviews. That's a lot of ads (and ad revenue!).
Sensational and fear-mongering headlines have always made me sad. Understanding the structure and constraints of click-based media is essential. These structures explain almost everything they do. It's the nature of the system.
"The medium is the message" — Marshall McLuhan
It points towards the fact that forms and methods (Instagram, Blogs, TV, etc.) used to communicate information have a nontrivial impact on the kind of messages being delivered.