[13] [14] [15] It"s important to note, in the context of power"s relationship to information, that reading and writing quickly became trade secrets belonging to this set of professionals. Women were quickly excluded. Lower-cla.s.s citizens needn"t apply.
[16] Barry J. Kemp. Ancient Egypt: Anatomy of a Civilization. Routledge: 2006.
[17] M. Lichtheim. Ancient Egyptian Literature (p. 104). The University of California Press: 1980, vol. 3.
[18] [19] [20] [21] [22] Carr, Nicholas. The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (p. 16). W.W. Norton & Company: 2010. Kindle Edition.
There Is No Such Thing as Information Overload.
Once we begin to accept that information technology is neutral and cannot possibly rewire our brains without our consent or cooperation, something else becomes really clear: there"s no such thing as information overload.
It"s the best "first world problem" there is. "Oh, my inbox is so full," or, "I just can"t keep up with all the tweets and status updates and emails" are common utterances of the digital elite. Though we constantly complain of it-of all the news, and emails, and status updates, and tweets, and the television shows that we feel compelled to watch-the truth is that information is not requiring you to consume it. It can"t: information is no more autonomous than fried chicken, and it has no ability to force you to do anything as long as you are aware of how it affects you. There has always been more human knowledge and experience than any one human could absorb. It"s not the total amount of information, but your information habit that is pushing you to whatever extreme you find uncomfortable.
Even so, we not only blame the information for our problems, we"re arrogant about it. More disturbing than our personification of information is the presumption that the concept of information overload is a new one, specific to our time.
In 1755, French philosopher Denis Diderot noted: "As long as the centuries continue to unfold, the number of books will grow continually, and one can predict that a time will come when it will be almost as difficult to learn anything from books as from the direct study of the whole universe. It will be almost as convenient to search for some bit of truth concealed in nature as it will be to find it hidden away in an immense mult.i.tude of bound volumes."[23]
Diderot was on target with the continuous growth of books, but he also made a common mistake in predicting the future. He presumed that technology would stay complacent. In this short verse, he didn"t antic.i.p.ate that with an increasing number of books, new ways to cla.s.sify and organize them would arise.
A century after Diderot wrote, we had the Dewey Decimal system to help us search for those bits of truth "hidden away in an immense mult.i.tude of bound volumes." Two and a half centuries later, the pages are bound not to bookbindings, but to electronic formats. It has never been faster and easier than with Amazon to find and buy a book in either a print or electronic version. And Google would be delighted if every word of every book were searchable-on Google.
To say, therefore, that the Internet causes our misinformation ignores history. In the modern arms race between fact and fiction, it"s always been a close fight: we"re no better at being stupid or misinformed than our grandparents were. It"s the ultimate ironic form of generational narcissism. History is filled with entire cultures ending up misinformed and misled by ill-willed politicians and deluded ma.s.ses.
Just like Stoll and Carr, Diderot was onto something, but he was lured into the trap of blaming the information technology itself.
The field of health rarely has this problem: one never says that a lung cancer victim dies of "cigarette overload" unless a cigarette truck falls on him. Why, then, do we blame the information for our ills? Our early nutritionist, Banting, provides some prescient advice. He writes in Corpulence: "I am thoroughly convinced, that it is quality alone which requires notice, and not quant.i.ty. This has been emphatically denied by some writers in the public papers, but I can confidently a.s.sert, upon the indisputable evidence of many of my correspondents, as well as my own, that they are mistaken."[24]
Banting"s letter gives us an idea of what the real problem is. It"s not information overload, it"s information overconsumption that"s the problem. Information overload means somehow managing the intake of vast quant.i.ties of information in new and more efficient ways. Information overconsumption means we need to find new ways to be selective about our intake. It is very difficult, for example, to overconsume vegetables.
In addition, the information overload community tends to rely on technical filters-the equivalent of trying to lose weight by rearranging the shelves in your refrigerator. Tools tend to amplify existing behavior. The mistaken concept of information overload distracts us from paying attention to behavioral changes.
The Information Overload Research Group, a consortium of "researchers, pract.i.tioners and technologists," is a group set up to help "reduce information overload." Its website offers a research section with 26 research papers on the topic, primarily focused on dealing with electronic mail and technology used to manage distractions and interruptions. If they mention user behavior at all, they"re focused on a person"s relationship with a computer and the tools within it.
Now, don"t get me wrong. I appreciate a good spam filter as much as the next person, but what we need are new ways of thinking and of coping.
Just as Banting triggered a wave of concern about diet as we shifted from a land of food scarcity to abundance, we have to start taking responsibility ourselves for the information that we consume. That means taking a hard look at how our information is being supplied, how it affects us, and what we can do to reduce its negative effects and enhance its positive ones.
[23] #v=onepage&q=As%20long%20as%20the%20centuries%20continue%20to%20unfold%2C%20the%20number%20of&f=false [24] 3. Big Info.
"For 200 years the newspaper front page dominated public thinking. In the last 20 years that picture has changed. Today television news is watched more often than people read newspapers, than people listen to radio, than people read or gather any other form of communication. The reason: people are lazy. With television you just sit-watch-listen. The thinking is done for you."
-Anonymous memo, Nixon Presidential Archives Largely attributed to Roger Ailes, Nixon Campaign Staffer and now FOX News Chairman[25]
The year 1960 was the year that television became the most important thing in politics. After refusing to wear makeup and campaigning for hours beforehand, Richard Nixon appeared weary, sick, and sloppy next to the well-rested and confident John Kennedy. Seventy million people tuned into the first televised presidential debate, and after it was over, John Kennedy moved into the lead and never looked back.
Having learned his lesson, when he ran for president again in 1968, Nixon hired a 28-year-old local television producer from Cleveland to be the media advisor to his campaign. His name was Roger Ailes, and he"d take Richard Nixon from the sickly sideliner to the polished, professional candidate who made it to the White House.
We have to put this into context a bit: there weren"t two generations of people in America who grew up with televisions in the household like there are today. Television for many was as magical and mysterious as the Internet is now. It was a new frontier, and like the social media consultant"s relationship with Washington today, there was a rising cla.s.s of consultants preaching the gospel of the new medium to candidates and politicians eager to get in on the action.
After the success of Nixon"s "68 campaign, Ailes quickly rose to power inside and outside the White House. He launched Roger Ailes a.s.sociates to help right-of-center candidates get elected, and advised the president on media and political strategy. For Nixon, he did everything from directing the television broadcast of the White House Christmas Tree Lighting Ceremony to suggesting that the administration infiltrate the George Wallace campaign in order to "guard their flank."[26]
It was during the Nixon administration that Ailes had the idea for a "pro-administration news system," recognizing that Washington was close to three major airports (Dulles, National, and Baltimore) and that video footage could get to any major media market in the country. Ailes believed that the media had become dominated by negativity and said that the failure of business leaders to translate their agenda into something that ordinary Americans could understand was responsible for a cancer that was killing America. It was the blueprint for what eventually became Fox News.
Today, if you ask the Democratic party establishment in Washington whom they hate the most, you"ll likely find Roger Ailes near the top of the list. In 1996, he was tapped by the News Corp chairman to launch and manage Fox News, now the number one cable news channel in the country. According to the New York Times,[27] Ailes" network makes more money than CNN and MSNBC, plus the nightly news broadcasts of the major networks, combined.
In under a decade, Ailes quickly toppled the other news broadcasts with less money, fewer reporters, and far less infrastructure than anyone else. So how"d he do it?
Ailes knew two things that n.o.body else did: first, that cable news was different than broadcast news. Because there were more channels available on cable than broadcast, and because of the nature of the medium, you didn"t have to try to please all your viewers; you could pick and grow a niche audience. Second, like many other conservatives today, Ailes felt the media was eliminating his point of view; Ailes knew that cable could provide an alternative news source.
He couldn"t compete with CNN on news. He had to compete with them by providing a different choice altogether. Ailes built himself a media network that, in his mind, didn"t eliminate the conservative point of view, and he found that much of America wanted it. Ailes found himself in a perfect spot: building a super-profitable business that aligned itself with his values. For News Corp Chairman Rupert Murdoch, it was even better. Ailes figured out how to build a hugely profitable cable news outlet without having to pay for the infrastructure of a CNN. Giving people what they want is far more profitable than giving them the facts. In his own words: "I can"t look hip, but I don"t want to be hip. And yet, you talk about programming a channel-I could out-program these thirty-year-olds in terms of what needs to be on there, how to get to the audience, how to get to younger people. I speak at colleges. Whatever it is, I always tell them, look, I can out-program you. I"ll challenge them all the time."[28]
Now, presiding over the Fox News empire, Ailes doesn"t want to make news-that"s not what he"s good at. What he wants to do is give people what they want: entertainment and affirmation.
The Pew Center for Excellence in Journalism[29] estimates that Fox News spends 72% of its budget on program expenses (expenses tied to specific programs, like host salaries) and 27.8% of its expenses on administrative expenses (things like newsrooms). CNN, on the other hand, spends 56% of its expenses in the administrative category, and 43.9% on program expenses. CNN has a total staff of 4,000 people working in its studios and 47 bureaus. Fox News has 1,272 members of staff in just 17 bureaus.
The strategy is simple: it"s cheaper to pay one media personality a two million dollar salary than it is to pay 100 journalists and a.n.a.lysts $40,000 a year. What"s better, people like hearing their beliefs confirmed more than they like hearing the facts. For Murdoch and Ailes, it must have been like discovering the McDonald"s business model. People like french fries more and they"re cheaper to make than steamed broccoli! That"s sound business.
Ailes hasn"t just made Fox News a media empire; he"s changed the news industry. In order to stay compet.i.tive, the other cable networks and news services have had to change their strategies. In 2005, MSNBC started to see the dollar signs and began investing in programming costs over newsroom costs. In 2005, it spent 58% of its costs on programming expenses, but by 2010 that number sat at 88%. It brought in personalities like Chris Matthews, Joe Scarborough, Keith Olbermann, and Rachel Maddow. The results are astounding: MSNBC surpa.s.sed CNN"s viewership in 2010 with a staff of just 600 people in 4 bureaus.[30] Ailes" experiment didn"t just succeed for Fox News. It has been proven correct for MSNBC too.
CNN, on the other hand, took a different path. Watching the other two networks go their right- and left-of-center ways, CNN figured there must be some room left for the facts.
Over the same period of time, CNN canceled much of their hard personality-driven shows-like "Crossfire," starring Democratic party media consultants Paul Begala and James Carville versus right-leaning pundits Tucker Carlson and Robert Novak-and replaced them with less overtly opinionated anchors like John King, Anderson Cooper, and Wolf Blitzer.
While the network still leverages its vast bureaus to achieve high ratings in times of international conflict, like 2010"s Arab Spring, the result was an astounding plummet in the ratings. In prime time, CNN is now a third-place network-it"s beaten by MSNBC and Fox"s personality-driven journalism night after night. Fox News is in first place on the right, and MSNBC is second on the left. CNN sits at the bottom in the middle, providing real news that n.o.body wants to hear.[31]
Although CurrentTV has been around for years now, it too has recently jumped on the bandwagon. After MSNBC and anchor Keith Olbermann had a fairly public dispute, Current snapped up the partisan media personality, and has seen an increase in market share, and an increase in profit.
Our news networks have turned into affirmation distributors.
Gone are the days of Edward R. Murrow-of journalists seeking to deliver truth to their audiences. Instead, the advertisers and their salesforces have taken over. The sales teams want to sell you the delicious stuff that you keep coming back for more, even if it"s at the expense of the truth.
Like our food companies, our media companies-the companies that produce and deliver much of the information that we consume-have been consolidated down to a handful: Time Warner, AOL, Disney, Viacom, News Corporation, CBS Corporation, and Comcast. Together, these companies represent many of the movies we watch, newspapers we read, magazines we subscribe to, books we buy, and Internet services we use.
These companies are all publicly traded corporations-ones with responsibilities to their shareholders to do their best to maximize profits. It"s called fiduciary responsibility, and this means driving down costs, increasing revenues, and growing the company. Every board member and every officer of a large corporation must grow their company and maximize shareholder wealth or face unemployment.
Food companies want to provide you with the most profitable food possible that will keep you eating it-and the result is our supermarket aisles filled with unimaginable ways to construct and consume corn. Media companies want to provide you with the most profitable information possible that will keep you tuned in, and the result is airwaves filled with fear and affirmation. Those are the things that keep the inst.i.tutional shareholders that own these firms happy.
Choice Lessons.
These issues aren"t new. In 1790, Benjamin Franklin"s grandson, Benjamin Franklin Bache, found himself the proud inheritor of all of his grandfather"s printing equipment and books. He quickly set up the Philadelphia Aurora, stating that "This paper will always be open, for the discussion of political, or any other interesting subjects, to such as deliver their sentiments with temper and decency, and whose motives appears to be, the public good."[32] Or, like the now familiar Fox News slogan, that it would be "Fair and Balanced."
Over the course of the next decade, Bache used his paper to denounce President Adams" administration, and Adams" party: the Federalists. The Federalists pa.s.sed the Sedition Act in 1798, which made it a crime to publish "false, scandalous, and malicious writing," and quickly arrested Bache. Whether Bache"s accusations were true or not didn"t matter: public outrage ensued, and in the election of 1800, the Federalists didn"t just lose-their party was all but destroyed.
What"s different today is that new tyranny of the majority is more efficient than it used to be. It"s driven in real time by the tiny but meaningful transactions we have with our media providers every day. That"s why the world of politics is dividing into the world of MSNBC and DailyKos versus Fox and Andrew Breitbart. We now have the option to partic.i.p.ate in the news realities we want to tune into, with the tribes we elect to be part of.
The New Media.
Even more than television, Fox routinely tweaks the news on the Web to make the news more palatable to its audience. Even when it takes content from other sources like the a.s.sociated Press and puts it on its website, the organization tweaks the headlines to make them more attractive to its conservative audience. The AP"s story "Economic Worries Pose New Snags for Obama" turned into "Obama Has a Big Problem with White Women." "Obama to Talk Economy, Not Politics, in Iowa" turned into "White House Insists Obama"s Iowa Stop for Economy, Not 2012." And "Malaysia Police Slammed for Cattle-Branding Women" turned into "Malaysian Muslims Cattle-Brand Prost.i.tutes."
Fox isn"t about advancing a conservative agenda. For its parent, News Corporation, it"s about the dollars. Fox changes these headlines on the Web not because it has an agenda, but because people click on them more, meaning that more advertis.e.m.e.nts can be shown, and more money can be made. And Fox"s headline tweaking is just the beginning. With the Web, our choices aren"t even bound by the number of channels our cable boxes offer. With the Web, our choices are limitless.
Of course Foxnews.com isn"t the only web operation that does this. The Huffington Post is also into these shenanigans. On any given day, the Huffington Post"s homepage is a bizarre sight: a defense of New York Times op-ed columnist Paul Krugman coupled with the "Top Embarra.s.sing Photos of Obama"s Vacation." "A Computer Chip Mimics the Human Brain," it tells me, next to the warning: "Don"t Go Shopping with People Harder Than You." Along the sidebar, we"re treated to images of celebrity wardrobe malfunctions and "make out sessions."
These things are there, not because of Arianna Huffington"s contempt for the public, but because we click on them, and we click on them more than we click on anything else. The Huffington Post is a reflection of its readership"s interests. In just writing this bit about the site, I"ve found myself lost in its enormous sea of link-bait. There"s so much I need to know that I didn"t know I needed to know!
The Huffington Post has turned content-creation on its head, using technology to figure out what it is that people want, and finding the fastest way to give it to them. Just like the Cheesecake Factory tests its delicious cheesecakes in a test lab to make sure they"re delicious before they are set in front of you, the Huffington Post uses your behavior to understand what you want. Unlike the Cheesecake Factory though, they can do it in real-time.
They employ a technology called multivariate testing (or A/B testing) to figure out what users want in near real time. According to Paul Berry, CTO, the site randomly displays one of two headlines for the same story for five minutes. After the elapsed time, the version with the most clicks wins and everybody sees that one. The result is the same: sensational headlines. "Wisconsin Protests Have State GOP Sending State Troopers After Democrat" turned into "GOP Sends National Guard After Dem Leader."[33]
The Huffington Post"s parent company, America Online, is far from its dialup and busy signal roots. AOL makes its money by acquiring content and selling advertis.e.m.e.nts. In 2011, it ranked as the fifth largest property online in the United States behind Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and Facebook. It reaches, in any given month, over a third of the United States population: about 110 million people.
The New Journalists.
The industrialization of information is doing to journalists what the industrialization of farming did to farmers. In an effort to squeeze every bit of profit out of a piece of content, expensive journalists are being replaced by networks of less-qualified but much cheaper independent contractors. In the world of fiduciary responsibility, quality journalism means market inefficiency.
Though it still makes money from its Internet service provider business, today AOL is what"s known online as a content farm, and it shares a lot in common with its agricultural counterpart, the factory farm. AOL"s content is driven by a policy known as "The AOL Way," a doc.u.ment in the form of a Powerpoint presentation that was leaked from AOL in early 2011. The AOL Way instructs the entire content arm of AOL on how it should operate.
The intent of The AOL Way is to decrease the costs and increase the profitability of the content the company produces. According to the plan, each editor should use four factors to decide what to cover: traffic potential, revenue potential, turn-around time, and at the bottom of the list, editorial quality. All editorial content staff are expected to write 5 to 10 stories per day, each with an average cost of $84, and a gross margin (from advertising) of 50%.
In short, it"s the job of the writer to produce popular content as cheaply and quickly as possible. That explains why the front page of AOL.com features the headline "Watch: Orangutan Gets Even With Rude Lady"; asks me to guess the age of the world"s oldest female bodybuilder; and offers me "Ten Bizarre Mosquito Prevention Tips."
At the heart of The AOL Way is a technology called BlogSmith. It"s a software platform that allows editors to generate and produce content and measure their impact on the revenue and profitability of the network. AOL"s editors are instructed[34] to first use BlogSmith"s Demand module to identify topics in demand. BlogSmith looks at search query volume and breaks terms up into three categories: breaking (current trending topics), seasonal (topics historically in demand during certain time periods), and evergreen-topics that are consistently in demand across all AOL products.
Editors are then a.s.signed these categories by their managers, and instructed to quickly write content matching these topics. (If management expects 5 to 10 posts per working day, then that"s about one post per hour.) Each post is to be tagged with popular search terms so that they"re more easily discoverable by search engines. Sarah Palin"s ride through downtown D.C. on Memorial Day was tagged on AOL-owned Huffington Post as: "2012 Election, Sarah Palin 2012, Elections 2012, Sarah Palin, Sarah Palin For President, Palin 2012, Palin Bus Tour, Palin For President, Palin Motorcycle, Rolling Thunder, Sarah Palin Bus Tour, Sarah Palin Motorcycle, Politics News" to cover all the search bases.
BlogSmith then carefully tracks the return on investment. Under its performance tab, it tells the author that it cost $15 to make the piece of content, and it"s returned $82.95 in advertising. In big green letters it tells the editor they"ve made $67.95 in profit for the mothership. It"s journalism, commoditized.
So, why this setup? Here"s what one AOL writer-John Biggs-had to say on AOL blog TechCrunch.com: "There"s no money in shaking the crown of power from a lowly perch. There is money in feeding novel info to a ravenous, neophilic audience."[35]
They do it because it works! The headlines are irresistible. In doing the research for this chapter alone, I"ve watched a one-and-a-half-minute short film on Lindsay Lohan, seen John Lithgow"s dramatic interpretation of a press release from Newt Gingrich"s presidential campaign, learned that Shiloh Jolie-Pitt turned five years old, and yes, have seen a lot of pictures and videos of Sarah Palin riding a motorcycle. The age of the oldest female bodybuilder as of this writing, by the way, is 74.
These articles aren"t written by people with a journalism background. They"re written by freelancers-independent contractors-who needn"t be provided any healthcare or retirement benefits. For content farmers, they"re simply credited-about $15 for a written piece of content, $20 for a video-directly to their bank account. Copy editors are paid a remarkable $2.50 per piece of content. Traditional newspapers pay about $300 to a freelance journalist for the same amount of work.
The jobs themselves tend to be no piece of cake. According to former AOL employee Oliver Miller: "My "ideal" turn-around time to produce a column started at thirty-five minutes, then was gradually reduced to half an hour, then twenty-five minutes. Twenty-five minutes to research and write about a show I had never seen-and this twenty-five minute period included time for formatting the article in the AOL blogging system, and choosing and editing a photograph for the article. Errors were inevitably the result. But errors didn"t matter; or rather, they didn"t matter for my bosses.
I had panic attacks; we all did. My fellow writers would fall asleep, and then wake up in cold sweats. I worked the graveyard shift-11PM to 7 or 8AM or later-but even the AOL slaves who wrote during the day would report the same universal experience. Finally falling asleep after work, they would awake with a jump, certain that they had forgotten something-certain that they hadn"t produced their allotted number of articles every thirty minutes. One night, I awoke out of a dead sleep, and jumped to my computer, and instantly began typing up an article about David Letterman. I kept going for ten minutes, until I realized I had dreamed it all. There was no article to write; I was simply typing up the same meaningless phrases that we all always used: "LADY GAGA PANTLESS ON LATE NIGHT WITH DAVID LETTERMAN," or some such.
Then there was the week where I only slept for about six hours over the course of five days-a week that ended with me being so exhausted that I started having auditory hallucinations, constantly hearing a distant ringing phone that didn"t exist, or an imaginary door slamming in the background."[36]
Now granted, Miller was still working from the comfort of his house. You can"t compare the job to farming at the physical level-as we"ve noted before, farming tends to be one of the more dangerous professions in America. Mr. Miller isn"t going to lose his life in a tragic blogging accident. But it also doesn"t sound like it was a particularly nice job to have.
While factory farming dominates agriculture, content farming now dominates our information consumption online. Its industrialization goes far beyond news.
If you"ve ever searched online for how to change the oil in your car, how to iron a shirt, or how to unclog a toilet, chances are you"ve run across a website called eHow.
eHow is owned by another content farm called Demand Media-probably the largest, in terms of workforce, of all content farms. They supply the content to eHow, Lance Armstrong"s LiveStrong.com, and Tyra Banks" typeF.com. Beyond their own sites, Demand Media also provides farmed content to a variety of websites across the Internet. In terms of traffic, Demand Media"s sites receive more unique visits than Fox News"s online presence and the Washington Post combined. It"s the 18th largest property on the Internet. Nearly four million more people online visit a Demand Media website than visit Craigslist in a given month.[37]
Content farms are big businesses. As of this writing, AOL is worth $1.2 billion. Demand Media is worth $663 million. a.s.sociated Content-the content farm once billed "The People"s Media Company"-sits as part of Yahoo.com.
[25] [26] [27] [28] #ixzz1VJICt1q4 [29] [30] This a.n.a.lysis comes from the excellent Pew Research Center"s Project for Excellence in Journalism State of the News Media reports, 20042001. [31] [32] Smith, Jeffery A. franklin and Bache: Envisioning the Enlightened Republic (p. 102). Oxford University Press: 1990.
[33] [34] #-14 [35] [36] [37] and We Shall Profit.
Search traffic is the fuel for most of these operations. Content farms have solved a fairly simple math problem. Google and other search engines provide data about the top searches for any given moment. Content farms write articles that then show up in the top results for those searches, and show ads on the pages that those articles are on. Over a short period of time, those pieces of content show enough ads so that they"re profitable. It may cost $15 to make a piece of content, but if every view of the page that it"s on earns you a nickel in advertising revenue, you only need 301 views to start turning a profit.
Google is both an accomplice and a benefactor of content farms. On one hand, Google is a search company. It has a vested interest in making its search experience high quality: if you search for how to change the oil in a 1976 Chevy Nova, Google wants you to get good, clear advice as a result of your search. On the other hand, Google is an advertising company. As of 2011, Google controlled 43.5% of total online advertising spending. Lining the sides of sites like Demand Media are advertis.e.m.e.nts provided by Google"s ad network: Google"s getting a cut of the site"s advertising revenues, to the tune of millions of dollars.