Technology has exploded in my life time. I went from playing an NES (Nintendo Entertainment System) as a child to being able to know about obscure issues in foreign lands. My family in Italy can now participate in my life with three button clicks. We are growing more connected every day and that is a good thing. However, with this renaissance of communication in our era, there are some troubling issues.
The main one is the lack of diversity in our consumption. When it comes to information, we have entered into a positive feedback loop. Each click, each like, and every time we click next on a slideshow, we move further into a stagnant worldview. Even if you read ten articles from ten different websites, you are probably consuming the same information structured slightly different. The reason is simple, in order to make money with free content, you must generate analytics to show the advertisers that their website is providing their ads with sufficient viewership.
Which means, if you are on a social media website like Facebook, and it is your portal into the internet, they know what you like and are likely to click on. They have your demographic information, what posts you linger on the most (may not click but where you stopped scrolling), which ones you click, and because you can block content from your newsfeed, what you don’t enjoy reading. With that information, they are able to generate a personalized advertisement string with articles, products, and pictures that would allow you to become more dependent on them. Like a drug, you type “f-a-c [enter]” into the address the second the browser loads.
Even if your portal into the world isn’t through social media, the odds are you have certain websites you enjoy visiting. Perhaps these are institutions that exist in print and/or are trustworthy, each time you go to that website and read through an entire article, you provide them valuable data. Each time you click a link, if the website is well designed, they will know what article you read, where you stopped reading or if you read the whole article, and how much time you spent on that page. If the website isn’t very well designed, they will provide you with a [Read More] button, and the second you press that, they know you continued to read (a more cost effective solution). Same thing happens with the slide shows you keep clicking in order to read the next blurb or see the next picture. But I digressed, the important thing is that each webpage has some structure to provide analytics to the business in order to make decisions.
This decision making structure is what concerns me the most (not the data collection) and is the nugget of this philosophical diatribe. When an analytics report is placed in front of a committee, manager, or editor, they look at it and have a difficult decision to make. In order to generate income for their business, they need to sell advertisements (very few are willing to pay for a subscription in this day and age). At this point, the person sees that articles focusing on topic 1 are viewed more by their readership, while articles on topic 2 are less viewed. When it comes time to allocate resources (money, people, travel, all of the things needed to generate a story) they have to decide how to split up what they have available to them. Depending on pressure, ethics, and desires, the decision will be tough, but often it will be to allocate more to items like topic 1. Which means, we end up with a consolidated set of information on that website. Now, I know the decision is not as easy as I am portraying it but this is a philosophical diatribe and not a thesis.
Now, I know I am being all doom and gloom, but someone once told me to offer a solution to the problems I see, and I try to do just that. However, by showing you the beginnings of this issue, I assume you can come to your own constructive conclusion. As for how I solved my consolidation of information, I moved to print and subscription based content and buy books with cash without a membership card.
By having magazines, newspapers, and other formats delivered to my door, I have cut off the analytics that come from a website. Each day, week, or month, content arrives at my doorstep and the editors/managers/advertisers only know I am willing to keep paying for the information they produce. They don’t know which articles I skip, what fiction I chose to read, or what advertising structure works best to grab my eye. All they know is that I keep subscribing so they must be doing something right, and too keep me, they shouldn’t change their scope of work. So get back into physical paper, let your eyes rest from the warm glow of the LCD panel, pay for the hard work of others, and enjoy an article without having to worry that you are being spied on.