Abstract
Notwithstanding the relative infancy of new media it has developed apace, so that advertisement-financed mass media is no longer its dominant form: that role has been taken over by interactive media. The business model of interactive or social media, as they are called, is the idea of scaling the business model of mass media down to the retail or even hawker’s tray level, thus enabling every smartphone user to participate in the worldwide market (read internet) where information is exchanged for attention. The gatekeepers who used to control the access to old media are abolished. Unexpectedly, this ‘democratization’ was widely taken as a licence for defamation and bullying. In social media, resentment, the self-help of starving self-esteem, finds unprecedented opportunities for taking revenge. Since resentment must find like-minded followers in order to thrive, media dispensing with gatekeepers provide an ideal platform for resentment looking for company. Since it is so easy on social media platforms to find fealty sharing one’s resentment, aggressive insults, denouncement and disinformation prove to be capable strategies for attracting attention. Emotionalized hype now spreads with toxic fervour as freely as climate pollutants. We face an emotional climate change, a warm-up of the mental sphere: the economy of attention has caught up with money economy in conjuring up an ecological problem.
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Notes
- 1.
PageRank (Brin and Page 1998), the algorithm that the superior performance of Google ’s search engine relies on, translates the model of citation indexing (SCI) into a general purpose system of indexing the information accessible by web addresses, helped by gigantic data centres constantly indexing the web. The crucial difference to the academic citation system lies in the ranking of hypertext pages. Incoming links are not just counted but weighed (normalized) according to the number of links on the page. This means that a link coming from a node with a high rank has more weight than a link coming from a node with low rank. By thus accounting for the unequal distribution of incoming attention and the upward bias that wealth gives rise to in its valuation, the apparently flat data ocean of the internet is made to show dynamic hierarchies according to the visibility and importance of each website (cf. Pasquinelli 2009, p. 4). Contrary to traditional mass media and neophyte social media , Google does not produce any content itself. It thus keeps the algorithm free of contamination from marketing interests. The only quasi-contents Google Search produces are the service of the search engine itself and the user data falling incidentally into its lap. The attention the service attracts and the user data gathered are marketed on the separate advertisement platform AdWords , which will be addressed later in this chapter. It is the insatiable demand of the ad industry for these secondary services on which Google’s frightening business power relies.
- 2.
The priority of the ‘kick ’ is even confirmed by empirical method. In a careful statistical analysis of Youtube user data , Huberman et al. (2009) measured the weight that attention income has as a motive to upload videos. They observed how each contributor responds to different amounts of attention received. Not only did they find a strong correlation between attention and productivity , but also went into the question of whether an increase of attention causes productivity or vice versa. By testing the direction of causality in terms of prediction accuracy, they could show that it is indeed attention that plays a determinant role in the productivity of those uploading videos. It is, in other words, not just productivity that earns attention, but the wage of fame that stimulates productivity.
- 3.
There are two concepts of social capital to be kept apart, the one introduced by Pierre Bourdieu , the other introduced by Robert D. Putnam . Bourdieu (1986) defines social capital as a sort of symbolic capital: the social relations that the owner utilizes as a means of distinction , i.e. of the enforcement of social distance . Putnam (1995) defines social capital as the stock of trust and benevolence as addressed here. When using the concept in this essay, I refer exclusively to Putnam’s definition.
- 4.
Singularity, in the context of AI, denotes the historical moment when artificial surpasses human intelligence . See Kurzweil (2005).
- 5.
Witness the chatbot Tay that was developed by Microsoft to ‘experiment with and conduct research on conversational understanding ’. It happened, however, that the robot got into contact with hate postings, and misogynistic and racist remarks. And Tay—supposed to learn to engage people through ‘casual and playful conversation’—started repeating these sentiments back to users. It did not even balk at variations on ‘Hitler was right’ or ‘9/11 was an inside job’, thus forcing Microsoft to apologize in public and to cancel the experiment. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/mar/24/tay-microsofts-ai-chatbot-gets-a-crash-course-in-racism-from-twitter (retrieved on 7.7.2017).
On concerns about the possibility of degenerating super-intelligence see Bostrom (2014).
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Franck, G. (2020). VI Social Media and the Ecology of Emotion. In: Vanity Fairs. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41532-7_7
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