How Modern-Day Media Manipulates Your Worldview
By: Quincy Bingham
Tags: The Social Dilemma, Misinformation, Social Media, Fake News, News Media

How Modern-Day Media Manipulates Your Worldview

This isn’t a subtle claim, and I want to clear in the seriousness I speak. Also, this isn’t some grand conspiracy, but much worst. It’s only an inevitable consequence of our human nature. We are too smart for our own good.

Every day, we are inundated with information on levels never seen before in our short history as a species. Just a short hundred years ago, no one knew what Karen was doing in Grand Park yesterday morning from hundreds of miles away or that a small school in a suburban town on the other side of the country is having trouble with school supplies.

We are consistently being hit with excessive amounts of non-useful information almost 24 hours a day from either the national news media or social media.

This creates a problem our species is not yet equipped to handle.

Just to cover one unique issue, faulty generalization alone is at the heart of many of our society's crippling problems. Simply stated, faulty generalization is a holistic conclusion drawn about a subject matter based on a small number of instances or observations.

The national news media has an incentive to keep you watching, keep you clicking and keep you engaged. Social media works the same way, except online algorithms are much more precise and nuanced when it comes to keeping your attention. As a digital marketer, I depend heavily on these algorithms to help sell my client’s products and services. They know who is interested and how to keep them interested. Selling products and services may be a relatively benign process, however, what about content that is supposed to be a window into the real world outside of an individual’s purview?

Just as Instagram encourages users to upload curated images of their happy, successful, and productive lives instead of their real lives, our media outlets disseminate information, video, and images that polarize and exaggerate outliers in the real world in an effort to keep your attention, but arbitrarily and intentionally cultivating faulty generalizations in the minds of a casual audience. Any half-hearted statistical, critical or logical analysis of headlined stories will often expose realities that do line up with what is being presented.

Brett Weinstein breaks down social media’s function in terms of how we perceive others in our society on Joe Rogen’s Podcast featuring Brett Weinstein at 3:30.

Our emotions, our animal minds naturally gravitate towards sensationalism, things that rouse our emotions, things that make us peel our ears back and grind our teeth.

When you combine the emotional baiting, sensationalism, hot takes, and clickbait with the volume of information we ask our brains to parse, little room is left for a thorough analysis and intellectual curiosity needed to grasp what we are being fed. Sound bites like fast food are high in caloric intake, i.e., emotional baggage, but low in nutritional value, which can be considered nuance and critical analysis.

Instead of examining issues from multiple angles, we are giving the most beautiful snapshot, like an IG pic, a perfect image, encapsulated in time to display exuberant joy, happiness and perfection…or hate, anger, pain and immense suffering while reality couldn’t be any further from the truth.

This scenario leads to information packaging newsworthy events in headlines, tweets, and posts that sacrifice careful understanding and accuracy on the altar of short, dramatic, and attention-grabbing information often aligned to a broader narrative or perspective curated for mass consumption and easy to digest. No veggies with these meals.

We don’t have the time or patience to fact check. Still, emotional reactions are free but importantly, they deliver that instant gratification in the form of a dopamine rush. We become addicts, addicted to feeling safe, understood, rational, sane, protected. We know we are in the right, and our cause is noble because they agree with us.