“I said it once before, but it bears repeating” – The White Stripes
“Negative feedback turns out to be the bargain feedback, the best choice for business, so it appears more often in social media.
Negative emotions such as fear and anger well up more easily and dwell in us longer than positive ones. It takes longer to build trust than to lose trust. Fight-or-flight responses occur in seconds, while it can take hours to relax.
The prime directive to be engaging reinforces itself, and no one even notices that negative emotions are being amplified more than positive ones.
Engagement is not meant to serve any particular purpose other than its own enhancement, and yet the result is an unnatural global amplification of the “easy” emotions, which happen to be the negative ones.” – Jaron Lanier
The can of worms that the topic of misinformation opens, is one that I’ve been struggling to mentally and creatively organize.
I’ll be starting with the words written in Nobel Peace Prize winner, Maria Ressa’s “How to Stand Up to a Dictator.” This sets the table for my latest dive into learning the systems at play within politics and its close developments of modern journalism in the age of big tech.
Her fair warning to America came across deaf ears when the Philippines was under similar style dictatorship from Duterte. Now the autocratic stencil, lifted straight out of the island motherland and applied onto US soil.
Misinformation is here.
En masse. Behavior modification.
Infecting us with hate, turning us against each other.
All paid for by us, as we ‘Skip Ad.’
“Anger and hate spread faster and farther than facts.
“Without facts, you can’t have truth.
Without truth, you can’t have trust.Without all three, we have no shared reality and democracy as we know it–and all meaningful human endeavors–are dead.
We must act quickly, before that happens.
That’s what I lay out in this book: an exploration into the values and principles not just of journalism and technology but of the collective action we need to take to win this battle for facts.” – Maria Ressa’s “How to Stand Up to a Dictator”
