#Microblog Monday 568: Reactive Reading
Not sure what #MicroblogMondays is? Read the inaugural post which explains the idea and how you can participate too.
*******
It is very difficult to not react to negative headlines. Back in the olden days, the newspaper was the newspaper. It was designed to provoke a reaction, but it wasn’t designed specifically to provoke a reaction in you. Everyone on your street who received the newspaper saw the same stories on Monday, and they didn’t see new stories until Tuesday.
But now, the stories you see are sometimes not the same stories other people see. News sites create so much content, and the algorithm can decide what to put in front of you based on what it believes you want to see (or provoke a reaction). The top of my news site is exclusively headline news, followed by opinion pieces on how AI is going to take everyone’s job, followed by articles about retirement. I never see sports, even though I know that section exists in the newspaper. I never see entertainment. Clearly, they showed those articles to me at some point, I didn’t click, and now they don’t show them to me at all.
My point: We have begun reminding each other in this house when we’re being distracted by headlines designed to distract us from real news, or believing a possibility just because the algorithm has delivered 12 opinion pieces over 12 days about the same topic. Instead of reacting, I remind myself that I am being manipulated by what amounts to advertising. It’s just advertising to get me to click or distract me from focusing on something else.
*******
Are you also doing #MicroblogMondays? Add your link below. The list will be open until Tuesday morning. Link to the post itself, not your blog URL. (Don’t know what that means? Please read the three rules on this post to understand the difference between a permalink to a post and a blog’s main URL.) Only personal blogs can be added to the list. I will remove any posts connected to businesses or sponsored posts.
2 comments
Ooops. I’ve been away so long I forgot to come and enter my post until today! lol
And yes, you’ve made an excellent point. My husband and I subscribed to an online local newspaper, where we would get the actual newspaper digitally, meaning that it would not feed only our interests. We’ve just made the decision to cancel that subscription, and I’m nervous about the algorithms and what I might miss out on.
I seek out news when I see something I need to follow up on. Somehow this manages to keep me well informed. The algorithms don’t necessarily know what I’m looking at, as everything on my feed is about travel.