Category Archives: Information Seeking & Foraging

We SHOULD Know Better — But We Don’t

“The human mind is both brilliant and pathetic.  Humans have built hugely complex societies and technologies, but most of us don’t even know how a toilet works.”

– from “The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone” by Steven Sloman and Philip Fernback.

Most of us think we know more than we do — especially about things we really know nothing about. This phenomenon is called the Dunning-Kruger Effect. Named after psychologists Justin Kruger and David Dunning, this bias causes us to overestimate our ability to do things that we’re not very good at.

That’s the basis of the new book “The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone.” The basic premise is this: We all think we know more than we actually do. Individually, we are all “error prone, sometimes irrational and often ignorant.” But put a bunch of us together and we can do great things. We were built to operate in groups. We are, by nature, herding animals.

This basic human nature was in the back of mind when I was listening to an interview with Es Devlin on CBC Radio. Devlin is self-described as an artist and stage designer.  She was the vision behind Beyonce’s Renaissance Tour, U2’s current run at The Sphere in Las Vegas, and the 2022 Superbowl halftime show with Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, Eminem and Mary J. Blige.

When it comes to designing a visually spectacular experience,  Devlin has every right to be a little cocky. But even she admits that every good idea doesn’t come directly from her. She said the following in the interview (it’s profound, so I’m quoting it at length):

“I learned quite quickly in my practice to not block other people’s ideas — to learn that, actually,  other people’s ideas are more interesting than my own, and that I will expand by absorbing someone else’s idea.

“The real test is when someone proposes something in a collaboration that you absolutely, [in] every atom of your body. revile against. They say, ‘Why don’t we do it in bubblegum pink?’ and it was the opposite of what you had in mind. It was the absolute opposite of anything you would dream of doing.

“But instead of saying, ‘Oh, we’re not doing that,’  you say ‘OK,’ and you try to imagine it. And then normally what will happen is that you can go through the veil of the pink bubblegum suggestion, and you will come out with a new thing that you would never have thought of on your own.

“Why? Because your own little batch of poems, your own little backpack of experience. does not converge with that other person, so you are properly meeting not just another human being, but everything that led up to them being in that room with you. “

From Interview with Tom Powers on Q – CBC Radio, March 18, 2024

We live in a culture that puts the individual on a pedestal.  When it comes to individualistic societies, none are more so than the United States (according to a study by Hofstede Insights).  Protection of personal rights and freedom are the cornerstone of our society (I am Canadian, but we’re not far behind on this world ranking of individualistic societies). The same is true in the U.K. (where Devlin is from), Australia, the Netherlands and New Zealand.

There are good things that come with this, but unfortunately it also sets us up as the perfect targets for the Dunning-Kruger effect. This individualism and the cognitive bias that comes with it are reinforced by social media. We all feel we have the right to be heard — and now we have the platforms that enable it.

With each post, our unshakable belief in our own genius and infallibility is bulwarked by a chorus of likes from a sycophantic choir who are jamming their fingers down on the like button. Where we should be cynical of our own intelligence and knowledge, especially about things we know nothing about, we are instead lulled into hiding behind dangerous ignorance.

What Devlin has to say is important. We need to be mindful of our own limitations and be willing to ride on the shoulders of others so we can see, know and do more. We need to peek into the backpack of others to see what they might have gathered on their own journey.

(Feature Image – Creative Commons – https://www.flickr.com/photos/tedconference/46725246075/)

The Messaging of Climate Change

86% of the world believes that climate change is a real thing. That’s the finding of a massive new mega study with hundreds of authors (the paper’s author acknowledgement is a page and a half). 60,000 participants from 63 countries around the world took part. And, as I said, 86% of them believe in climate change.

Frankly, there’s no surprise there. You just have to look out your window to see it. Here in my corner of the world, wildfires wiped out hundreds of homes last summer and just a few weeks ago, a weird winter whiplash took temperatures from unseasonably warm to deep freeze cold literally overnight. This anomaly wiped out this region’s wine industry. The only thing surprising I find about the 86 percent stat is that 14% still don’t believe. That speaks of a determined type of ignorance.

What is interesting about this study is that it was conducted by behavioral scientists. This is an area that has always fascinated me. From the time I read Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s book, Nudge, I have always been interested in behavioral interventions. What are the most effective “nudges” in getting people to shift their behaviors to more socially acceptable directions?

According to this study, that may not be that easy. When I first dove into this study, my intention was to look at how different messages had different impacts depending on the audience: right wing vs left wing for instance. But in going through the results, what struck me the most was just how poorly all the suggested interventions performed. It didn’t matter if you were liberal or conservative or lived in Italy or Iceland. More often than not, all the messaging fell on deaf ears.

What the study did find is that how you craft your campaign about climate change depends on what you want people to do. Do you want to shift non-believers in Climate Change towards being believers? Then decrease the psychological distance. More simply put, bring the dangers of climate change to their front doorstep. If you live next to a lot of trees, talk about wildfires. If you live on the coast, talk about flooding. If you live in a rural area, talk about the impacts of drought. But it should be noted that we weren’t talking a massive shift here – with an “absolute effect size of 2.3%”. It was the winner by the sheer virtue of sucking the least.

If you want to build support for legislation that mitigates climate change, the best intervention was to encourage people to write a letter to a child that’s close to you, with the intention that they read it in the future. This forces the writer to put some psychological skin in the game.  

Who could write a future letter to someone you care about without making some kind of pledge to make sure there’s still a world they can live in? And once you do that, you feel obligated to follow through. Once again, this had a minimal impact on behaviors, with an overall effect size of 2.6%.

A year and a half ago, I talked about Climate Change messaging, debating Mediapost Editor-in-Chief Joe Mandese about whether a doom and gloom approach would move the needle on behaviors. In a commentary from the summer of 2022, Mandese wrapped up by saying, “What the ad industry really needs to do is organize a massive global campaign to change the way people think, feel and behave about the climate — moving from a not-so-alarmist “change” to an “our house is on fire” crisis.”

In a follow up, I worried that doom and gloom might backfire on us, “Cranking up the crisis intensity on our messaging might have the opposite effect. It may paralyze us.”

So, what does this study say?

The answer, again, is, “it depends.” If we’re talking about getting people to share posts on social media, then Doom and Gloom is the way to go. Of all the various messaging options, this had the biggest impact on sharing, by a notable margin.

This isn’t really surprising. A number of studies have shown that negative news is more likely to be shared on social media than positive news.

But what if we’re asking people to make a change that requires some effort beyond clicking the “share” button? What if they actually have to do something? Then, as I suspected, Doom and Gloom messaging had the opposite effect, decreasing the likelihood that people would make a behavioral change to address climate change (the study used a tree planting initiative as an example). In fact, when asking participants to actually change their behavior in an effortful way, all the tested climate interventions either had no effect or, worse, they “depress(ed) and demoralize(d) the public into inaction”.

That’s not good news. It seems that no matter what the message is, or who the messenger is, we’re likely to shoot them if they’re asking us to do anything beyond bury our head in the sand.

What’s even worse, we may be losing ground. A study from 10 years ago by Yale University had more encouraging results. They showed that effective climate change messaging, was able to shift public perceptions by up to 19 percent. While not nearly as detailed as this study, the results seem to indicate a backslide in the effectiveness of climate messaging.

One of the commentators that covered the new worldwide study perhaps summed it up best by saying, “if we’re dealing with what is probably the biggest crisis ever in the history of humanity, it would help if we actually could talk about it.”

Fooling Some of the Systems Some of the Time

If there’s a system, there’s a way to game it. Especially when those systems are tied to someone making money.

Buying a Best Seller

Take publishing, for instance. New books that say they are on the New York Times Best-Seller List sell more copies than ones that don’t make the list. A 2004 study by University of Wisconsin economics professor Alan Sorenson found the bump is about 57%. That’s; certainly motivation for a publisher to game the system.

There’s also another motivating factor. According to a Times op-ed, Michael Korda, former editor in chief of Simon and Schuster, said that an author’s contract can include a bonus of up to $100,000 for hitting No. 1 on the list.

This amplifying effect is not a one-shot deal. Make the list for just one week, in any slot under any category, and you can forever call yourself a “NY Times bestselling author,” reaping the additional sales that that honor brings with it. Given the potential rewards, you can guarantee that someone is going to be gaming the system.

And how do you do that? Typically, by doing a bulk purchase through an outlet that feeds its sales numbers to TheTimes. That’s what Donald Trump Jr. and his publisher did for   his book “Triggered,” which hit No. 1 on its release in November of 2019, according to various reports.  Just before the release, the Republican National Committee reportedly placed a $94,800 order with a bookseller, which would equate to about 4,000 books, enough to ensure that “Triggered” would end up on the Times list. (Note: The Times does flag these suspicious entries with a dagger symbol when it believes that someone may be potentially gaming the system by buying in bulk.)

But it’s not only book sales where you’ll find a system primed for rigging. Even those supposedly objective 5-star buyer ratings you find everywhere have also been gamed.

5-Star Scams

A 2021 McKinsey report said that, depending on the category, a small bump in a star rating on Amazon can translate into a 30% to 200% boost in sales. Given that potential windfall, it’s no surprise that you’ll find fake review scams proliferate on the gargantuan retail platform.

A recent Wired exposé on these fake reviews found a network that had achieved a level of sophistication that was sobering. It included active recruitment of human reviewers (called “Jennies” — if you haven’t been recruited yet, you’re a “Virgin Jenny”) willing to write a fake review for a small payment or free products. These recruitment networks include recruiting agents in locations including Pakistan, Bangladesh and India working for sellers from China.

But the fake review ecosystem also included reviews cranked out by AI-powered automated agents. As AI improves, these types of reviews will be harder to spot and weed out of the system.

Some recent studies have found that, depending on the category, over one-third of the reviews you see on Amazon are fake. Books, baby products and large appliance categories are the worst offenders.

Berating Ratings…

Back in 2014, Itamar Simonson and Emanuel Rosen wrote a book called “Absolute Value: What Really Influences Customers in the Age of (Nearly) Perfect Information.” Spoiler alert: they posited that consumer reviews and other sources of objective information were replacing traditional marketing and branding in terms of what influenced buyers.

They were right. The stats I cited above show how powerful these supposedly objective factors can be in driving sales. But unfortunately, thanks to the inevitable attempts to game these systems, the information they provide can often be far from perfect.

In Defense of SEO

Last week, my social media feeds blew up with a plethora (yes – a plethora!) of indignant posts about a new essay that had just dropped on The Verge.

It was penned by Amanda Chicago Lewis and it was entitled: “The People that Ruined the Internet”

The reason for the indignation? Those “people” included myself, and many of my past colleagues. The essay was an investigation of the industry I used to be in. One might even call me one of the original pioneers of said industry. The intro was:

“As the public begins to believe Google isn’t as useful anymore, what happens to the cottage industry of search engine optimization experts who struck content oil and smeared it all over the web? Well, they find a new way to get rich and keep the party going.”

Am I going to refute the observations of Ms. Lewis?

No, because they are not lies. They are observations. And observations happen through the lens the observer uses to observe. What struck me is the lens Lewis chose to see my former industry through, and the power of a lens in media.

Lewis is an investigative journalist. She writes exposes. If you look at the collection of her articles, you don’t have to scroll very far before you have seen the words “boondoggle”, “hustler”, “lies”, “whitewashing”, and “hush money” pop up in her titles. Her journalistic style veers heavily towards being a “hammer”, which makes all that lie in her path “nails.”

This was certainly true for the SEO article. She targeted many of the more colorful characters still in the SEO biz and painted them with the same acerbic, snarky brush. Ironically, she lampoons outsized personalities without once considering that all of this is filtered through her own personality. I have never met Lewis, but I suspect she’s no shrinking violet. In the article, she admits a grudging admiration for the hustlers and “pirates” she interviewed.

Was that edginess part of the SEO industry? Absolutely. But contrary to the picture painted by Lewis, I don’t believe that defined the industry. And I certainly don’t believe we ruined the internet. Google organic search results are better than they were 10 years ago. We all have a better understanding of how people actually search and a good part of that research was done by those in the SEO industry (myself included). The examples of bad SEO that Lewis uses are at least 2 decades out of date.

I think Lewis, and perhaps others of her generation, suffer from “rosy retrospection” – a cognitive bias that automatically assumes things were better yesterday. I have been searching for the better part of 3 decades and – as a sample of one – I don’t agree. I can also say with some empirical backing that the search experience is quantitatively better than it was when we did our first eye tracking study 20 years ago. A repeat study done 10 years ago showed time to first click had decreased and satisfaction with that click had increased. I’m fairly certain that a similar study would show that the search experience is better today than it was a decade ago. If this is a “search optimized hellhole”, it’s much less hellish than it was back in the “good old days” of search.

One of the reasons for that improvement is that millions of websites have been optimized by SEOs (a label which, by the way Amanda, has absolutely nothing to do with wanting to be mistaken for a CEO) to unlock unindexable content, fix broken code, improve usability, tighten up and categorize content and generally make the Internet a less shitty and confusing place. Not such an ignoble pursuit for “a bunch of megalomaniacal jerks (who) were degrading our collective sense of reality because they wanted to buy Lamborghinis and prove they could vanquish the almighty algorithm.”

Amanda Chigaco Lewis did interview those who sat astride the world of search providers and the world of SEO: Danny Sullivan (“angry and defensive” – according to Lewis), Barry Schwartz (“an unbelievably fast talker”), Duane Forrester (a “consummate schmoozer”) and Matt Cutts (an “SEO celebrity”). Each tried to refute her take that things are “broken” and the SEOs are to blame, but she brushed those aside, intent on caricaturing them as a cast of characters from a carnival side show.  Out of the entire scathing diatribe, one scant paragraph grudgingly acknowledges that maybe not all SEO is bad. That said, Lewis immediately spins around and says that it doesn’t matter, because the bad completely negates the good.

Obviously, I don’t agree with Lewis’s take on the SEO industry. Maybe it’s because I spent the better part of 20 years in the industry and know it at a level Lewis never could. But what irritates me the most is that she made no attempt to go beyond taking the quick and easy shots. She had picked her lens through which she viewed SEO before the very first interview and everything was colored by that lens. Was her take untrue? Not exactly. But it was unfair. And that’s why reporters like Lewis have degraded journalism to the point where it’s just clickbait, with a few more words thrown in.

Lewis gleefully stereotypes SEOs as “content goblin(s) willing to eschew rules, morals, and good taste in exchange for eyeballs and mountains of cash.” That’s simply not true. It’s no more true than saying all investigative journalists are “screeching acid-tongued harpies who are hopelessly biased and cover their topics with all the subtlety of a flame-thrower.”

P.S.  I did notice the article was optimized for search, with keywords prominently shown in the URL. Does that make the Verge and Lewis SEOs?

When the News Hits Home

My, how things have changed.

My intention was to write a follow up to last week’s post about Canada’s Bill C-18 and Meta’s banning of news on Facebook. I suppose this is a follow up of sorts. But thanks to Mother Nature – that ofttimes bully – that story was pushed right out of the queue to be replaced with something far more tragic and immediate.

To me, anyway.

I live in Kelowna. Chances are you’ve heard about my home in the last few days. If you haven’t, I can tell you that when I look out my window, all I can see is thick smoke. Which may be a good thing. Last Friday, when I could see, I spent the entire evening watching West Kelowna, across Okanagan Lake from my home, burn in the path of the oncoming McDougall Creek Wildfire. As the flames would suddenly leap towards the sky, you knew that was someone’s home being ignited.

We don’t know how many homes have been lost. The fire has been too active for authorities to have the time to count. We have firefighters and first responders pouring in from around our province to help. . Our Air Quality Index is 11 on a scale of 10, as bad as it can get. Thousands are out of their home. More thousands have their things packed by the door, ready to leave at a moment’s notice. We’re one of those.

But that’s enough about the fire. This post is about our weird relationship with the news.

When something like this happens, you have a very real, very visceral need to know what’s going on. For those of us that live here in British Columbia, the news has hit home in a way we could never imagine. A few posts ago, I said it might be healthier for me to ignore the news, because it’s always alarming and very seldom relevant to me. Well, those words are now coming back to haunt me.

This disaster has thrown our reliance on Facebook for new into stark relief. This last Friday, Canada’s Transportation Minster, Pablo Rodriguez, asked Meta to reverse its current ban on news, “We’ve seen that, throughout this emergency, Canadians have not had access to the crucial information they need. So, I ask Meta to reverse its decision, allow Canadians to have access to news on their platforms.”

But there’s another dimension to this that’s a bit more subtle yet even more frightening. It goes to the heart of how we handle crisis. I think you necessarily must “zoom in,” performing some type of terrible triage in your mind to be able to imagine the unimaginable. As the winds shift the fire away from your home, there’s relief. But other homes now lie in the path of the fire. In your head, you know that, but emotionally you can’t help but feel a lift. It’s not noble, but it’s human.

So let’s “zoom out” – a lot. We’re not the only ones this is happening to. This is a global crisis. Twenty-six thousand people are evacuated on the Spanish island of Tenerife. A friend of mine, who’s an airline pilot, was one week ago volunteering to fly people out of Maui who had lost their homes in the tragic Lahaina fire.

Take a look at Nasa’s FIRMS (Fire Information for Resource Management) website, which gives a global map of all hotspots from wildfires burning. I’ve set this link to wildfire activity in the last 7 days.

Scary as hell, right?

But can we actually process that, in a way that lets us move forward and start coping with this massive issue? Is it enough to change our behaviors in the way we must to finally start addressing climate change?

In a recent article on BBC.com, Richard Fisher talks about “Construal level theory” – which says that the greater the psychological distance there is between the news and your life, the less likely it is to make you change your behavior. For me, the psychological distance between myself and climate change is roughly 1 kilometer (just over half a mile) as the crow flies. That’s how far it is from my house to the nearest evacuation alert area.

It doesn’t get much closer than that.  But will we change? Will anything change?

I’m not so sure. We’ve been through this before. Exactly 20 years ago, the Okanagan Mountain wildfire raged through Kelowna, displacing over 30,000 people and destroying 239 homes. It was a summer much like this, at the time the driest summer on record. This year, we have smashed that record, as we have many times since that fire. Once we picked up, rebuilt our homes and got back to life, nothing really changed.

And now, here we are again. Let’s hope that this time is different.

How Canada is Killing its News Industry

In Canada, an interesting game of brinkmanship is happening. To help bring you up to speed, here are the Cole’s notes:

  • Like everywhere in the world, Canada’s news outlets are starving for revenue. Advertising is drying up, as more budget moves online.
  • In an ill-advised attempt to shore up the Canadian News industry, the federal government passed bill C-18, the Online News Act, which says that Facebook, Google and other tech giants must pay news organizations when someone comes to a web story through a link on one of their platforms.
  • Meta said – basically – WTF? We’re sending you traffic. You want us to pay for that? Fine, we’ll shut off that traffic.

Back in June, Meta posted this notice:

“In order to comply with the Online News Act, we have begun the process of ending news availability in Canada. These changes start today, and will be implemented for all people accessing Facebook and Instagram in Canada over the course of the next few weeks.”

Those changes started stripping news from our social media feeds in the last few weeks. I haven’t seen one news item on my Facebook feed in the last week.

 If you’re confused, you have a lot of company north of the 49th. Logic seems to be totally missing from this particular legislative hammer toss from Justin Trudeau and his merry band of lawmakers.

If there is any logic, it may be that for many some users, they never bother to click through to the actual story. They apparently get all the news they need from doomscrolling on Facebook.

Michael Geist, the Canadian Research Chair in Internet and E-commerce law at the University of Ottawa, calls the bill a “Lose-Lose-Lose-Lose.” 

For the media outlets that this bill is supposedly protecting, Geist says, “It is difficult to overstate the harm that Bill C-18 will create for the media sector in Canada, with enormous losses that will run into the hundreds of millions of dollars.”

Oops.

Geist details how lobbyists and supporters of the bill were sure Meta was bluffing and would come to the table to negotiate when bidden to do so. A law professor from Carleton University said “I am not worried. The threats they are making, they are doing this all around the world.”

But Meta wasn’t bluffing. And why would they?  When you hold all the cards, you don’t have to bluff. Some news publishers estimate that as much as 50% of their traffic comes from these online channels. A recent study by Maru Public Opinion showed that 26% of Canadians say they get their news from social media sites. For younger age cohorts, this percentage jumps to 35%.

News publishers have now lost that traffic, with no offsetting revenue from Bill C-18 to compensate for it. For a bill that was supposed to save the Canadian news industry, this seems to be hammering nails in the coffin at an alarming rate.

Like Geist said, this is “a cautionary tale for a government that blithely ignored the warning signs, seemed to welcome a fight with the tech companies, and had no Plan B.”

If there are lessons to be learned – or, at least, points to be pondered – in this Canadian debacle, here are two to consider:

This shows that legislators, not just in Canada but around the world, have no idea of the new power dynamics in a digital economy. They still carry the quaint notion they are the power brokers within their borders. But this shows that Meta could care less about the Canadian market. We are a drop in their global revenue bucket. Not only have they not caved in when confronted with the awesome might of the Canadian government, they haven’t even bothered coming back to the table to talk. When the Liberal lawmakers decided to take on Meta, they were taking a knife to a gun fight.

Secondly, I wonder how one third of Canadians will now be informed about what’s happening in the world. With any information sources with even a shred of journalistic integrity stripped from their Facebook and Instagram feeds, who will they be listening to? In a bid for survival, Canada’s news publishers are supposedly launching a desperate campaign to “re-educate” us on how to find the news.

Yeah. We all know how successful “re-education” campaigns are.

Finally, in the irony of ironies, as they squared off against Facebook in this ill-fated battle, Canada’s Liberal government launched a new campaign asking for us to share our thoughts on a “Summer Check-In Survey.”

Their platform of choice for this campaign? Facebook.

It’s All in How You Spin It

I generally get about 100 PR pitches a week. And I’m just a guy who writes a post on tech, people and marketing now and then. I’m not a journalist. I’m not even gainfully employed by anyone. I am just one step removed — thanks to the platform  MediaPost has provided me — from “some guy” you might meet at your local coffee shop.

But still, I get 100 PR pitches a week. Desperation for coverage is the only reason I can think of for this to be so. 99.9999% of the time, they go straight to my trash basket. And the reason they do is that they’re almost never interesting. They are — well, they’re pitches for free exposure.

Now, the average pitch, even if it isn’t interesting, should at least try to match the target’s editorial interest. It should be in the strike zone, so to speak.

Let’s do a little postmortem on one I received recently. It was titled “AI in Banking.” Fair enough. I have written a few posts on AI. Specifically, I have written a few posts on my fear of AI.

I have also written about my concerns about misuse of data. When it comes to the nexus between AI and data, I would be considered more than a little pessimistic. So, something linking AI and banking did pique my interest, but not in a good way. I opened the email.

There, in the first paragraph, I read this: “AI is changing how banks provide personalized recommendations and insights based on enriched financial data offering tailored suggestions, such as optimizing spending, suggesting suitable investment opportunities, or identifying potential financial risks.”

This, for those of you not familiar with “PR-ese,” is what we in the biz call “spin.” Kellyanne Conway once called it — more euphemistically — an alternative fact.

Let me give you an example. Let’s say that during the Tour de France half the Peloton crashes and bicyclists get a nasty case of road rash. A PR person would spin that to say that “Hundreds of professional cyclists discover a new miracle instant exfoliation technique from the South of France.”

See? It’s not a lie, it’s just an alternative fact.

Let’s go on. The second paragraph of the pitch continued: “Bud, a company that specializes in data intelligence is working with major partners across the country (Goldman Sachs, HSBC, 1835i, etc.) to categorize and organize financial information and data so that users are empowered to make informed decisions and gain a deeper understanding of their financial situation.”

Ah — we’re now getting closer to the actual fact. The focus is beginning to switch from the user, empowered to make better financial decisions thanks to AI, to what is actually happening: a data marketplace being built on the backs of users for sale to corporate America.

Let’s now follow the link to Bud’s website. There, in big letters on the home page, you read:

“Turn transactional data into real-time underwriting intelligence

Bud’s AI platform and data visualizations help lenders evaluate risk, reduce losses and unlock hidden revenue potential.”

Bingo. This is not about users, at least, not beyond using them as grist in a data mill. This is about slipping a Trojan Horse into your smartphone in the form of an app and hoovering your personal data up to give big banks an intimate glimpse into not just your finances, but also your thinking about those finances. As you bare your monetary soul to this helpful “Bud,” you have established a direct pipeline to the very institutions that hold your future in their greedy little fingers. You’re giving an algorithm everything it needs to automatically deny you credit.

This was just one pitch that happened to catch my eye long enough to dig a little deeper. But it serves as a perfect illustration of why I don’t trust big data or AI in the hands of for-profit corporations.

And that will continue to be true — no matter how you PR pros spin it.

No News is Good News

I’m trying not to pay too much attention to the news. This is partly because I’m exhausted by the news, and partly because of the sad state of journalism today.

This isn’t just a “me” thing. Almost everyone I talk to says they’re trying to find coping mechanisms to deal with the news. The News industry – and its audience – has gone from being an essential part of a working democracy to something that is actually bad for you.  In an online essay from 4 years, Swiss author Rolf Dobelli equates news consumption to a bad diet:

“(translated from its original German) News is to the mind what sugar is to the body. News is appetizing, easily digestible and at the same time highly harmful. The media feeds us morsels of trivial stories, tidbits that by no means satisfy our hunger for knowledge. Unlike with books and long, well-researched, long articles, there is no saturation when consuming news. We can devour unlimited amounts of messages; they remain cheap sugar candies. As with sugar, the side effects only show up with a delay.”

Rolf Dobelli, 2019

This alarming state is due to the fact that the News (in the US) is supported by advertising, which means it has a ravenous appetite for eyeballs. Because of this, it is highly profitable to make news addictive.

This creates a state, as Dobelli points out, where even though the news is highly inflammatory, like a constantly jangling alarm bell, almost all the news we consume is irrelevant to our daily lives. While the news we watch pushes all our hot buttons, it doesn’t serve a useful purpose. In fact, it does the exact opposite: it leads to chronic mental and physical ill-being and may cause us to start ignoring the warning signs we should be paying attention to.

A study last year (McLaughlin, Gotlieb and Mills) found ties between problematic news consumption and mental ill-being. The study found that 16.5% of 1,100 people polled in an online survey showed signs of “severely problematic” news consumption, which led them to focus less on school, work and family, and contributed to an inability to sleep.

Dobelli’s essay goes even further, pointing a finger at excessive news consumption as the cause of a list of issues including cognitive errors, inhibiting deeper thinking, wasting time, killing creativity, making us more passive and even wiring our brains for addiction in a manner similar to drugs.

All these negative side effects come from chronic stress – a constant and pervasive alarmed state that excessive news consumption puts our brains into. And if you thought Dobelli’s list was scary, wait until you see the impact of chronic stress! It actually attacks the brain by releasing excessive amounts of cortisol and restricting the uptake of serotonin, which can increase inflammation, lead to depression, shrink your hippocampus and impact your memory, make it difficult to sleep and impair your ability to think rationally.

To put a new twist on an old saying, “No news is good news.”

But let’s put aside for a moment the physical and mental toll that news takes on us. Even if none of that were true, our constant diet of bad news can also lead to something known as “alarm fatigue.”

Alarm fatigue is essentially our response to the proverbial boy who calls wolf. After several false alarms, we stop paying attention. And on that one time when we should be paying attention, we are caught with our guard down.

There is one other problem with our news diet: it oversimplifies complex problems into simple sound bites. Thomas Jefferson said, “An educated citizenry is a vital requisite for our survival as a free people.” But when the news abdicates its role as an informer to pursue profit as entertainment, it is no longer educating us. It is pandering to us by stuffing bite sized opinion pieces that reinforce our beliefs – right or wrong. We are never challenged to examine our beliefs or explore the complexity of the wicked problems that confront us. Real journalism has been replaced by profitable punditry.

All this leaves us with a choice. Until the News industry cleans up its act (I’m not holding my breath), you’re likely far better off to ignore it. Or at least, ignore the profit driven platforms that are hungry for eyeballs. Stay informed by turning to books, long articles and true investigative journalism. That’s what I’m going to start doing.

Failing all that, just think about things. I understand it’s good for you.

Why I’m Worried About AI

Even in my world, which is nowhere near the epicenter of the technology universe, everyone is talking about AI And depending on who’s talking – it’s either going to be the biggest boon to humanity, or it’s going to wipe us out completely. Middle ground seems to be hard to find.

I recently attended a debate at the local university about it. Two were arguing for AI, and two were arguing against. I went into the debate somewhat worried. When I walked out at the end of the evening, my worry was bubbling just under the panic level.

The “For” Team had a computer science professor – Kevin Leyton-Brown, and a philosophy professor – Madeleine Ransom. Their arguments seemed to rely mainly on creating more leisure time for us by freeing us from the icky jobs we’d rather not do. Leyton-Brown did make a passing reference to AI helping us to solve the many, many wicked problems we face, but he never got into specifics.

“Relax!” seemed to be the message. “This will be great! Trust us!”

The “Against” Team was comprised of a professor in Creative and Critical Studies – Bryce Traister. As far as I could see, he seemed to be mainly worried about AI replacing Shakespeare. He did seem quite enamored with the cleverness of his own quips.

It was the other “Against” debater who was the only one to actually talk about something concrete I could wrap my head around. Wendy Wong is a professor of Political Science. She has a book on data and human rights coming out this fall. Many of her concerns focused on this area.

Interestingly, the AI debaters all mentioned Social Media in their arguments. And on this point, they were united. All the debaters agreed that the impact of Social Media has been horrible. But the boosters were quick to say that AI is nothing like Social Media.

Except that it is. Maybe not in terms of the technology that lies beneath it, but in terms of the unintended consequences it could unleash, absolutely! Like Social Media, what will get us with AI are the things we don’t know we don’t know.

I remember when social media first appeared on the scene. Like AI, there were plenty of evangelists lining up saying that technology would connect us in ways we couldn’t have imagined. We were redefining community, removing the physical constraints that had previously limited connections.

If there was a difference between social media and AI, it was that I don’t remember the same doomsayers at the advent of social media. Everyone seemed to be saying “This will be great! Trust us!”

Today, of course, we know better. No one was warning us that social media would divide us in ways we never imagined, driving a wedge down the ideological middle of our society. There were no hints that social media could (and still might) short circuit democracy.

Maybe that’s why we’re a little warier when it comes to AI. We’ve already been fooled once.

I find that AI Boosters share a similar mindset – they tend to be from the S.T.E.M. (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) School of Thought. As I’ve said before, these types of thinkers tend to mistake complex problems for complicated ones. They think everything is solvable, if you just have a powerful enough tool and apply enough brain power. For them, AI is the Holy Grail – a powerful tool that potentially applies unlimited brain power.

But the dangers of AI are hidden in the roots of complexity, not complication, and that requires a different way of thinking. If we’re going to get some glimpse of what’s coming our way, I am more inclined to trust the instincts of those that think in terms of the humanities. A thinker, for example, such as Yuval Noah Harari, author of Sapiens.

Harari recently wrote an essay in the Economist that may be the single most insightful thing I’ve read about the dangers of AI: “AI has gained some remarkable abilities to manipulate and generate language, whether with words, sounds or images. AI has thereby hacked the operating system of our civilisation.”

In my previous experiments with ChatGPT, it was this fear that was haunting me. Human brains operate on narratives. We are hard-wired to believe them. By using language, AI has a back door into our brains that bypass all our protective firewalls.

My other great fear is that the development of AI is being driven by for-profit corporations, many of which rely on advertising as their main source of revenue. If ever there was a case of putting the fox in charge of the henhouse, this is it!

When it comes to AI it’s not my job I’m afraid of losing. It’s my ability to sniff out AI generated bullshit. That’s what’s keeping me up a night.

Search and ChatGPT – You Still Can’t Get There From Here

I’m wrapping up my ChatGPTrilogy with a shout out to an old friend that will be familiar to many Mediaposters – Aaron Goldman. 13 years ago Aaron wrote a book called Everything I Know About Marketing I Learned from Google.  Just a few weeks ago, Aaron shared a post entitled “In a World of AI, is Everything I Know about Marketing (still) Learned from Google”. In it, he looked at the last chapter of the book, which he called Future-Proofing. Part of that chapter was based on a conversation Aaron and I had back in 2010 about what search might look like in the future.

Did we get it right? Well, remarkably, we got a lot more right than we got wrong, especially with the advent of Natural Language tools such as ChatGPT and virtual assistants like Siri.

We talked a lot about something I called “app-sistants”. I explained, “the idea of search as a destination is an idea whose days are numbered. The important thing won’t be search. It will be the platform and the apps that run on it. The next big thing will be the ability to seamlessly find just the right app for your intent and utilize it immediately.” In this context, “the information itself will become less and less important and the app that allows utilization of the information will become more and more important.”

To be honest, this evolution in search has taken a lot longer than I thought back then, “Intent will be more fully supported from end to end. Right now, we have to keep our master ‘intent’ plan in place as we handle the individual tasks on the way to that intent.”

Searching for complex answers as it currently sits requires a lot of heavy lifting. In that discussion, I used the example of planning a trip.  “Imagine if there were an app that could keep my master intent in mind for the entire process. It would know what my end goal was, would be tailored to understand my personal preferences and would use search to go out and gather the required information. When we look at alignment of intent, [a shift from search to apps is] a really intriguing concept for marketers to consider.”

So, the big question is, do we have such a tool? Is it ChatGPT? I decided to give it a try and see. After feeding ChatGPT a couple of carefully crafted prompts about a trip I’d like to take to Eastern Europe someday, I decided the answer is no. We’re not quite there yet. But we’re closer.

After a couple of iterations, ChatGPT did a credible job of assembling a potential itinerary of a trip to Croatia and Slovenia. It even made me aware of some options I hadn’t run across in my previous research. But it left me hanging well short of the “app-ssistant” I was dreaming of in 2010. Essentially, I got a suggestion but all the detail work to put it into an actual trip still required me to do hundreds of searches in various places.

The problem with ChatGPT is that it gets stuck between the millions of functionality siloes – or “walled gardens” – that make up the Internet. Those “walled gardens” exist because they represent opportunities for monetization. In order for an app-ssistant to be able to multitask and make our lives easier, we need a virtual “commonage” that gets rid of some of these walls. And that’s probably the biggest reason we haven’t seen a truly useful iteration of the functionality I predicted more than a decade ago.

This conflict between capitalism and the concept of a commonage goes back at least to the Magna Carta. As England’s economy transitioned from feudalism to capitalism, enclosure saw the building of fences and the wiping out of lands held as a commonage. The actual landscape became a collection of walled gardens that the enforced property rights of each parcel and the future production value of those parcels.

This history, which played out over hundreds of years, was repeated and compressed into a few decades online. We went from the naïve idealism of a “free for all” internet in the early days to the balkanized patchwork of monetization siloes that currently make up the Web.

Right now, search engines are the closest thing we have to a commonage on the virtual landscape. Search engines like Google can pull data from within many gardens, but if we actually try to use the data, we won’t get far before we run into a wall.

To go back to the idea of trip planning, I might be able to see what it costs to fly to Rome or what the cost of accommodations in Venice is on a search engine, but I can’t book a flight or reserve a room. To do that, I have to visit an online booking site. If I’m on a search engine, I can manually navigate this transition fairly easily. But it would stop something like ChatGPT in its tracks.

When I talked to Aaron 13 years ago, I envisioned search becoming a platform that lived underneath apps which could provide more functionality to the user. But I also was skeptical about Google’s willingness to do this, as I stated in a later post here on Mediapost.  In that post, I thought that this might be an easier transition for Microsoft.

Whether it was prescience or just dumb luck, it is indeed Microsoft taking the first steps towards integrating search with ChatGPT, through its recent integration with Bing. Expedia (who also has Microsoft DNA in its genome) has also taken a shot at integrating ChatGPT in a natural language chat interface.

This flips my original forecast on its head. Rather than the data becoming common ground, it’s the chat interface that’s popping up everywhere. Rather than tearing down the walls that divide the online landscape, ChatGPT is being tacked up as window decoration on those walls.

I did try planning that same trip on both Bing and Expedia. Bing – alas – also left me well short of my imagined destination. Expedia – being a monetization site to begin with – got me a little closer, but it still didn’t seem that I could get to where I wanted to go.

I’m sorry to say search didn’t come nearly as far as I hoped it would 13 years ago. Even with ChatGPT thumbtacked onto the interface, we’re just not there yet.

(Feature Image: OpenAI Art generated from the prompt: “A Van Gogh painting of a chatbot on a visit to Croatia”)