Category Archives: Online User Experience

Curation is Our Future. But Can You Trust It?

 You can get information from anywhere. But the meaning of that information can come from only one place: you. Everything we take in from the vast ecosystem of information that surrounds us goes through the same singular lens – one crafted by a lifetime of collected beliefs and experiences.

Finding meaning has always been an essentially human activity. Meaning motivates us – it is our operating system. And the ability to create shared meaning can create or crumble societies. We are seeing the consequences of shared meaning play out right now in real time.

The importance of influencing meaning creates an interesting confluence between technology and human behavior. For much of the past two decades, technology has been focusing on filtering and organizing information. But we are now in an era where technology will start curating our information for us. And that is a very different animal.

What does it mean to “curate” an answer, rather than simply present it to you? Curation is more than just collecting and organizing things. The act of curation is to put that information in a context that provides additional value by providing a possible meaning. This crosses the line that delineates just disseminating information from attempting to influence individuals by providing them a meaningful context for that information. 

Not surprisingly, the roots of curation lie – in part – with religion. It comes from the Latin “curare” – “to take care of”. In medieval times, curates were priests who cared for souls. And they cared for souls by providing a meaning that lay beyond the realms of our corporal lives. If you really think about religion, it is one massive juxtaposition of a pre-packaged meaning on the world as we perceive it.

In the future, as we access our world through technology platforms, we will rely on technology to mediate meaning. For example, searches on Google now include an “AI Overview” at the top of the search results The Google Page explaining what the Overview is says it shows up when “you want to quickly understand information from a range of sources, including information from across the web and Google’s Knowledge Graph.” That is Google – or rather Google’s AI – curating an answer for you.

It could be argued that this is just another step to make search more useful – something I’ve been asking for a decade and a half now. In 2010, I said that “search providers have to replace relevancy with usefulness. Relevancy is a great measure if we’re judging information, but not so great if we’re measuring usefulness.” If AI could begin to provide actionable answers with a high degree of reliability, it would be a major step forward. There are many that say such curated answers could make search obsolete. But we have to ask ourselves, is this curation something we can trust?

With Google, this will probably start as unintentional curation – giving information meaning through a process of elimination. Given how people scan search listings (something I know a fair bit about) it’s reasonable to assume that many searchers will scan no further than the AI Overview, which is at the top of the results page. In that case, you will be spoon-fed whatever meaning happens to be the product of the AI compilation without bothering to qualify it by scanning any further down the results page. This conveyed meaning may well be unintentional, a distillation of the context from whatever sources provided the information. But given that we are lazy information foragers and will only expend enough effort to get an answer that seems reasonable, we will become trained to accept anything that is presented to us “top of page” at face value.

From there it’s not that big a step to intentional curation – presenting information to support a predetermined meaning. Given that pretty much every tech company folded like a cheap suit the minute Trump assumed office, slashing DEI initiatives and aligning their ethics – or lack of – to that of the White House, is it far-fetched to assume that they could start wrapping the information they provide in a “Trump Approved” context, providing us with messaged meaning that supports specific political beliefs? One would hate to think so but based on Facebook’s recent firing of its fact checkers, I’m not sure it’s wise to trust Big Tech to be the arbitrators of meaning.

They don’t have a great track record.

Strategies for Surviving the News

When I started this post, I was going to unpack some of the psychology behind the consumption of the news. I soon realized that the topic is far beyond the confines of this post to realistically deal with. So I narrowed my focus to this – which has been very top of mind for me lately – how do you stay informed without becoming a trembling psychotic mess? How do you arm yourself for informed action rather than becoming paralyzed into inaction by the recent fire hose of sheer WTF insanity that makes up the average news feed.

Pick Your Battles

There are few things more debilitating to humans than fretting about things we can’t do anything about. Research has found a strong correlation between depression and our locus of control – the term psychologists use for the range of things we feel we can directly impact. There is actually a term for being so crushed by bad news that you lose the perspective needed to function in your own environment. It’s called Mean World Syndrome.

If effecting change is your goal, decide what is realistically within your scope of control. Then focus your information gathering on those specific things. When it comes to informing yourself to become a better change agent, going deep rather than wide might be a better strategy.

Be Deliberate about Your Information Gathering

The second strategy goes hand in hand with the first. Make sure you’re in the right frame of mind to gather information. There are two ways the brain processes information: top-down and bottom-up. Top-down processing is cognition with purpose – you have set an intent and you’re working to achieve specific goals. Bottom up is passively being exposed to random information and allowing your brain to be stimulated by it. The way you interpret the news will be greatly impacted by whether you’re processing it with a “top-down” intent or letting your brain parse it from the “bottom-up”

By being more deliberate in gathering information with a specific intent in mind, you completely change how your brain will process the news. It will instantly put it in a context related to your goal rather than let it rampage through our brains, triggering our primordial anxiety circuits.

Understand the Difference between Signal and Noise

Based on the top two strategies, you’ve probably already guessed that I’m not a big fan of relying on social media as an information source. And you’re right. A brain doom scrolling through a social media feed is not a brain primed to objectively process the news.

Here is what I did. For the broad context, I picked two international information sources I trust to be objective: The New York Times and the Economist out of the U.K. I subscribed to both because I wanted sources that weren’t totally reliant on advertising as a revenue source (a toxic disease which is killing true journalism). For Americans, I would highly recommend picking at least one source outside the US to counteract the polarized echo chamber that typifies US journalism, especially that which is completely ad supported.

Depending on your objectives, include sources that are relevant to those objectives. If local change is your goal, make sure you are informed about your community. With those bases in place, even If you get sucked down a doom scrolling rabbit hole, at least you’ll have a better context to allow you to separate signal from noise.

Put the Screen Down

I realize that the majority of people (about 54% of US Adults according to Pew Research) will simply ignore all of the above and continue to be informed through their Facebook or X feeds. I can’t really change that.

But for the few of you out there that are concerned about the direction the world seems to be spinning and want to filter and curate your information sources to effect some real change, these strategies may be helpful.

For my part, I’m going to try to be much more deliberate in how I find and consume the news.  I’m also going to be more disciplined about simply ignoring the news when I’m not actively looking for it. Taking a walk in the woods or interacting with a real person are two things I’m going to try to do more.

Getting Tired of Trying to tell the Truth

It’s not always easy writing these weekly posts. I try to deal with things of consequence, and usually I choose things that may be negative in nature. I also try to learn a little bit more about these topics by doing some research and approaching the post in a thoughtful way.  All of this means I have gone down several depressing rabbit holes in the course of writing these pieces over the years.

I have to tell you that, cumulatively, it takes a toll. Some weeks, it can only be described as downright depressing. And that’s just for myself, who only does these once a week. What if this were my full-time job? What if I were a journalist reporting on an ever more confounding world? How would I find the motivation to do my job every day?

The answer, at least according to a recent survey of 402 journalists by PR industry platform creator Muck Rake, is that I could well be considering a different job. Last year, 56% of those journalists considered quitting.

The reasons are many. I and others have repeatedly talked the dismal state of journalism in North America. The advertising-based economic model that supports true reporting is falling apart. Publishers have found that it’s more profitable to pander to prejudice and preconceived beliefs than it is to actually try to report the truth and hope to change people’s minds. When it comes to journalism, it appears that Colonel Nathan R. Jessup (from the movie A Few Good Men) may have been right. We can’t handle the truth. We prefer to spoon fed polarized punditry that aligns with our beliefs. When profitability is based on the number of eye-balls gained, you get a lot more of them at a far lower cost by peddling opinion rather than proof. This has led to round after round of mass layoffs, cutting newsroom staffing by double digit percentages.

This reality brings a crushing load of economic pressure down on journalists. According to the Muck Rake survey, most journalist are battling burnout due to working longer hours with fewer resources. But it’s not just the economic restraints that are taking their toll on journalists. A good part of the problem is the evolving nature of how news develops and propagates through our society.

There used to be such a thing as a 24-hour news cycle which was defined by a daily publication deadline, whether that was the printing of a newspaper or the broadcast of the nightly news. As tight as 24 hours was, it was downright leisurely compared to the split-second reality of today’s information environment. New stories develop, break and fade from significance in minutes now rather than days or weeks as was true in the past. And that means that a journalist that hopes to keep up always has to be on. There is no such thing as downtime or being “off the grid.” Even with new tools and platforms to help monitor and filter the tidal wave of signal vs. noise that is today’s information ecosystem, a journalist always has to be plugged in and logged on to do their job.

That is exhausting.

But perhaps the biggest reason why journalists are considering a career change is not the economic constraints nor the hours worked. It’s the nature of the job itself. No one choses to be a journalist because they want to get rich. It’s a career built on passion. Good journalists want to do something significant and make a difference. They do it because they value objectivity and truth and believe that by reporting it, they can raise the level of thought and discourse in our society. Given the apparent dumpster fire that seems to sum up the world today, can you blame them for becoming disillusioned with their chosen career?

All of this is tremendously sad. But even more than that, it is profoundly frightening. In a time when we need more reliably curated, reliably reported information about the state of affairs than ever before, those we have always trusted to provide this are running – in droves – towards the nearest exit.

Is This The Time to Say No?

I like to be agreeable. I’m not really into rocking boats or stirring things up. If there is a flow to be found, I will usually be found going with it.

But today, one day after Trump v2.0 became official, I’m wondering if I should change my tune and say “no” more often. Trump hasn’t even been president for 24 hours yet and already the world seems to be changing, and not in any way I’m comfortable with.

There has been a lot of talk about how Big Tech is embracing the wild and wacky world of misinformation in the new era of MAGA. Musk’s malevolent makeover of X has proven to be prescient rather than puerile. Mark Zuckerberg is following suit by sending Meta’s Fact Checkers packing. Jeff Bezos first blocked the Washington Post from endorsing Kamala Harris and then dialed back diversity, equity and inclusion at Amazon to be better aligned with Trumpian sensibilities.

All of these moves are driven purely by business motives. The Tech Broligarchs (the worlds most exclusive white male club) are greasing the wheels for maximum profitability over the next 4 years for their respective empires. They are tripping over each other rushing to scatter rose petals at Trump’s toes. When collectively those three are worth close to 1 trillion dollars – well – a dude has the right to protect his assets, doesn’t he?

No. I don’t think so. I’m not okay with any of this. As Big Tech primes the profitability pump by pandering to the new president, we are all going to pay a much bigger price. The erosion of social capital is going to be massive. And so, I feel the time has come to say when I don’t agree with something. And I don’t agree with this.

We all somehow believe that free markets will eventually lead us to the best moral choice. And nothing could be further from the truth. Nobel prize winning economist Milt Friedman was wrong when he said, “an entity’s greatest responsibility lies in the satisfaction of the shareholders.” This doctrine has guided the corporate world for half a century now, towing along our western governments in its wake. The enshrining of profits as more important than social responsibility has led us inevitably to where we are now, where the personal worth of a handful of tech billionaires is judged as more important than the sustainability and fairness of our own society.

Normally, we would rely on our governments to put in place legislation to protect us from the worst instincts of big business. But yesterday, with the second swearing in of Donald Trump as president, we saw that dynamic flipped on its head. For the next four years, the U.S. will have a sitting president that will be leading the way in the race to the bottom. Corporate America will be hard pressed to keep up.

So, if big business is not looking out for us, and our government is looking the other way, who should we turn to? The answer, sadly, is there is no one left but ourselves. If we don’t agree with something – if the world is going in a direction contrary to our own values – we have to say something. We also have to do something. We have to become a little more defiant.

That is the theme of the brand-new book “Defy” by organizational psychologist Dr. Sunita Sah. She says that we are typically hard-wired to comply rather than defy, “There are situations where you want to defy, but you go along with it. Maybe the costs are too great, the benefits too meager, or the situation is dangerous. We all have to do that at times, even our defiant heroes like Rosa Parks. How many times did she comply with the segregation laws? A lot, but there comes a moment when we decide now is the time to defy. It’s figuring out when that time is.”

For myself, that time has come.

2024: A Media Insider Review

(This is my annual look back at what the MediaPost Media Insiders were talking about in the last year.)

Last year at this time I took a look back at what we Media Insiders had written about over the previous 12 months. Given that 2024 was such a tumultuous year, I thought it would be interesting to do it again and see if that was mirrored in our posts.

Spoiler alert: It was.

If MediaPost had such a thing as an elder’s council, the Media Insiders would be it. We have all been writing for MediaPost for a long, long  time. As I mentioned, my last post was my 1000th for MediaPost. Cory Treffiletti has actually surpassed my total, with 1,154 posts. Dave Morgan has written 700. Kaila Colbin has 586 posts to her credit. Steven Rosenbaum has penned 371, and Maarteen Albarda has 367. Collectively, that is well over 4,000 posts.

I believe we bring a unique perspective to the world of media and marketing and — I hope — a little gravitas. We have collectively been around several blocks numerous times and have been doing this pretty much as long as there has been a digital marketing industry. We have seen a lot of things come and go.  Given all that, it’s probably worth paying at least a little bit of attention to what is on our collective minds. So here, in a Media Insider meta analysis, is 2024 in review.

I tried to group our posts in four broad thematic buckets and tally up the posts that fell in each. Let’s do them in reverse order.

Media

Technically, we’re supposed to write on media, which, I admit, is a very vaguely defined category. It could probably be applied to almost everything we wrote, in one way or the other. But if we’re going to be sticklers about it, very few of our posts were actually about media. I only counted 12, the majority of these about TV or movies. There were a couple of posts about music as well.

If you define media as a “box,” we were definitely thinking outside of it.

It Takes a Village

This next category is more in the “Big Picture” category we Media Insiders seem to gravitate toward. It goes to how we humans define community, gather in groups and find our own places in the world. In 2024 we wrote 59 posts that I placed in this category.

Almost half of these posts looked at the role of markets in in our world and how the rules of engagement for consumers in those markets are evolving. We also looked at how we seek information, communicate with each other and process the world through our own eyes.

The Business of Marketing

All of us Media Insiders either are or were marketers, so it makes sense that marketing is still top of mind for us. We wrote 80 posts about the business of marketing. The three most popular topics were — in order — buying media, the evolving role of the agency, and marketing metrics. We also wrote about advertising technology platforms, branding and revenue models. Even my old wheelhouse of search was touched on a few times last year.

Existential Threats

The most popular topic was not surprising, given that it does reflect the troubled nature of the world we live in. Fully 40% of the posts we wrote — 99 in total — were about something that threatens our future as humans.

The number-one topic, as it was last year, was artificial intelligence. There is a caveat here. Not all the posts were about AI as a threat. Some looked at the potential benefits. But the vast majority of our posts were rather doomy and gloomy in their outlook.

While AI topped the list of things we wrote about in 2024, it was followed closely by two other topics that also gave us grief: the death knell of democracy, and the scourge of social media.

The angst about the decay of democracy is not surprising, given that the U.S. has just gone through a WTF election cycle. It’s also clear that we collectively feel that social media must be reined in. Not one of our 28 posts on social media had anything positive to say.

As if those three threats weren’t enough, we also touched briefly on climate change, the wars raging in Ukraine and the Middle East, and the disappearance of personal privacy.

Looking Forward

What about 2025? Will we be any more positive in the coming year? I doubt it. But it’s interesting to note that the three biggest worries we had last year were all monsters of our own making. AI, the erosion of democracy, and the toxic nature of social media all are things which are squarely within our purview. Even if these things are not created by media and marketing, they certainly share the same ecosystem. And, as I said in my 1000th post, if we built these things, we can also fix them.

My 1000th Post – and My 20 Year Journey

Note: This week marks the 1000th post I’ve written for MediaPost. For this blog, all of those posts are here, plus a number that I’ve written for other publications and exclusively for Out of My Gord. But the sentiments here apply to all those posts. If you’re wondering, I’ve written 1233 posts in total.

According to the MediaPost search tool, this is my 1000th post for this publication. There are a few duplicates in there, but I’m not going to quibble. No matter how you count them up, that’s a lot of posts.

My first post was written on August 19th, 2004. Back then I wrote exclusively for the emerging search industry. Google was only 6 years old.  They had just gone public, with investors hoping to cash in on this new thing called paid search. Social media was even greener. There was no Facebook. Something called Myspace had launched the year before.

In the 20 years I’ve written for MediaPost, I’ve bounced from masthead to masthead. My editorial bent evolved from being Search industry specific to eventually find my sweet spot, which I found at the intersection of human behavior and technology.

It’s been a long and usually interesting journey. When I started, I was the parent of two young children who I dragged along to industry events, using the summer search conference in San Jose as an opportunity to take a family camping vacation. I am now a grandfather, and I haven’t been to a digital conference for almost 10 years (the last being the conferences I used to host and program for the good folks here at MediaPost).

When I started writing these posts, I was both a humanist and a technophile. I believed that people were inherently good, and that technology would be the tool we would use to be better. The Internet was just starting to figure out how to make money, but it was still idealistic enough that people like me believed it would be mostly a good thing. Google still had the phrase “Don’t be Evil” as part of its code of conduct.

Knowing this post was coming up, I’ve spent the past few months wondering what I’d write when the time came. I didn’t want it to be yet another look back at the past 20 years. The history I have included I’ve done so to provide some context.

No, I wanted this to be what this journey has been like for me. There is one thing about having an editorial deadline that forces you to come up with something to write about every week or two. It compels you to pay attention. It also forces you to think. The person I am now – what I believe and how I think about both people and technology – has been shaped in no small part by writing these 1000 posts over the past 20 years.

So, If I started as a humanist and technophile, what am I now, 20 years later? That is a very tough question to answer. I am much more pessimistic now. And this post has forced me to examine the causes of my pessimism.

I realized I am still a humanist. I still believe that if I’m face to face with a stranger, I’ll always place my bet on them helping me if I need it. I have faith that it will pay off more often than it won’t. If anything, we humans may be just a tiny little bit better than we were 20 years ago: a little more compassionate, a little more accepting, a little more kind.

So, if humans haven’t changed, what has? Why do I have less faith in the future than I did 20 years ago? Something has certainly changed. But what was it, I wondered?

Coincidentally, as I was thinking of this, I was also reading the late Philip Zimbardo’s book – The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil. Zimbardo was the researcher who oversaw the Stanford Prison Experiment, where ordinary young men were randomly assigned roles as guards or inmates in a makeshift prison set up in a Stanford University basement. To make a long story short – ordinary people started doing such terrible things that they had to cut the experiment short after just 6 days.

 Zimbardo reminded me that people are usually not dispositionally completely good or bad, but we can find ourselves in situations that can push us in either direction. We all have the capacity to be good or evil. Our behavior depends on the environment we function in. To use an analogy Zimbardo himself used, it may not be the apples that are bad. It could be the barrel.

So I realized, it isn’t people who have changed in the last 20 years, but the environment we live in. And a big part of that environment is the media landscape we have built in those two decades. That landscape looks nothing like it did back in 2004.  With the help of technology, we have built an information landscape that doesn’t really play to the strengths of humanity. It almost always shows us the worst side of ourselves. Journalism has been replaced by punditry. Dialogue and debate have been pushed out of the way by demagoguery and divisiveness.

So yes, I’m more pessimistic now that I was when I started this journey 20 years ago. But there is a glimmer of hope here. If people had truly changed, there is not a lot we can do about that. But if it’s the media landscape that’s changed, that’s a different story. Because we built it, we can also fix it.

It’s something I’ll be thinking about as I start a new year.

The Strange Social Media Surge for Luigi Mangione

Luigi Mangione is now famous. Just one week ago, we had never heard of him. But now, he has become so famous, I don’t even have to recount the reason for his fame.

But, to me, what’s more interesting than Mangione’s sudden fame is how we feel about him. According to the Network Contagion Research Institute there is a lot of online support for Luigi Mangione. An online funding campaign has raised over $130,000 for his legal defense fund. The hashtag #FreeLuigi, #TeamLuigi and other pro-Luigi memes have taken over every social media channel. Amazon, Etsy and E-Bay are scrambling to keep Luigi inspired merchandise out of their online stores. His X (formerly Twitter) account has ballooned from 1500 followers to almost half a million.

It’s an odd reaction for someone who is accused of gunning down a prominent American businessman in cold blood.

The outpouring of support for Luigi Mangione is so consequential, it’s threatening to lay a very heavy thumb on the scales of justice. There is so much public support for Luigi Mangione, prosecutors are worried that it could lead to jury nullification. It may be impossible to find unbiased and impartial jurors who would find Mangione guilty, even if it’s proven beyond a reasonable doubt.

Now, I certainly don’t want to comment or Mr. Mangione’s guilt, innocence or whether he’s appropriate material from which to craft a folk hero. Nor do I want to talk about the topic of American Healthcare and the corporate ethics of United Healthcare or any other medical insurance provider.  I won’t even dive into the admittedly juicy and ironic twist that our latest anti-capitalist hero of the common people is a young, white, male, good looking, wealthy and privately educated scion who probably leans right in his political beliefs.

No, I will leave all of that well enough alone. What I do want to talk about is how this had played out through social media and why it’s different than anything we’ve seen before.

We behave and post differently depending on what social platform we’re on at the time. In sociology and psychology, this is called “modality.”  How we act depends on what role we’re playing and what mode we’re in. The people we are, the things we do, the things we say and the way we behave are very different when we’re being a parent at home, an employee at work or a friend having a few drinks after work with our buddies. Each mode comes with different scripts and we usually know what is appropriate to say in each setting.

It was sociologist Erving Goffman who likened it to being on stage in his 1956 book, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. The roles we choose to play depends on the audience we’re playing too. We try to stay consistent with the expectations we think the audience has of us. Goffman said, “We are all just actors trying to control and manage our public image, we act based on how others might see us.”

Now, let’s take this to the world of social media. What we post depends on how it plays to the audience of the platform we’re on. We may have a TikTok persona, a Facebook persona and an X persona. But all of those are considered mainstream platforms, especially when compared to platforms like 4Chan, Parler or Reddit. If we’re on any of those platforms, we are probably taking on a very different role and reading from a different script.

Think of it this way. Posting something on Facebook is a little like getting up and announcing something at a townhall meeting that’s being held at your kid’s school. You assume that the audience will be somewhat heterogenous in terms of tastes and ideologies, and you consider your comments accordingly.

But posting something on 4Chan is like the conversation that might happen with your 4 closest bros (4Chan’s own demos admit their audience is 70% male) after way too many beers at a bar. Fear about stepping over the line is non-existent. Racial slurs, misogynistic comments and conspiracy theories abound in this setting.

The thing that’s different with the Mangione example is that comments we would only expect to see on the fringes of social media are showing up in the metaphorical Town Square of Facebook and Instagram (I no longer put X in this category, thank to Mr. Musk’s flirting with the Fringe). In the report from the Network Contagion Research Institute, the authors said,  “While this phenomenon was once largely confined to niche online subcultures, we are now witnessing similar dynamics emerging on mainstream platforms, amplifying the risk of further escalation,”

As is stated in this report, the fear is that by moving discussions of this sort into a mainstream channel, we legitimize it. We have moved the frame of what’s acceptable to say (my oft referenced example of Overton’s Window) into uncharted territory in a new and much more public arena. This could create an information cascade, when can encourage copycats and other criminal behavior.

This is a social phenomenon that will have implications for our future. The degrees of separation between the wild, wacky outer fringes of social media and the mainstream information sources that we use to view the world through are disappearing, one by one. With the Luigi Mangione example, we just realized how much things have changed.

Why Hate is Trending Up

There seems to be a lot of hate in the world lately. But hate is a hard thing to quantify. There are, however, a couple places that may put some hard numbers behind my hunch.

Google’s NGram viewer tracks the frequency of the appearance of a word through published books from 2022 all the way back to 1800. According to NGram, the usage of “hate” has skyrocketed, beginning in the mid 1980s. In 2022, the last year you can search for, the frequency of usage of “hate” was 3 times higher than it historically was.

NGram also allows you to search separately for usage in American English and British English. You’ll either be happy or dismayed to learn that hate knows no boundaries. The British hate almost as much as Americans. They had the same steep incline over the past 4 decades. However, Americans still have an edge on usage, with a frequency that is about 40% higher than those speaking the Queen’s English.

One difference between the two graphs were during the years of the First World War. Then, usage of “hate” in England spiked briefly. The U.S. didn’t have the same spike.

Another way to measure hate is provided by the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Alabama, who have been publishing a “hate map” since 2000. The map tracks hate and antigovernment groups. In the year 2000, the first year of the map, the SPLC tracked 599 hate groups across the U.S. By 2023, the number of hate groups had exploded by 240 percent to 1430.

So – yeah – it looks like we all hate a little more than we used to. I’ve talked before about Overton’s Window, that construct that defines what it is acceptable to talk about in public. And based on both these quantitative measures, it looks like “hate” is trending up. A lot.

I’m not immune to trends. I don’t personally track such things, but I’m pretty sure the word “hate” has slipped from my lips more often in the past few years. But here’s the thing. It’s almost never used towards a person I know well. It’s certainly never used towards a person I’m in the same room with. It’s almost always used towards a faceless construct that represents a person or a group of people that I really don’t know very well. It’s not like I sit down and have a coffee with them every week. And there we have one of the common catalysts of hate – something called “dehumanization.”

Dehumanization is a mental backflip where we take a group and strip them of their human qualities, including intelligence, compassion, kindness or social awareness. We in our own “in group” make those in the “out group” less than human so it’s easier to hate them. They are “stupid”, “ignorant”, “evil” or “animals”.

But an interesting thing happens when we’re forced to sit face to face with a representative from this group and actually engage then in conversation so we can learn more about them. Suddenly, we see they’re not as stupid, evil or animalistic as we thought. Sure, we might not agree with them on everything, but we don’t hate them. And the reason for this is due to another thing that makes us human, a molecule called oxytocin.

Oxytocin has been called the “Trust molecule” by neuroeconomist Paul Zak. It kicks off a neurochemical reaction that readies our brains to be empathetic and trusting. It is part of our evolved trust sensing mechanism, orchestrating a delicate dance by our prefrontal cortex and other regions like the amygdala.

But to get the oxytocin flowing, you really need to be face-to-face with a person. You need to be communicating with your whole body, not just your eyes or ears. The way we actually communicate has been called the 7-38-55 rule, thanks to research done in the 1960’s and 70’s by UCLA body language researcher Albert Mehrabian. He showed that 7% of communication is verbal, 38% is tone of voice and 55% is through body language.

It’s that 93% of communication that is critical in the building of trust. And it can only happen face to face. Unfortunately, our society has done a dramatic about-face away from communication that happens in a shared physical space towards communication that is mediated through electronic platforms. And that started to happen about 40 years ago.

Hmmm, I wonder if there’s a connection?

Is the Customer Always Right?

You can’t always get what you want
But if you try sometimes, well, you might find
You get what you need

The Rolling Stones – 1969

When I retired from marketing 11 years ago, I did a brief stint running a tourism business, putting together custom bike tours. I thought it would be an ideal semi-retirement gig – riding bikes and hanging out with others who loved road cycling. Like many customer facing businesses, we lived and died by ratings. Because we were an experience curator, we regularly dealt with dozens of other tourism-based businesses. We were all dealing in the same currency – those elusive five-star ratings.

In theory, I think customer ratings are a good idea. But there is a dark side – the overly entitled customer that wields the threat of a negative review over the head of a proprietor. By the end of the season, all the operators we were dealing with were burnt out and frustrated. Overt entitlement sucked all the joy out of being in the tourism biz. This trend got much worse as we were pulling out of Covid. It was as if the entitled had doubled down on their demands during the pandemic. That was when I decided to hang up my cycling shoes. Life was too short to stress about catering to a bunch of whiny, demanding guests who threatened to bring the wrath of a bad TripAdvisor review down on me.

The internet’s early promise was to democratize markets that were traditionally asymmetrical. Suddenly, everyone had a voice. And, at first, it was wonderful. But predictably, we found a way to screw it up. Compared to the dumpster fire that is social media, online ratings are not pure evil, but they do have their dark side in a culture full of entitled customers.

If you doubt that North America is narcissistically entitled, I direct you to Jean Twenge and Keith Campbell’s book, the Narcissism Epidemic. Based on years of extensive research, it shows how we have fostered an age of entitlement that lives by the maxim that everyone should be treated special. That is now the baseline of expectation. We have brought this on ourselves, by insisting that we – and especially our children – receive special treatment. But, as any statistician can tell you, we can’t all be above average. Sooner or later, something has to give.

This is especially true in tourism. We all long for that magical, once-in a lifetime vacation. In fact, we now demand it. But that is impossible to deliver on. Just check into the most popular vacation destinations in the world: Paris, Rome, Barcelona, Venice and London. All are creaking under the weight of unprecedented numbers of tourist. And the supporting infrastructure can’t support it. Those places are popular because they have a sense of romance, history and magic. Everyone wants to experience strolling through the secluded streets of Rome at twilight, stopping to toss a coin into the Trevi Fountain.

But the reality is far different. Last year, Rome was invaded by an onslaught of 35 million tourists. Crowds ten to twelve deep push towards the fountain, crushing each other and providing the ideal environment for pick pockets. It’s gotten so bad; the City of Rome is looking at instituting a ticket reservation system to see the fountain.

That is the reality. Over tourism has stripped Rome of its magic. But marketing continues to push the elusive dream of the ideal Roman Holiday, leading us to believe that we’re entitled to that. Everyone else can put up with the crowds and the hassles. But not us – we’re special. And that expectation of special treatment unleashes a vicious cycle. Disappointment is sure to follow. We’ll voice our disappointment by leaving a nasty review somewhere. And some poor tourism operator who’s just trying to keep up will see his or her business slip away as the negative reviews pile up.

I do believe this idea of customer entitlement is particularly prevalent with North Americans. We have constructed it on pagan alter of crazy consumerism, as this post from on the Zendesk Blog by Susan Lahey explains, “ U.S. culture, especially American consumer culture, focuses a lot on making people feel special. After being treated like this in enough scenarios, people come to expect it. Then, when they don’t get their way, they’re upset. They feel like they have a right to act however they want towards others until they’re appeased—which winds up isolating the consumer and shaping their view of the world as ‘me against them.’ “

Lahey provides a counter-example of sustainable consumerism –aligned to a culture that embraces egalitarianism. You’ll find it in what are supposed to be the happiest countries on earth – Finland, Denmark, Iceland and Sweden: “One thing these countries have in common is a set of social norms called the Jante Laws, which say that no one is more special than anyone else. Far from making citizens unhappy, it seems to make them more resilient when they don’t get what they want.”

Less entitlement, more resiliency – that doesn’t sound like a bad plan for the future!

Democracy Dies in the Middle

As I write this, I don’t know what the outcome of the election will be. But I do know this. There has never been an U.S. Presidential election campaign quite like this one. If you were scripting a Netflix series, you couldn’t have made up a timeline like this (and this is only a sampling):

January 26 – A jury ordered Donald Trump to pay E. Jean Carroll $83 million in additional emotional, reputation-related, and punitive damages. The original award was $5 million.

April 15 – Trial of New York vs Donald Trump begins. Trump was charged with 34 counts of felony.

May 30 – Trump is found guilty on all 34 counts in his New York trial, making him the first U.S. president to be convicted of a felony

June 27 – Biden and Trump hold their first campaign debate hosted by CNN. Biden’s performance is so bad, it’s met with calls for him to suspend his campaign

July 1 – The U.S. Supreme Court delivers a 6–3 decision in Trump v. United States, ruling that Trump had absolute immunity for acts he committed as president within his core constitutional purview.  This effectively puts further legal action against Trump on hold until after the election

July 13 – Trump is shot in the ear in an assassination attempt at a campaign rally held in Butler, Pennsylvania. One bystander and the shooter are killed and two others are injured.

July 21 – Biden announces his withdrawal from the race, necessitating the start of an “emergency transition process” for the Democratic nomination. On the same day, Kamala Harris announces her candidacy for president.

September 6 – Former vice president Dick Cheney and former Congresswoman Liz Cheney announce their endorsements for Harris. That’s the former Republican Vice President and the former chair of the House Republican Conference, endorsing a Democrat.

September 15: A shooting takes place at the Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Florida, while Donald Trump is golfing. Trump was unharmed in the incident and was evacuated by Secret Service personnel.

With all of that, it’s rather amazing that – according to a recent PEW Research Centre report – Americans don’t seem to be any more interested in the campaign than in previous election years. Numbers of people closely following election news are running about the same as in 2020 and are behind what they were in 2016.

This could be attributed in part to a certain ennui on the part of Democrats. In the spring, their level of interest was running behind Republicans. It was only when Joe Biden dropped out in July that Democrats started tuning in in greater numbers. As of September, they were following just as closely as Republicans.

I also find it interesting to see where they’re turning for their election coverage. For those 50 plus, it is overwhelmingly television. News websites and apps come in a distant second.

But for those under 50, Social Media is the preferred source, with news websites and television tied in second place. This is particularly true for those under 30, where half turn to Social media. The 30 to 49 cohort is the most media-diverse, with their sources pretty much evenly split between TV, websites and social media. 

If we look at political affiliations impacting where people turn to be informed, there was no great surprise. Democrats favour the three networks (CBS, NBC and ABC, with CNN just behind. Republicans Turn first to Fox News, then the three networks, then conservative talk radio.

The thing to note here is that Republicans tend to stick to news platforms known for having a right-wing perspective, where Democrats are more open to what could arguably be considered more objective sources.

It is interesting to note that this flips a bit with younger Republicans, who are more open to mainstream media like the three networks or papers like the New York Times. Sixty percent of Republicans aged 18 – 29 cited the three networks as a source of election information, and 45% mentioned the New York Times.

But we also have to remember that all younger people, Republican or Democrat, are more apt to rely on social media to learn about the election. And there we have a problem. Recently, George Washington University political scientist Dave Karpf was interviewed on CBC Radio about how Big Tech is influencing this election.  What was interesting about Karpf’s comments is how social media is now just as polarized as our society. X has become a cesspool of right-leaning misinformation, led by Trump supporter Elon Musk, and Facebook has tried to depoliticize their content after coming under repeated fire for influencing previous campaigns.

So, the two platforms that Karpf said were the most stabilized in past elections have effectively lost their status as common ground for messaging to the right and the left.  Karpf explains, “Part of what we’re seeing with this election cycle is a gap where nothing has really filled into those voids and left campaigns wondering what they can do. They’re trying things out on TikTok, they’re trying things out wherever they can, but we lack that stability. It is, in a sense, the first post social media election.”

This creates a troubling gap. If those under the age of 30 turn first to social media to be informed, what are they finding there? Not much, according to Karpf. And what they are finding is terribly biased, to the point of lacking any real objectivity.

In 2017, the Washington Post added this line under their masthead: “Democracy Dies in Darkness”. , in this polarized mediascape, I think it’s more accurate to say “Democracy Dies in the Middle”.  There’s a Right-Wing reality and a Left-Wing reality. The truth is somewhere in the middle. But it’s getting pretty hard to find it.