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Algorithmic Targeting is Messing with Our Zeitgeist

Broken mirror fragments showing city street at night, mountain, desert with camel, tropical forest, market street, autumn forest path, Paris cafe with Eiffel Tower, coastal lighthouse

You have to know where you stand. You,and by you I mean all of us, need to know how we fit into the big, universal, “whole-ball-a-wax” picture. We have to know, at our infinitesimal cog-in-the machine level, how we should interact with the universe.

That’s why having a Zeitgeist is important.

Now, you’ve probably heard that term. You’ve probably used it yourself. But give me a minute to explain why I believe it’s so important to have a reliable Zeitgeist.

The term Zeitgeist is usually associated with German philosopher Georg W.F. Hegel but it was used first by Johann Gottfried Herder. It became a dominant platform in German Idealist philosophy, which believed that reality wasn’t just made up of physical bits and pieces, it was shaped by our collective ideas, consciousness and the beliefs we shared. Our reality is defined by what is going through our collective brains. And that is Zeitgeist – the spirit of our times and the crucible of our reality. 

Given how important that is, we should think about how each draw our own perspective of what that Zeitgeist might be. How do we each determine what is the spirit of our time?

In our lifetimes, Zeitgeist has been predominately defined by media – and lately – what we see and hear through screens. We are spoon-fed reality by the keepers of Zeitgeist, who determine what and what won’t make it to our screens. 

There used to be some commonality to that. We all watched the same news, the same shows, the same sporting events. In my lifetime, my own Zeitgeist was hugely impacted but what I saw on television. But 30 years ago, what I watched wasn’t all that different from what you watched, or what my mother watched, or what my Uncle George watched. Our Zeitgeist has some common foundations which were determined by the gatekeepers of our media channels.

Now, however, algorithmic targeting determines what I see on my screen, and that will bear almost no resemblance to what you see, or what may be in my Uncle George’s feed. We are all seeing an algorithmically defined slice of Zeitgeist, served exclusively to us.

If you could crawl inside my Facebook feed, for example, you would be surrounded by a lot of old West Wing clips, a number of reels about biking through the Balkans, a bunch of AI generated videos showing what the stars of the sitcoms I watched in the 80’s look like now (here’s a sobering fact, a big percentage are dead), a truck load of political charged messaging that agrees completely with my own belief system and – somehow – the cast of Dirty Dancing slinking along to the opening theme of the Muppet Show. It’s a custom Zeitgeist bubble, algorithmically designed just for me.

So, what’s the harm with a little tailoring of Zeitgeist? Well, I’m pretty damned sure that none of that is an accurate picture of the current reality. And if that is the spirit of our times, heaven help us all (although I would welcome a president like Jed Bartlet in a heartbeat). 

We need a reliable Zeitgeist to set our personal compass to. We need to react to some semblance of reality. And when reality looks different for everyone, depending on the media we consume – well – we end with a world that looks a lot like the one we currently have.

No One Was Laughing this April Fool’s Day

Men in fedoras at typewriters in a vintage newsroom with fish in unusual places.

Last Wednesday was April Fool’s Day. But I hardly saw any April Fool’s pranks. When I realized that, I thought to myself, “This is a sign of the times.”

April Fool’s probably started in 1582, when much of Europe switched from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar, which moved New Year’s from April 1st to January 1st. Those that still clung to the old calendar were called April Fools.

An alternative theory comes from Spring festivals that celebrated jokes, chaos and role reversals, like the Roman Hilaria or the medieval European “Feast of Fools.”

But April Fool’s really hit its peak when Mass Media joined in the fun. It was the BBC in Britain that got the ball rolling in 1957, with their famous “Spaghetti Tree Harvest” news documentary. Thousands jammed the BBC switchboards asking how they could grow their own spaghetti trees. The April Fool’s News Story became a BBC tradition.

Other media outlets followed in the BBC’s footsteps. In 1977, that stiff-lipped stalwart of British journalism, The Guardian, published a travel supplement for “San Serriffe” – a tropical nation made up of two main islands, Upper Caisse and Lower Caisse. The leader, General Pica, had a palace in the capital city of Bodoni. Anyone with some graphic design experience would soon realize the entire 7-page special supplement was full of typography puns, but it seems the British weren’t exactly that “type” – U.K. travel agencies received several calls wanting to book trips there.

Brands thought elaborate pranks would show how hip and relevant they were and jumped on the April Fool’s bandwagon in the 1980’s and 90’s. Taco Bell “bought” the Liberty Bell in 1996 and renamed it the Taco Liberty Bell. In 1998, Burger King introduced the Left-Handed Whopper. Even Big Tech joined the party with that wacky sense of humor computer engineers are known for. In 2013 Google introduced Google Nose, a search engine of smells. It included “Wet Dog” and had a Street Sense feature.

Ironically, Google also introduced Gmail on April 1st, in 2004, blurring the line between prank and product launch. No one believed you could get a free email account with 1 GB of storage. Competitors offered 2 to 4 megabytes.

Let’s fast forward to April 1, 2026. On that day – last Wednesday – crickets. There was no ha-ha to be found. And I thought, “What a sad state the world is in when we can’t even poke fun at ourselves.”

Maybe it’s because “Fake News” is now a real thing, 365 days a year, not just on April First.

Also, if you’re going to play a prank now, it’s probably going to be on social media. And how the hell can you compete with the wall-to-wall misinformation madness that fills everyone’s feed, every single day of the year.

But then I realized that attitudes towards April Fools have followed an arc directly related to how we get our information through media.

From the 1950s to the 90s, information was scarce and mass media outlets were the gate keepers. Trust was implied in the relationship, and it was that trust that was slyly mocked at on April the First. The April Fool’s prank hearkened back to the Medieval tradition of role reversal on Feast of Fools Day, when traditional hierarchies were inverted. This meant that – for one day – even the sober British media could play the fools. It was all done in a “wink wink” kind of way.

Then, in the late 90s and early 2000s, information became abundant. Those playing a prank expected to be fact checked. It was a way to drive viral traffic to online sources of information, which is why brands started to jump aboard with their own April Fool’s Pranks.

But now, in the age of misinformation and A.I. slop, every day is April Fool’s Day. Information (and misinformation) isn’t just abundant, it’s a pollutant. It’s everywhere and it’s often intentionally toxic. The very thing we used to smile about is a force that’s shattering our society.

It’s hard to laugh at that.

Bread and Circuses: A Return to the Roman Empire?

Reality sucks. Seriously. I don’t know about you, but increasingly, I’m avoiding the news because I’m having a lot of trouble processing what’s happening in the world. So when I look to escape, I often turn to entertainment. And I don’t have to turn very far. Never has entertainment been more accessible to us. We carry entertainment in our pocket. A 24-hour smorgasbord of entertainment media is never more than a click away. That should give us pause, because there is a very blurred line between simply seeking entertainment to unwind and becoming addicted to it.

Some years ago I did an extensive series of posts on the Psychology of Entertainment. Recently, a podcast producer from Seattle ran across the series when he was producing a podcast on the same topic and reached out to me for an interview. We talked at length about the ubiquitous nature of entertainment and the role it plays in our society. In the interview, I said, “Entertainment is now the window we see ourselves through. It’s how we define ourselves.”

That got me to thinking. If we define ourselves through entertainment, what does that do to our view of the world? In my own research for this column, I ran across another post on how we can become addicted to entertainment. And we do so because reality stresses us out, “Addictive behavior, especially when not to a substance, is usually triggered by emotional stress. We get lonely, angry, frustrated, weary. We feel ‘weighed down’, helpless, and weak.”

Check. That’s me. All I want to do is escape reality. The post goes on to say, “Escapism only becomes a problem when we begin to replace reality with whatever we’re escaping to.”

I believe we’re at that point. We are cutting ties to reality and replacing them with a manufactured reality coming from the entertainment industry. In 1985 – forty years ago – author and educator Neil Postman warned us in his book Amusing Ourselves to Death that we were heading in this direction. The calendar had just ticked past the year 1984 and the world collectively sighed in relief that George Orwell’s eponymous vision from his novel hadn’t materialized. Postman warned that it wasn’t Orwell’s future we should be worried about. It was Aldous Huxley’s forecast in Brave New World that seemed to be materializing:

“As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions…  Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we desire will ruin us.”

Postman was worried then – 40 years ago – that the news was more entertainment than information. Today, we long for even the kind of journalism that Postman was already warning us about. He would be aghast to see what passes for news now. 

While things unknown to Postman (social media, fake news, even the internet) are throwing a new wrinkle in our downslide into an entertainment induced coma, it’s not exactly new.   This has happened at least once before in history, but you have to go back almost 2000 years to find an example. Near the end of the Western Roman Empire, as it was slipping into decline, the Roman poet Juvenal used a phrase that summed it up – panem et circenses – “bread and circuses”:

“Already long ago, from when we sold our vote to no man, the People have abdicated our duties; for the People who once upon a time handed out military command, high civil office, legions — everything, now restrains itself and anxiously hopes for just two things: bread and circuses.”

Juvenal was referring to the strategy of the Roman emperors to provide free wheat and circus games and other entertainment games to gain political power. In an academic article from 2000, historian Paul Erdkamp said the ploy was a “”briberous and corrupting attempt of the Roman emperors to cover up the fact that they were selfish and incompetent tyrants.”

Perhaps history is repeating itself.

One thing we touched on in the podcast was a noticeable change in the entertainment industry itself. Scarlett Johansenn noticed the 2025 Academy Awards ceremony was a much more muted affair than in years past. There was hardly any political messaging or sermons about how entertainment provided a beacon of hope and justice. In an interview with Vanity Fair  – Johanssen mused that perhaps it’s because almost all the major studies are now owned by Big-Tech Billionaires, “These are people that are funding studios. It’s all these big tech guys that are funding our industry, and funding the Oscars, and so there you go. I guess we’re being muzzled in all these different ways, because the truth is that these big tech companies are completely enmeshed in all aspects of our lives.”

If we have willingly swapped entertainment for reality, and that entertainment is being produced by corporations who profit from addicting as many eyeballs as possible, prospects for the future do not look good.

We should be taking a lesson from what happened to Imperial Rome.

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.