Cartoon from the Calvin & Hobbes Treasury
As I’ve explained often on this blog, I believe our behaviour is completely conditioned by our biology and our culture, subject to the circumstances of the moment.
An unfortunate consequence of that fact is that our beliefs and behaviours can be cynically conditioned by others for their own purposes. Or stated in simpler terms — We can be played.
One of the arenas in which this conditioning plays out is in the media — not only the traditional ‘mainstream’ media and publishing houses, but now in ‘social’ media as well, and also by the millions of self-publishers of books, videos, podcasts and blogs. Everyone is a ‘publisher’ now, and they’re all vying for our limited attention.
And there is no better way of getting our attention, researchers have found, than provoking outrage and righteous indignation. The evidence is that the more outrageous a claim or assertion is in the ‘media’, the more likely it is to grab and hold our attention. This is how we are played.
Even worse, the evidence suggests that beyond responding viscerally to such provocative writing and speaking, it is much less likely that we will actually do anything useful about it. Whereas if we’re presented with useful, reasoned information, we are much more likely to act on it in some productive way.
But of course, the purveyors of outrage (and the corporate owners of the media that convey them) don’t care. They get monetary rewards for simply provoking our response (supportive or critical), nothing more. What do we get? A boost of unhealthy cortisol, adrenaline and other chemicals, and possibly a heightened sense of helpless, pointless, and useless anger, hatred, anxiety, fear, or sorrow. And our time needlessly wasted.
I no longer read either mainstream or social media, largely for that reason. And while I do have a number of blogs and other media in my RSS feed, I generally only read the headlines, and when those headlines are merely the expression of someone’s opinion (ie 95% of the time) I don’t go further than that. What you see in my Links of the Month posts are (mostly) the tiny percentage of articles that actually convey useful or interesting information that I don’t already know. Despite the firehose of writing aimed at me (and at us all), I’m actually finding less and less useful or interesting writing every month. Opinions, it’s been said, are like assholes — everyone has one, and they’re really of no interest to anyone else.
Not only are outraged opinions not ‘news’, they are not even (as the etymology of the word suggests) new. Tell us something factually new (not just something someone believes, has an opinion on, or imagines possible). That might at least be worthy of our attention.
Unfortunately, we have no agency or control over whether or how we respond. It’s an automatic, visceral, conditioned response.
I’ve been blessed to have been conditioned by the people in my life to at least be self-aware of my unhealthy, useless, instinctual reactivity to these provocations, and most of the time, after the initial involuntary reaction, that self-awareness now equips and enables me to let go of my reactivity and not respond to the clickbait at all.
But even if we’re able to become self-aware, the clickbaiters won’t care — there are 8.2B others they can exploit.
We can wish and hope that we will all eventually be (re-)conditioned not to fall for provocations and manipulations from those exploiting our very human vulnerability to outrageous and outraged opinions and righteous indignation.
But I’m not very hopeful.
