The Information Diet Read online

  Fox isn’t about advancing a conservative agenda. For its parent, News Corporation, it’s about the dollars. Fox changes these headlines on the Web not because it has an agenda, but because people click on them more, meaning that more advertisements can be shown, and more money can be made. And Fox’s headline tweaking is just the beginning. With the Web, our choices aren’t even bound by the number of channels our cable boxes offer. With the Web, our choices are limitless.

  Of course Foxnews.com isn’t the only web operation that does this. The Huffington Post is also into these shenanigans. On any given day, the Huffington Post’s homepage is a bizarre sight: a defense of New York Times op-ed columnist Paul Krugman coupled with the “Top Embarrassing Photos of Obama’s Vacation.” “A Computer Chip Mimics the Human Brain,” it tells me, next to the warning: “Don’t Go Shopping with People Harder Than You.” Along the sidebar, we’re treated to images of celebrity wardrobe malfunctions and “make out sessions.”

  These things are there, not because of Arianna Huffington’s contempt for the public, but because we click on them, and we click on them more than we click on anything else. The Huffington Post is a reflection of its readership’s interests. In just writing this bit about the site, I’ve found myself lost in its enormous sea of link-bait. There’s so much I need to know that I didn’t know I needed to know!

  The Huffington Post has turned content-creation on its head, using technology to figure out what it is that people want, and finding the fastest way to give it to them. Just like the Cheesecake Factory tests its delicious cheesecakes in a test lab to make sure they’re delicious before they are set in front of you, the Huffington Post uses your behavior to understand what you want. Unlike the Cheesecake Factory though, they can do it in real-time.

  They employ a technology called multivariate testing (or A/B testing) to figure out what users want in near real time. According to Paul Berry, CTO, the site randomly displays one of two headlines for the same story for five minutes. After the elapsed time, the version with the most clicks wins and everybody sees that one. The result is the same: sensational headlines. “Wisconsin Protests Have State GOP Sending State Troopers After Democrat” turned into “GOP Sends National Guard After Dem Leader.”[33]

  The Huffington Post’s parent company, America Online, is far from its dialup and busy signal roots. AOL makes its money by acquiring content and selling advertisements. In 2011, it ranked as the fifth largest property online in the United States behind Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and Facebook. It reaches, in any given month, over a third of the United States population: about 110 million people.

  The New Journalists

  The industrialization of information is doing to journalists what the industrialization of farming did to farmers. In an effort to squeeze every bit of profit out of a piece of content, expensive journalists are being replaced by networks of less-qualified but much cheaper independent contractors. In the world of fiduciary responsibility, quality journalism means market inefficiency.

  Though it still makes money from its Internet service provider business, today AOL is what’s known online as a content farm, and it shares a lot in common with its agricultural counterpart, the factory farm. AOL’s content is driven by a policy known as “The AOL Way,” a document in the form of a Powerpoint presentation that was leaked from AOL in early 2011. The AOL Way instructs the entire content arm of AOL on how it should operate.

  The intent of The AOL Way is to decrease the costs and increase the profitability of the content the company produces. According to the plan, each editor should use four factors to decide what to cover: traffic potential, revenue potential, turn-around time, and at the bottom of the list, editorial quality. All editorial content staff are expected to write 5 to 10 stories per day, each with an average cost of $84, and a gross margin (from advertising) of 50%.

  In short, it’s the job of the writer to produce popular content as cheaply and quickly as possible. That explains why the front page of AOL.com features the headline “Watch: Orangutan Gets Even With Rude Lady”; asks me to guess the age of the world’s oldest female bodybuilder; and offers me “Ten Bizarre Mosquito Prevention Tips.”

  At the heart of The AOL Way is a technology called BlogSmith. It’s a software platform that allows editors to generate and produce content and measure their impact on the revenue and profitability of the network. AOL’s editors are instructed[34] to first use BlogSmith’s Demand module to identify topics in demand. BlogSmith looks at search query volume and breaks terms up into three categories: breaking (current trending topics), seasonal (topics historically in demand during certain time periods), and evergreen—topics that are consistently in demand across all AOL products.

  Editors are then assigned these categories by their managers, and instructed to quickly write content matching these topics. (If management expects 5 to 10 posts per working day, then that’s about one post per hour.) Each post is to be tagged with popular search terms so that they’re more easily discoverable by search engines. Sarah Palin’s ride through downtown D.C. on Memorial Day was tagged on AOL-owned Huffington Post as: “2012 Election, Sarah Palin 2012, Elections 2012, Sarah Palin, Sarah Palin For President, Palin 2012, Palin Bus Tour, Palin For President, Palin Motorcycle, Rolling Thunder, Sarah Palin Bus Tour, Sarah Palin Motorcycle, Politics News” to cover all the search bases.

  BlogSmith then carefully tracks the return on investment. Under its performance tab, it tells the author that it cost $15 to make the piece of content, and it’s returned $82.95 in advertising. In big green letters it tells the editor they’ve made $67.95 in profit for the mothership. It’s journalism, commoditized.

  So, why this setup? Here’s what one AOL writer—John Biggs—had to say on AOL blog TechCrunch.com:

  “There’s no money in shaking the crown of power from a lowly perch. There is money in feeding novel info to a ravenous, neophilic audience.”[35]

  They do it because it works! The headlines are irresistible. In doing the research for this chapter alone, I’ve watched a one-and-a-half-minute short film on Lindsay Lohan, seen John Lithgow’s dramatic interpretation of a press release from Newt Gingrich’s presidential campaign, learned that Shiloh Jolie-Pitt turned five years old, and yes, have seen a lot of pictures and videos of Sarah Palin riding a motorcycle. The age of the oldest female bodybuilder as of this writing, by the way, is 74.

  These articles aren’t written by people with a journalism background. They’re written by freelancers—independent contractors—who needn’t be provided any healthcare or retirement benefits. For content farmers, they’re simply credited—about $15 for a written piece of content, $20 for a video—directly to their bank account. Copy editors are paid a remarkable $2.50 per piece of content. Traditional newspapers pay about $300 to a freelance journalist for the same amount of work.

  The jobs themselves tend to be no piece of cake. According to former AOL employee Oliver Miller:

  “My ‘ideal’ turn-around time to produce a column started at thirty-five minutes, then was gradually reduced to half an hour, then twenty-five minutes. Twenty-five minutes to research and write about a show I had never seen—and this twenty-five minute period included time for formatting the article in the AOL blogging system, and choosing and editing a photograph for the article. Errors were inevitably the result. But errors didn’t matter; or rather, they didn’t matter for my bosses.

  I had panic attacks; we all did. My fellow writers would fall asleep, and then wake up in cold sweats. I worked the graveyard shift—11PM to 7 or 8AM or later—but even the AOL slaves who wrote during the day would report the same universal experience. Finally falling asleep after work, they would awake with a jump, certain that they had forgotten something—certain that they hadn’t produced their allotted number of articles every thirty minutes. One night, I awoke out of a dead sleep, and jumped to my computer, and instantly began typing up an article about David Letterman. I kept going for ten minutes, until I realized I had drea
med it all. There was no article to write; I was simply typing up the same meaningless phrases that we all always used: ‘LADY GAGA PANTLESS ON LATE NIGHT WITH DAVID LETTERMAN,’ or some such.

  Then there was the week where I only slept for about six hours over the course of five days—a week that ended with me being so exhausted that I started having auditory hallucinations, constantly hearing a distant ringing phone that didn’t exist, or an imaginary door slamming in the background.”[36]

  Now granted, Miller was still working from the comfort of his house. You can’t compare the job to farming at the physical level—as we’ve noted before, farming tends to be one of the more dangerous professions in America. Mr. Miller isn’t going to lose his life in a tragic blogging accident. But it also doesn’t sound like it was a particularly nice job to have.

  While factory farming dominates agriculture, content farming now dominates our information consumption online. Its industrialization goes far beyond news.

  If you’ve ever searched online for how to change the oil in your car, how to iron a shirt, or how to unclog a toilet, chances are you’ve run across a website called eHow.

  eHow is owned by another content farm called Demand Media—probably the largest, in terms of workforce, of all content farms. They supply the content to eHow, Lance Armstrong’s LiveStrong.com, and Tyra Banks’ typeF.com. Beyond their own sites, Demand Media also provides farmed content to a variety of websites across the Internet. In terms of traffic, Demand Media’s sites receive more unique visits than Fox News’s online presence and the Washington Post combined. It’s the 18th largest property on the Internet. Nearly four million more people online visit a Demand Media website than visit Craigslist in a given month.[37]

  Content farms are big businesses. As of this writing, AOL is worth $1.2 billion. Demand Media is worth $663 million. Associated Content—the content farm once billed “The People’s Media Company”—sits as part of Yahoo.com.

  Seek and We Shall Profit

  Churnalism

  According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics at the Department of Labor, in 2008 there were just 69,300 news analysts, correspondents, and reporters in the United States, earning a median average wage of $34,850.[39] The department expects a 4% decline in the sector between 2008 and 2018. The journalist is going the way of the farmer.

  The world of public relations is moving in the opposite direction. In 2008, there were over 275,200 public relations specialists in the United States, earning a median annual wage of $51,280. The Bureau expects the field to continue to grow, upwards of 25% between 2008 and 2018.

  As a result, our reporters are suffering from information obesity themselves. For every reporter in the United States, there are more than four public relations specialists working hard to get them to write what their bosses want them to say. That’s double what there were in 1970. Journalists are assaulted with press releases stuffed in their mailboxes, polluting their email inboxes, and pouring out of their fax machines, full of pitches, sound bites, and spin.

  In an effort to cut costs, journalists often become more filters than reporters, succumbing to the torrents of spin heading their way, and passing on what’s said by the scores of PR consultants. Rather than report the news, they simply copy what’s in a press release and paste it into their stories. It’s a kind of commercially advantageous and permissible plagiarism called churnalism.

  In 2009, the independent filmmaker Chris Atkins decided to put this phenomenon to the test. He worked with a small web design firm to set up a fake website for a PR agency, and a fake male cosmetic product, the Penazzle, sold by a fake company: MaleBeautyDirect.com. It’s a temporary tattoo of sorts that sits on a male’s waxed lower abdomen.

  Atkins sent press releases out to all the large newsdesks of large newspapers in the UK, and had researchers follow up with calls to each targeted member of the press. The next day, the Sun, the largest newspaper in Britain, carried the story with the headline “Nobbies Dazzlers” with 45% of the text lifted straight from the press release. He demonstrated the same thing repeatedly, with a story of a fake “chastity garter” that secretly texts a boyfriend when she’s cheating on him, and a fake story of how the British Prime Minister’s cat Larry had been stolen from its rightful owner. In every case, the story was carried, without fact checking, and largely copied and pasted into the press.

  It’s a widespread problem—and not just the problem of hoaxters either. Researchers at Great Britain’s Cardiff University found that upwards of 60% of press articles and 34% of broadcast stories were the results of churnalism.

  A website has even been set up, churnalism.com, that allows you to paste in the copy of news articles to see how an article has been “churnalized”; how many times a press release has been copied and pasted across various sources in the UK.

  The parallels between how our media has changed and how agriculture changed are obvious if you look closely: what happened to farmers is happening to journalists. What happened to our diets is happening to our news. And like with our food, there’s not much we can do about it; the draw of living with abundant supply is too strong, and too beneficial, to fight. Instead, we’ve got to understand how to cope in a world with different rules.

  Chapter 4. We Are What We Seek

  “A fanatic is one who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject.”

  —Winston Churchill (attributed)

  Reality Dysmorphia

  In eating disorder treatment centers, a physician will often ask the patient to draw an outline of her own body on a large chalkboard. Then, the doctor will ask the patient to place her back against the wall, and trace the actual outline of her body. For many patients, the outlines that they draw are quite exaggerated, sometimes twice as large as their actual bodies.

  It’s a phenomenon called body dysmorphia: that someone’s self-image isn’t attached to reality. The phenomenon goes beyond the patients just thinking they’re a different shape than they really are, though: when the victims of this disorder look in the mirror, they’re literally seeing something different than what everybody else does.

  During the Dean campaign, the delusion that resulted from my poor information diet was a cognitive version of this disease: reality dysmorphia. I haven’t met a single campaign operative here in Washington, D.C., on either side, that didn’t have at least a mild case of it.

  This kind of delusion comes from psychological phenomena like heuristics, confirmation bias, and cognitive dissonance.

  It turns out our brains are remarkable energy consumers. Though it typically represents only 2% of the human body’s weight, the brain consumes about 20% of the body’s energy resources.[40] As such, we’ve evolved—both for our brain’s energy consumption, and for our social survival—to use shortcuts in order to be able to handle more complex thoughts.

  Think of a heuristic as a rule of thumb: a mental shortcut, or the thing you get once you burn your hand on a hot pan and learn that you shouldn’t touch hot pans anymore. You needn’t bother testing this hypothesis anymore; you know it. Heuristics are psychologically there so that you don’t have to think about them anymore, and you can spend your brain’s energy thinking about something else.

  Heuristics have a dark side, though: they cause us to have unconscious biases towards things we’re familiar with, and choose to do the same thing we’ve always done rather than do something new that may be more efficient.

  They cause us to make logical leaps that take us to false conclusions. For instance, these mental shortcuts underpin our capacity for racism, sexism, and other forms of discrimination.

  One such nefarious heuristic is called confirmation bias. It’s the psychological hypothesis that once we begin to believe something, we unconsciously begin seeking out information to reinforce that belief, often in the absence of facts. In fact, our biases can grow to be so strong that facts to the contrary will actually strengthen our wrong beliefs.

  In 2005, Emory University professor Drew W
esten and his colleagues recruited 15 self-described strong Democrats and 15 strong Republicans for a sophisticated test. They used a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine to study how partisan voters reacted to negative remarks about their party or candidate. Westen and his colleagues found that when these subjects processed “emotionally threatening information” about their preferred candidates, the parts of the brain associated with reasoning shut down and the parts responsible for emotions flared up.[41] Westen’s research indicates that once we grow biased enough, we lose our capacity to change our minds.

  Following Westen’s study, social scientists Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifle conducted a new test,[42] and discovered what they believe is a “backfire effect.”

  Nyhan and Reifle provided the subjects with sample articles claiming that President Bush stated that tax cuts would create such economic growth that it would increase government revenues. The same articles included corrective statements from a 2003 Economic Report of the President and various other official sources, claiming that this was implausible. The researchers then showed the students the actual tax revenues as a proportion of GDP declining after Bush’s tax cuts were enacted.

  The results were fascinating: after reading the article, the conservatives in the study were still more inclined to believe that tax cuts increase revenue as a result of reading the correction. Hearing the truth made conservatives more likely to agree with the misperception. The facts backfired.

  We already know that things like confirmation bias make us seek out information that we agree with. But it’s also the case that once we’re entrenched in a belief, the facts will not change our minds.