Добавление комментария

(автор статьи по жизни, кажется, большой дурак, но сам текст полезный)
https://quillette.com/2020/07/31/journalisms-death-by-a-thousand-tweets/

Imagine you want to create a digital platform that will both destroy—or, at the very least, seriously enfeeble—the journalism profession, and simultaneously make you a vast amount of money. How should you do it?

Well, first you should ensure that the primary goal of your platform has absolutely nothing to do with the stated goals of the journalism profession. More specifically, the aim of your platform should not be to hold the powerful to account or, more broadly, to report on stories that are in the public interest. Rather, the platform’s main objective should ideally be the opposite of this: It should be to service the aims of powerful and private interests. The most obvious way to do this—whilst simultaneously making a lot of money—would be to sell millions and millions (and millions) of dollars’ worth of advertisements on behalf of these interests.

Then you should try to get as many journalists to use your platform as much as possible. (After all, what better way to destroy journalism than to get the vast majority of journalists to compulsively use a platform the aims of which are antithetical to those of their own profession?) The most straightforward way to do this would be to design a digital platform that is highly addictive (or, to use a less medically-loaded and industry-friendly term, “habit-forming”). To ensure that this platform is sufficiently habit-forming, it should conform to what author Nir Eyal has called the “hooking model,” to which every other major digital platform, consciously or unconsciously, scrupulously adheres. In particular, this platform should encourage or even require some kind of investment by its users (in the form of, for instance, content creation or profile curation). This habit-forming quality will have the further, collateral benefit of encouraging non-journalists to use it too—this is a very good thing, as it will allow you to sell targeted ads to them as well, and (hence) allow you to make even more money than you otherwise would. More importantly, it should feature variable rewards as one of the defining characteristics of its users’ platform experience (in the form of, say, a “newsfeed”).

Perhaps the most necessary feature, however, is also the most subtle: This new platform should offer a veneer of journalistic utility. More specifically, it should allow articles, videos, and opinions to be shared between journalists and non-journalists; it should facilitate the uptake and spread of “breaking news”; and it should be able to claim, with at least some initial plausibility, that it permits or even encourages a “conversation” to occur among its users on “newsworthy” subject matters. If, however, the platform is to remain strictly at odds with the aims of the journalism profession, every conceivable step must be taken to mitigate the possibility of genuine conversation or meaningful, journalistically relevant user interaction taking place.

In particular—and to give some possible examples—users should only be exposed to opinions, articles, and facts to which they want to be exposed; the rapid dissemination of “breaking news” should be encouraged, ideally without the requirement (or even the possibility) of context, fact-checking, assessment of genuine newsworthiness, or indeed any kind of editorial curation whatsoever; conversations should be fully surveilled, sometimes censored, and encouraged to take place in full view of everyone, thus limiting the possibility of the private exploration of alternative, non-mainstream viewpoints; empathy, sympathy, and face-to-face engagement should be actively discouraged, if not rendered impossible by the platform’s design interface, while hatred, tribalism, and outrage should be fostered and encouraged (this will have the added benefit of maximising user engagement, thus allowing you to sell your users even more ads); and, perhaps most importantly, the “conversations” themselves should be severely circumscribed, so as to prevent the possibility of genuine nuance and deep reflection taking place (by, for example, limiting the number of characters you’re allowed to type). Such a veneer will allow you to rebut accusations that your platform is perniciously habit-forming and seriously deleterious to the health of the individual, the journalism profession, and wider society.

As the reader will undoubtedly already have guessed, such
a platform already exists: It is called Twitter.