We’ve spent a term talking about the relationship between advertising, audience, and content. It’s the model that commercial news stations have more and more been saddled with, as insulation from market forces makes it hard for journalism to operate from an ethical position. Content that produces no audience produces no advertising revenue, and no business model. Content that produces an audience may be driven by more than journalistic ethics. The more the content providers know about the audience they’re targeting, the more they can tailor the content. The lines between the newsroom and the sales department get blurred.

Problem? Depends on who you are and where you’re located in this picture. For the newsroom, the problem is making payroll, and the journalistic compromises that might entail. For the news consumer, the problem may be that what you’re consuming is being sold as news, but it’s also bait designed to attract you. The bait may be high quality–from a New York Times reporter, for instance. Or it could be from the New York Post. There’s a big difference. But not everyone prefers the Times over the Post. Advertisers want to know! And bait that brings a predictable audience is even better, a fact not likely lost on the owner(s). Fox News panders to a conservative audience with conservative news. Duh. What makes it dishonest is the ‘Fair & Balanced’ claim, but it has sold its audience on the idea that they are more American, liberals are less American, and Fox defines ‘balance’ as its conservative corrective on the liberal media.

Personalization: A new paradigm

Eli Pariser’s book The Filter Bubble describes a radically different dynamic between advertising, audience, and content providers. Remember Andrew Lewis’ observation–‘if you’re not paying for something, you’re not the customer–you’re the product being sold.’ The logic is on the surface relatively straightforward and compelling:

1. The Internet represents an ever-expanding, ubiquitous tsunami of information. Which sounds democratic–there’s lots of information, and news, out there for the consumer.
2. Too much information for the average consumer to make much sense of. This has been referred to as ‘attention crash.’ Information overload, but focusing on the response to that overload–a sort of consumer paralysis.
3. Hence the race to be ‘curators’ of information–to help information consumers ‘make sense’ of the information, the world, or whatever it is he/she wants to know. At the end of the race–a pot of gold, in the form of information about our preferences, profiles, and consumption habits.
4. In the same way that news organizations claim to be providing ‘news’ when as often as not they may be cutting it with ‘bait,’ curators of information–Facebook, Google, Twitter, Amazon, Reddit–provide consumers with information tailored to their own preferences, which have been painstakingly scrutinized and analyzed through algorithms. To paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, consumers are presented ‘the sort of information that people who like that sort of information are going to like.’ And if you’re logged in to any of these–especially the extended family of Google apps–your information is being run through a digital meat grinder.
5. The result? Everyone gets presented with a slightly different world, based not on some news organization’s reputation for journalistic integrity, but based on that person’s previous behavior, whether it be what he/she bought, read, clicked through, deleted, or left on the screen during a bathroom break. Pandora finds you music based on music you’ve been listening to. Amazon gives you ideas for books or movies or toasters based on what it knows about you. Or even your friends, if Facebook gets involved. `
6. So the idea of the ‘media?’ That some entity is mediating information, serving as the proverbial ‘middleman’ between provider and consumer? One word: disintermediation. Eliminating the ‘middleman.’ Well, not really, but the middleman is you, and your largely opaque data mining companies that want to customize or personalize your information, on the premise that you will want more of what you’ve already shown you want.
7. That’s the solution to the ‘attention crash.’ At least, it’s the solution from the point of view of the internet information mediators. But Pariser says that it means we all live in bubbles of our own making, bubbles that reflect our own preferences, at least if these curators have done their job properly. But in a world where our news is processed and personalized, who makes decisions about what is ‘news?’ If the editor isn’t working in a newsroom, who, or what, is it? What’s going to show up in your headlines–a school shooting, Kimye’s wedding plans, LeBron’s twitter feed, a US drone attack on ‘terrorists’ in Yemen, or a story on atmospheric CO2 concentrations and the effects of acidification on marine life?
8. This involves some degree of ‘debundling‘ the news. Easy to understand if you think of an album. Imagine Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon as simply a collection of tracks, shuffled or part of a much larger shuffle. And you get itunes. Here, instead of the New York Times, you may get a Times article on Reddit, Reader Supported News, or Google’s news search engine.
9. So how do content providers make money in this model? Well advertisers always want to know what the audience looks like, and with data and click ‘signals’ they can be sold fine-grained information about people’s internet consumption habits. The more accurate these are, the more people are likely to use them–it’s a self-reinforcing, positive feedback loop. They don’t just know whether people ‘act on product,’ they know exactly how. Or at least think they do, based on what our computers or our computer use (Pariser notes for instance that an airline knows what seat you’re supposed to be in, and could engage in a transaction where they sell advertisers access to us, advertisers who probably know whether we’re left- or right-handed, male or female or transgender, American or Swedish) tell them about us. They can even follow users around the web with ads, and when they buy something, that information can be sold to someone else.

Now though news and information travels at the speed of light on the Web,  content providers like the Times and the Washington Post or Wall Street Journal make the rounds more often. Much news still comes from journalistic outfits, and bounces around the web like a nuclear-powered superball. Ever notice those ‘most read’ lists of news stories? Where do you think that information comes from? Does that affect what stories you see or read? It’s not based on some editor’s judgment, but on what’s ‘moving.’ Traffic managers collect information and can quickly reorganize front pages to reflect what might even go viral.

And it may not be what’s newsworthy. Simply what’s going viral and what people are clicking on. In the old model, it might have been what the editors thought their readers were most likely to view. And we went to find what we were looking for. It was more of a ‘push’ vs a ‘pull.’ And while in the new model we can ‘pull’ information from a server, there may be some pre-selecting that’s been going on that affects what gets pulled. Meaning we do less of the work, but what do we know about who’s doing it for us, or do we simply think it’s the ‘news?’ We may not realize that our bubble (our ‘front page’) looks slightly different than our friends’, radically different than strangers’. Will ‘news’ become less of a public, shared phenomenon, and more of a personalized one? We can always change the channel on the TV. Although we don’t necessarily know who owns what, or we may have to choose between programming that is formulaic and simply offering bait that doesn’t really interest us. The Internet supposedly puts us in control–we choose where to go. But what if our options are being pre-processed for us–what if the ‘control’ is more illusion, and we are presented with a world that looks more and more like what someone thinks we think the world should look like?

Twisted sentence, or twisted media universe? You decide.

And …. if this (below) is the ‘news,’ democracy’s in trouble:

• Reddit home page
• Google News
• Gawker

Eli Pariser. 2011. The Filter Bubble. NY: Penguin.