Content Magnets

There’s a piece (in the shape of an interview) from the (excellent) online culture newsletter Embedded that addresses the all-too-common (and often incorrect) claim that something isn’t being done or investigated or written, even when it absolutely is.

The most common manifestation of this is when someone reads a news article (or news headline, or social media post containing that headline), then shares (or re-shares) said content with the comment, “Why isn’t anyone covering this?”

Almost always someone is covering that thing. It’s just that the person asking this question hasn’t looked for it: if it exists, they assume it will come to them.

There’s a name for this assumption, by the way: the “news-finds-me perception.”

And while in some cases the complainer is legitimately flagging something that isn’t getting enough ink, enough attention, or enough secondary hullabaloo, generally they believe no one is looking into this thing because their perception of such matters is limited to what comes to them; what’s delivered via social media, and perhaps via discussion with their friends (that discussion also typically informed by social media).

This bias toward information that finds us may work in some contexts, but in an information ecosystem partly (and in some cases bordering on entirely) shaped by algorithms aiming to optimize engagement, not knowledge or exposure to new things, some content will carry far and wide, but most will be shown only to those who have a history of caring about such topics (and importantly, who demonstrate their care via algorithm-legible indicators like shares and likes).

There’s another level to this muddlement, even beyond the fragmented media landscape (and propensity to sort content based on the ideological leanings of the consumer) covered in that Embedded article, though.

Part of the issue is that even though many of us might aspire to puncture our filter bubbles and expose ourselves to unfamiliar qualia and datum, doing so can be devilishly tricky because of how such information is organized and shared. And seeking out that which we don’t yet understand (or know exists) can be a precarious task.

There’s so much content and information available to the average person, these days, that sifting through all the noise for the signal we hope to engage with is a substantial undertaking.

Many of us mentally flatline while rifling through viewing options on Netflix, and working through the whole of human knowledge (or all of a given genre of book, or all potential sources of news) for a hint of a whiff of a sense of a specific vibe or narrative can be even more frictionful, cumbersome work.

None of which, I think, is a permanent state of affairs.

Just as search engines were (until recently, at least) helpful to those hoping to sieve the Web 2.0 era for interesting, valuable, perhaps life-changing things, so too might new tools—some of which are possibly being developed today—allow us to make sense of all the things happening in a given facet of the world as it exists right now (potentially even through lenses optimized to help us (for instance) discover our next favorite (currently undiscovered) author, find the ideal next step along our career path, or stumble upon news about things happening in parts of the world about which we (currently) know little or nothing).

The incentives powering such tools would have to align with the premise of undistorted (or distorted in the user’s favor) discovery, though, and that’s something that unfortunately wouldn’t work for a lot of today’s businesses (the way they’re currently structured, at least).

Which is too bad, because despite assumptions to the contrary, we are not content magnets.

We’re fed content through funnels controlled by entities that have their own motivations and priorities, neither of which are currently (consistently, at least) aligned with our (potential) desire to be cohesively, concretely, and neutrally informed about the world around us.

As a result, I would argue the best intellectual, epistemically humble stance most of us can take in this regard is the assumption that what we’re seeing—the information to which we have casual access—is a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of just a part of the holistic total of whatever it is we’re exploring.

And unless we’re willing to put in a fair bit more effort, tightening the mesh on our nonsense-strainers along the way, it’s best to assume we’re not seeing the big picture, and that there could be more to any story (or catalog, or field of study) than we’re currently capable of perceiving.