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Can we Manufacture Consent with Social Media?

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Anyone who has read my commentary knows that I am prone to philosophical flights of fancy; quite a contradistinction to my day job promoting women’s health and researching hormone systems. This election, however, has me thinking of Noam Chomsky and how he might view the battle between the political propaganda of traditional money and media versus the power of social media.

A recent study by Pew suggested that nearly 40% of all mainstream news coverage focused on politics, apparently down from 53% in 2008. Depending upon the network’s political preference, one was more or less likely to hear positive reports of the chosen candidate or party and negative commentary about the challenger, with sparsely anything in between. The completely insular nature of our major news networks, were by any criteria, manufacturing consent for their viewers. In this post Citizen’s United election, mainstream media and money were so closely merged that nary a fact to the contrary of the stated opinion could break through.

Then there was social media, the vast diaspora of public opinion, where until recently (new Facebook algorithms) news, real and fake, spread like wildfire; where rather than big money selecting who you follow and by association the filters through which your news is served, we, the public can self-filter. We select who serves us our news by the very act of choosing who to follow or who to read. And we in turn can guide the direction of the conversation by choosing to re-tweet or share what we find. This is a remarkably powerful shift in information management, one that big money, no matter how it has tried, cannot yet contain or control.

Your Uterus, Your Ovaries and Social Media

Nowhere was the power of social media more obvious than in the women’s health debates. Beginning in earnest with the Sandra Fluke hearing and continuing through every asinine comment made by a male politico, social media brought voice and power to women in a way never before possible. Here are just a few of the women’s political sites that sprung up this election season.

Without the almost continuous accessibility of news and information and the unlimited degree to which information could be shared on social media, does anyone really think that women’s reproductive rights would have been covered at all by mainstream media?  Even post-election, the power of women and social media is barely mentioned by mainstream media, despite the fact that women effectively won the election for the democrats – by 18 points in the presidential race and by equally high margins across federal and state elections.

Social Media and Women’s Reproductive Rights

The silent majority is silent no longer. The question is – for how long? What corporate filters will silence the female masses and re-direct the conversation? Will the pendulum swing again and allow corporate and political money to determine what news we are served even in the social media sphere?

Unfortunately, yes. And it is already happening. The new Facebook algorithms released just last month, decide what news is important to the user (to some extent, it has done this all along, but never so egregiously). It doesn’t matter that users spend years developing a network of friends and followers or that they may really want to see little Susie’s first-day-of school-pictures. Nope, none of that matters. Facebook’s algorithm decides what will interest each user and only shows those feeds. As a result, users are only served about 16% of the content posted by their friends.

Since this latest change, traffic on most Facebook pages, where most political news is conveyed, is down by as much as 60-70%. Imagine if this had happened well before the election (algorithm rolled out at the end of September). Would women, who are the dominant users of Facebook been able to mobilize? Would grassroots organizations have been able to disseminate information effectively?  Maybe not.

Though I am certain Facebook’s motivation for these changes is monetary, the ultimate result will be political. And in that regard, Facebook has now become, by their very business model, arbiters of political speech, likely to the detriment of women’s health and all other ‘fringe’ movements that lack the money to market their message. Facebook is manufacturing consent, with all the same news filters Chomsky wrote about 30 years ago, plus the new algorithm filter. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want the brainchildren of Facebook controlling my access to news. Twitter anyone?

@ChanatLucine @LucineWoman

The irony – Facebook is the public square. So, even though only 16% of our followers will see this post on our page (Lucine Women Community), we must post it there anyway. It’s time for a new public square.

Is Social Networking as Rewarding as Sex?

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You can learn a lot about someone based on their posts, tweets, updates and other social networking tools. There is the obsessive narrator, “OMG I just had a bagel and boysenberry cream cheese for breakfast,” “I’m in line at the grocery store and I have to pee soooo bad,” “Vacuuming!” Then there are the my-life-is-so-much-cooler-than-it-was-in-high-school-so-now-I-have-to-brag-and-make-it-sound-even-more-amazing-than-it-probably-really-is, “I just went skydiving and now I’m going to a [insert whoever is cool right now] concert!” or “I just met [insert random celebrity] at the airport, OMG!” There are the Debbie-downers, “Ugh, could god punish me any more than he is? I mean seriously, can anything possibly go worse because it’s clearly never going to get better at this point. FML” There are the I’m –so-witty-I’m-going-to-post-clever-comments-that-only-a-handful-of-people-as-clever-as-me-will-understand posters, “Purple penguins tap dance while earth worms snooze in the tantric tundra trampoline park.” And then there are the rest of us who probably do a mix of all of the above.

Why is it so appealing to post random facts or experiences to an online community of hundreds of people you may or may not know? According to a new study conducted by Harvard researchers Diana Tamir and Jason Mitchell, because it feels good.

Have we Forgotten the Tale of Narcissus?

Narcissus needs to make room in his river, because according to this study, “Humans devote 30–40% of speech output solely to informing others of their own subjective experiences” (I can think of a few dates that were overachievers in this department). When online, however, we blow poor Narcissus right back out of the river; research revealed that over 80% of social media posts are “announcements about one’s own immediate experiences.”

I have often commented to friends and family that it is a shame that we have these amazing tools at our fingertips to pass information, start grassroots campaigns, revolutions, truly change the world and while some people/organizations manage to do that, most talk about our favorite subject: ourselves. I have often wondered what the result of social media will be in younger generations who are posted online from the day they are born (be honest – how many of you have posted pictures of your newborns?). It has already drastically changed the world of recruiting and business networking, college and professional schools; can we even imagine what cyberspace will do to dating and marriage? Who knows maybe it will lower the level of divorce if we take a moment to read what our spouse/partner posts about him/herself?

The Same as Sex?!

Perhaps my cynicism of the growing online world is just the cantankerous Luddite in me. Then again, the study found that people would pass up monetary reward in order to talk about themselves (they obviously weren’t as broke as I was in college). It reveals (and headlines have gone wild with this one) “humans so willingly self-disclose because doing so represents an event with intrinsic value, in the same way as with primary rewards such as food and sex.” Furthermore, “Self-disclosure was strongly associated with increased activation in brain regions that form the mesolimbic dopamine system, including the nucleus accumbens and ventral tegmental area.”

Apparently the test subjects have not discovered OMing science behind orgasms.

And of course, all snarky comments aside, this study was important to understand the social behaviors and evolution of the society we live in. The researchers concluded:

In an ultimate sense, the tendency to broadcast one’s thoughts and beliefs may confer an adaptive advantage in individuals in a number of ways: by engendering social bonds and social alliances between people; by eliciting feedback from others to attain self- knowledge; by taking advantage of performance advantages that result from sharing one’s sensory experience; or by obviating the need to discover firsthand what others already know, thus expanding the amount of know-how any single person can acquire in a lifetime. As such, the proximate motivation to disclose our internal thoughts and knowledge to others around us may serve to sustain the behaviors that underlie the extreme sociality of our species.
 
For more information the published results of the study can be found here.