Posts Tagged ‘engagement’
“The best way out is always through”*…
Adam Mastroianni (and here) with a diagnosis of the malaise (“Borg vibes,” as he calls them) that so many of us feel– and a remedy (or, at least, a constructive response)…
Everyone I know has given up. That’s how it feels, at least. There’s a creeping sense that the jig is up, the fix is in, and the party’s over. The Earth is burning, democracies are backsliding, AI is advancing, cities are crumbling—somehow everything sucks and it’s more expensive than it was last year. It’s the worst kind of armageddon, the kind that doesn’t even lower the rent.
We had the chance to prevent or solve these problems, the thinking goes, but we missed it. Now we’re past the point of no return. The world’s gonna end in fascists and ashes, and the only people still smiling are the ones trying to sell you something. It feels like we’re living through the Book of Revelation, but instead of the Seven Seals and the apocalyptic trumpeters, we have New York Times push notifications.
On the one hand, it’s totally understandable that these crises would make us want to curl up and die. If the world was withering for lack of hot takes, I’d assemble a daredevil crew and we’d be there in an instant. But if history is heading more in the warlords ‘n’ water wars direction, I’m out.
On other hand, this reaction is totally bonkers. If our backs are against the wall, shouldn’t we put up our dukes? For people supposedly facing the breakdown of our society, our response is less fight-or-flight and more freeze-and-unease, frown-and-lie-down, and despair-and-stay-there.
Maybe humanity has finally met its match, but even though people talk like that’s the case, the way they act is weirdly…normal. Every conversation has a dead-man-walking flavor to it, and yet the dead men keep on walking. “Yeah, so everything’s doomed and we’re all gonna die. Anyway, talk to ya later, I gotta put the lasagna in the oven.” If things are just about to go kaput, why is everyone still working 60 hours a week?
Something strange is going on here, and I’d like to offer an explanation in two parts: a wide circle, and a bullet with a foot in it…
Eminently worth the read: “Use this magic bullet to shoot yourself in the foot,” from @mastroianni.bsky.social.
Pair with: “Apocalypse 24/7” (an excerpt from Roy Scranton‘s Impasse: Climate Change and the Limits of Progress)… a deeper, darker– but sadly, all-too-credible– dive into the context that Mastrioanni sketches… while (as your correspondent reads it, anyway) it doesn’t contradict Mastroianni’s prescription (“pick up a sponge and start washing”), it reminds us just how much grime there is to get through… all the more reason to get started…
* Robert Frost
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As we grapple, we might recall that it was on this date in 1965 that Bob Dylan’s “Positively 4th Street” was released. Dropping between Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde, as the follow-up to Dylan’s hit single “Like a Rolling Stone“, it was not included on either album. But it reached No. 1 on Canada’s RPM chart, No. 7 on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100, and No. 8 on the UK Singles Chart, and has been ranked by Rolling Stone No. 203 in their 500 Greatest Songs of All Time list.
“The more wonderful the means of communication, the more trivial, tawdry, or depressing its contents seemed to be”*…
… a little harsh, perhaps– but, as Mane Kara-Yakoubian reports, all-too-consonant with the results of a major new study of news participation around the world…
A massive cross-cultural study reported a 12% decline in overall news participation—including liking, sharing, and commenting on social media, and discussing news offline—a trend spanning 46 countries between 2015 to 2022. This research was published in New Media & Society.
“I was interested in news participation because in recent years many have expressed concerns about dark forms of participation, such as the sharing of ‘fake news’. Yet, what we see on social media isn’t a representative sample of reality,” said Sacha Altay (@Sacha_Altay), a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Zürich in the department of political science. “For instance, we know that a small group of very active and vocal internet users drive most forms of dark participation online. I wanted to understand general trends in participation beyond these potentially unusual and unrepresentative cases.”
The research team used data from the Digital News Report surveys conducted by YouGov and its partners, which encompassed responses from 577,859 individuals across 46 countries over an eight-year period. These surveys were designed to be nationally representative, with quotas for age, gender, region, and, in some cases, education and political orientation…
“The main takeaway is that in many countries, news participation is declining,” explained Altay. “For example, people report sharing, commenting, or liking news on social media less. This decline is not only confined to online spaces: people also report talking less about the news in face-to-face interactions with their friends or colleagues. The only form of participation that has increased is news sharing via private messaging applications such as WhatsApp.”
Specifically, sharing news on social media dropped by 29%, commenting decreased by 26%, and offline discussions fell by 24%. Conversely, sharing news through private messaging apps increased by 20%, suggesting a preference for private communication channels.
Participants with higher education levels, younger individuals, women, and those with a keen interest in news were more likely to participate in news activities. However, over time, the decline in participation was more pronounced among women, those without a bachelor’s degree, and individuals with low trust in news. This shift resulted in men eventually participating more than women, a reversal of the trend observed in 2015. Further, political polarization within countries was linked to lower levels of news participation, suggesting that increasing societal divides may discourage news engagement…
“The decline in news participation that we document is likely a symptom of growing negative perceptions of the news: in the last seven years, trust in news has slowly but steadily declined, news avoidance has grown, and interest in news has fallen sharply,” Altay told PsyPost. “I see these trends as worrying given the role that the news plays in informing people and, among other things, holding politicians accountable.”…
If true, it’s worrying news to anyone concerned for healthy civil discourse: “Massive cross-cultural study finds participation with news is declining,” from @ManeYakoubian in @PsyPost.
The open access paper: “News participation is declining: Evidence from 46 countries between 2015 and 2022”, by Sacha Altay, Richard Fletcher, and Rasmus Kleis Nielsen.
* Arthur C. Clarke, 2001: A Space Odyssey
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As we investigate engagement, we might spare a thought for a journalist from a brighter time for the field and a champion of an educated, informed populace, Norman MacKenzie; he died on this date in 2013. After graduating for the LSE, MacKenzie worked for two decades at the New Statesman magazine. But in 1962, Asa Briggs recruited him to teach sociology at the University of Sussex (where he also set up the Centre for Educational Technology). In the mid-1960s he worked with Richmond Postgate of the BBC and the then education minister Jennie Lee on ideas for getting more people into university. He subsequently instrumental in creating the Open University.
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