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They Didn't See It Coming?
Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race To Go Viral
“Ben Smith’s Traffic bears no relation to Steven Soderbergh’s 2000 war-on-drugs epic of the same title, a film about the absurd and society-rending lengths people will go to profit from the self-obliteration of others. But it might as well. Subtitled “Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race To Go Viral,” the debut book from the former BuzzFeed News chief, New York Times media columnist, and Semafor co-founder tells the story of the Obama-Trump era’s click-driven revolution in digital news. I trust it’s not spoiling anything to say the story doesn’t end well.”As I listened the other day to Ben Smith’s interview about his recent book, the one thing that stood out for me was his description of how many of the founders of now declining or already defunct social media outlets were thinking that this new technology would become a predominantly intellectual format with a progressive leaning milieu and clientele for disseminating and discussing daily events and issues.Instead, Facebook and Twitter emerged as innocuous in the beginning but then, along with the backdrop of Fox News and other ultra conservative radio and podcast hosts, emerged as quite the opposite, a social media construct that undergirded Donald Trump’s march to the White House, thriving on messages of fear, anger, righteous indignation and flourishing in an overall extremist reactionary landscape.What I kept listening for, but did not hear, was an understanding of how this could have happened. Let's address a fundamental oversight of these early pioneers that seems to leave them, and I venture, most of humanity in a perpetual state of self-deception. The failure of those involved in the early phases of social media was the assumption that the format would appeal to and by applied the rational side of human nature.What they did not properly assess is that the human brain is not solely rational as in the Descartes declaration, “I think therefore I am,” but is also, and this is important, even predominantly emotional and instinctual. In fact, growing evidence in the study of how the brain works reveals that our thoughts emerge in a “slow” manner, several critical seconds after we’ve already formulated in which direction those thoughts will go in via our instinctual reactions and our emotional attachments.The fallacy of relying upon humans to be these rational beings who are uniquely equipped to run the earth in a constantly cool, calm, collected manner is quite frankly the kind of intellectual elitism that the far right rages against, ironically revealing the underlying survival reactions and emotionally driven relational entanglements that ensure Facebook, Twitter and all the other outlets that rely upon irrational override, the means to grow their audiences.But, here's the difficult reality: our supposedly superior “executive” rational selves are at a significant disadvantage. Our language-based cognitive functions, while impressive, move at a snail's pace in comparison to our survival instincts, our gut reactions, and our roller-coaster emotions. Those underlying brain functions are lightning fast. In essence, whether we like it or not, chemical reactions and emotional whirlwinds dictate much of our lives. Unfortunately, reason often takes a back seat because we haven't yet mastered the art of "knowing thyself" and leveraging all three major human-brain functions effectively.These underlying brain functions, have been appropriately named by some in the field of brain study, as the “lizard” instinctual and the “limbic” emotional aspects of the brain. Until recently, most studies of how the brain functions were focused on the “logic” areas of the brain, where the skills for language, math, reason and science are predominantly expressed.
But, social media gleefully reminds us that our primal instincts and emotional attachments still reign supreme and very likely always will. It revels in the fact that our reasonable selves are just one piece of the puzzle and that many times the decisions we make such as to buy that kitchen gadget we don’t really need, but do so anyway because we’ve been warned that “supplies are limited” and our primitive reactive brain stabs us with a subtle panic that our existence could somehow depend upon that utensil to survive.Here's the thing, though, It's not all doom and gloom. But, there is work to be done, my friends if we ever hope to handle not only the current upsweeps of social media, but also the even more complicated and astronomically increasing presence of AI in a vast array of human communication and technological applications.If we can learn to give pause and allow our logical brain the chance to catch up with what all the above is triggering in our deeper recesses, we can put our limited resources of time and energy into sustaining and improving what does work, and in doing so, we limit feeding that ravenous urgency emitting from our survivalist side. To help the logic brain do so, we need to consistently marshal the emotional brain to give us perspective on how others might feel about the decisions we are making and hopefully mitigate the harm our decisions might cause. We need to persistently connect empathetically.We need a logical feedback loop inclusive of our emotional self, to lift our values and make commitments that help us to rise above selective and often blinding emotional gravitational wells of fear, especially toward others who are “not like us” and thus stimulate a natural suspicion until those differences are assessed as non-threatening.By shedding light on the full “human element” we can perhaps more effectively harness the power of social technology. I haven’t even addressed the emerging power of AI, nor of the next bump in the road, quantum computing, but they in their stride will be exponentially increasing factors in how we humans do politics, enterprise and every other kind of trajectory into the future. And although social media and AI may amplify our primal instincts in the current challenges they present, we should not lose sight of the incredible advancements and opportunities we have at our fingertips.Recognizing all our brain’s agencies in shaping critical aspects of our multitude of pathways going forward, could prevent the kind of miscalculations that the early builders of social media made, opening a primal, emotional can of worms that will take quite some effort for the foreseeable future to properly contain.Again, let's not lose hope. Let's embrace the opportunities we have while acknowledging the obstacles ahead. It is by being aware and noticing, and drawing upon all aspects of our essential human nature that will allow us to harness the best of our rational, emotional and survival capacities. In this way, we can steer ourselves towards a future that balances progress, well-being, and the ever unfolding wonders of human ingenuity.
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