Category Archives: digital media

November 6, 2019 · 10:27 am

Who’s Calling?

If you carry a smartphone, and nearly everyone does, you’ve probably had the experience of your caller ID showing a fake number that’s calling, often with a fake name or organization displaying. You might think it would require a great deal of technical knowledge to be able to spoof a number or generate a fake caller ID, but you’d be wrong. There are several apps available in the Android or Apple stores that will do just that for you. They’ll even change your voice and add fake, location-specific background noise. I’m not clear what the legitimate purpose of these apps is but for $8, you can set yourself up to run any number of scams if you’re so inclined.

It dawns on me, though, that many folks do exactly the same thing with their social media posts. Their food is picture-perfect. They’re always smiling and having fun, often in some unusual locale. Their party never stops. They never mention that they’re short on cash, their job is unfulfilling, and they’re slowing sinking into depression. I mean, what’s the point of being happy if you can’t post it? As with the phone apps, everything is not as it seems.

I think businesses can learn from this. I’m not suggesting that they use social media to bum us all out, but I am saying that being authentic and transparent will win the day. People appreciate being made spoof-proof, and that happens when they know the businesses they follow aren’t posting visual checks that their real-world business can’t cash. Are they using “influencers” to say nice things about their business when that person has never been in the place or used the product? Have they generated some FOMO by purchasing fake followers?

Don’t believe every number that pops up on your phone. The IRS isn’t calling you. Neither is the Social Security Administration. I’ve had my bank call me but I’ve never had them ask me for account information over the phone. Don’t believe that everything you see on social media is the whole story. It might have been the only good day in a month. And if you run a business, there are very few people who will patronize you based solely on some pretty Instagram photos. Dozens of review sites will keep you honest. People like to know who is calling for real. So be real.

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September 18, 2019 · 10:06 am

Living For The Likes

I’ve been meaning to mention the thing that Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube are all either testing or have deployed outside of the USA: killing the like count. They’re not eliminating the positive feedback (or any other kind) that people reading your content provide. What they’re doing is deemphasizing it by not showing total like counts. I, for one, am a fan and I’ll tell you why.

Actually, I won’t tell you. I’ll instead quote a Wired piece on the subject of living for the like and tailoring your message and tactic accordingly:

These tactics are attracting increased scrutiny, about their impact on the health of the internet and on society at large. Publicly measurable indicators—including views, retweets, or likes—are “one of the driving forces in radicalization,” says Whitney Phillips, a media manipulation researcher and associate professor at Syracuse University. It works both ways, she says. A user can be radicalized by consuming content and a creator can be radicalized by users’ reactions to their content, as they tailor their behavior around what garners the most interest from their audience.

Unfortunately for marketers, it also eliminates a metric that many marketers use to guide both their spending and their own content. While a minor disturbance in the marketing Force, they’ll get over it and move on to something else. My hope is that it destroys the “influencer” world. I’ve never been a fan and if this hastens its demise, I’m all for it. These are vanity metrics and not real measures of engagement which can be tracked in other ways. It’s also the final solution to those scam artists that sell fake “likes”.

The real issue for me is that many people – especially young ones – seem to develop feelings of inadequacy if they can’t generate sufficient “likes.” Maybe it even deters them from sharing anything in the first place and withdrawing.  For those of us that were there when all of this social stuff began, it’s been hard to watch it go from a great way to stay in touch with your friends and family to a weaponized space where trolls proliferate and it’s often hard to tell what’s real and what’s not.

I’m sure there are some selfish business reasons behind these moves while remaining hopeful that it’s really the start of the social media company’s coming to grips with all of the downsides of their worlds. When you like these screeds, do I see the counts? Sure. Do I change what I have written? In broad strokes, yes, but not based on the likes as much as on the overall readership and responses. In the 11 years I’ve been writing the screed, things such as a regular post on music (TunesDay!) and blogs about research (only rarely now) have gone because you don’t read them. Would I still write on those topics if I thought I could produce something that would interest you? Of course, likes be damned.

Live for today, not for the like.  You with me?

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June 12, 2019 · 10:36 am

Misaligned Interests

Did you happen to hear about (or read!) the NY Times article on how a young man got “sucked into the vortex” of radical videos on YouTube? It’s an interesting and scary read. It’s about how a person goes to YouTube to watch a video on one thing and ends up multiple videos later watching something completely different and often dangerous.

As the article says:

YouTube has been a godsend for hyper-partisans on all sides. It has allowed them to bypass traditional gatekeepers and broadcast their views to mainstream audiences and has helped once-obscure commentators build lucrative media businesses.

As usual, we’re not here to rant about the politics of these videos. It’s just as easy for the videos to be dangerous and non-political and even though YouTube specifically bans harmful or dangerous content, they can’t catch everything.

The real issue here is YouTube’s – and many other platforms’ – business model. They make money by keeping you engaged and the way that they do that is often via a recommendation engine. That engine uses an algorithm that rewards videos that have lengthy watch times by promoting them more often. Of course, the more engaged you are, the more ads you’ll see and that’s really the problem. Most of the popular platforms follow that business model and their interests don’t necessarily align with yours. They all have some sort of algorithm which on YouTube, as the article says, is

the software that determines which videos appear on users’ home pages and inside the “Up Next” sidebar next to a video that is playing. The algorithm is responsible for more than 70 percent of all time spent on the site.

Of course, you can turn off the recommendations. You can also delete your search history, pausing it going forward, and your watch history which will prevent the algorithm from determining what you usually watch. If you haven’t hidden the video suggestions (it’s in your settings) at least you’ll see lots of pretty neutral offerings. More importantly, you’ll take back control and realign their interests with yours.

It would be easy for YouTube and others to prevent a host of problems by killing off the recommendation engine but they never will because it’s the thing that drives their business model. In a perfect world, every business’ interests would align perfectly with those of their customers. Maybe it’s because the big platforms are out of alignment with us that there is so much anger directed toward them?

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