Divergent Factual Realities: How the Parasite Drives Polarization

-- By AlexanderLandyshev - 13 Oct 2022

The use of misinformation as propaganda to achieve political influence, sway public opinion, or exercise control over populations is by no means a unique artifact of the 21st century. Roman emperors printed exaltations of the state on currency, war propaganda flyers have rallied young people to enlist in wars both modern and ancient, and historical revisionism has continued to be employed by unsavory characters in the modern day, in efforts to legitimize both governments and individual figures with gruesome pasts. But with the advent of the parasite, misinformation within the media landscape has seen a shift not simply in magnitude, but in kind as well. This shift has contributed to the continued atomization of individuals, who increasingly express in-group preferences. The target at the end of such a trajectory does not appear encouraging; individuals are sequestered into private bubbles containing only ideas with which they are completely comfortable, and insulated from any potential challenges to their worldview, regardless of any underlying factual reality. However, it does appear that steps can be taken to counteract this seemingly untenable position we find ourselves entrenched in.

The Changing Landscape in Media Consumption

First, it is necessary to discuss the state of modern media, and how it differs from a pre-digital era. Foremost is the question of scale. The modern media landscape dwarves anything that could have been previously envisioned. The current advertising media market size of the internet is greater than all other media forms combined and doubled, showing the dominance of digital media in todays information marketplace.https://www.marketingcharts.com/featured-226320. Average news media consumption appears to be increasing, with those consuming news media online primarily driving the trends, and cable news falling behind as the source of choice. https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2010/09/12/americans-spending-more-time-following-the-news/. This difference in media preference is particularly visible across generational divides, as up to 90% of adults aged 18-34 report consuming daily news primarily through online only sources. https://www.statista.com/statistics/717651/most-popular-news-platforms/

I don't understand why you put the URLs in the text, which is ugly and disruptive to reading, rather than putting the hyperlinks behing textual anchors, the way writing for the Web usually works. It's just a matter of moving your double-brackets around.

Beyond the increased scale of the current media landscape, the nature of the coverage has changed drastically and substantively over time. The first historical shift occurring during the rise of cable news, with 24/7 reporting, increased conglomeration of media corporations, and a higher focus on advertising revenue, subjective opinion based reporting that used more partisan language became the norm. https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR2960.html. However, with the modern shift to a digital news dominated landscape, the trend established during the shift to cable news has accelerated, both reflecting and propelling the polarization of the public. (Id., See Also https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2014/06/12/political-polarization-in-the-american-public/)

Such are the changes in degree that the information landscape has undergone with the introduction of digital news. However, when we add the consideration of the parasite into the mix, an unsettling reality begins to emerge.

Propagation by Preference

Prior to the introduction of the parasite with the Mind of God, news media curation was primarily driven from the perspective of the producer. Newspapers and TV stations (to a lesser extent) would be obligated to attempt to estimate what would drive viewership in order to stay competitive, and were fundamentally limited in the range of products that could be delivered to the end user. However, with the increase in volume of media, the shift to digital consumption, and increased polar and partisan coverage, the parasite has a wide base of stories and media to choose from. Furthermore, because of its personal information gathering capabilities, the parasite is capable of individual media curation like never before. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2451958822000872. No social media feed is identical, no news feed is the same; all are now curated algorithmically to appeal maximally to the individual consuming them, based on collected demographic and suer data. And while the current recommendations are quite good at increasing engagement, the are historically (and currently) not very proficient in isolating media by truthfulness. https://www.onenought.one/post/fake-news-and-social-media-algorithms. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/nov/18/social-media-creating-virus-of-lies-says-nobel-winner-maria-ressa.

In some senses, this is to be expected, people have a natural propensity to share sensational and provocative media, and the human brain itself is not adapted to be a truth-seeking apparatus. https://www.nature.com/articles/s44159-021-00006-y. Examples abound, but particularly impactful and appealing ones revolve around public skepticism of settled questions of scientific fact; most recently vaccine skepticism being the most damaging. https://cca-reports.ca/reports/the-socioeconomic-impacts-of-health-and-science-misinformation/. It is reasonable to expect this effect to translate to other aspects of online engagement, beyond factual reporting to areas that are more socially oriented. Given the human tendency to seek out affirming or pleasurable content, and the propensity to avoid adversarial or challenging content, it is expected that social groups emerge out of this environment with increasingly homogenized thought and preference. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jan/13/self-segregation-military-facebook-college-diversity.

Return to Reality; Individually, Systemically

Considering the novelty of this issue as applied to the parasite with the Mind of God, and the general lack of public interest in meticulously pursuing truthful information, existing implementations of systemic solutions are unfortunately few and far between. One that comes to mind most recently, and perhaps incorporates some of the original anarchistic values found in the creation of Wikipedia, is the community notes system on X, formerly known as twitter. The system allows community users to add context below tweets that may be missing information or misleading, however the visibility of such corrections has been low thus far, and the requirement that notes achieve consensus from users from all political sides may constitute a systemic flaw. https://www.poynter.org/fact-checking/2023/why-twitters-community-notes-feature-mostly-fails-to-combat-misinformation/. I plan to continue updating this article with novel and potentially successful efforts to address this growing issue, so please stay tuned!

I think the way to improve this piece is to cut back on the hype-inclusion. "Community Notes" as Wikipedia? That sort of evanescent analogy lasted as long as the thing itself: Community Notes has already failed. The problem is that technical analogy is not cultural similarity.

Instead of links floating by (particularly in the logjam form of URLs embedded in the text) we need clearer analysis. Your version of the parasite is just a metaphor, as your "misinformation" is, or your "media environment." Rather than asking an actual question, "what is happening to the human mind, to the nature of thought?" you ask a question fabricated from the political journalism and media chatter of the moment, "why is there 'polarization'?"

To understand what the actual parasite in our real nervous system is doing to the reality of human thought, start with yourself. You are a highly capable and motivated learner, pursuing a subject that interests you. I have assigned two books, Zuboff's Age of Surveillance Capitalism and Turkle's Alone Together, both of which are directly relevant and indeed provide necessary fundamental components of the ideas you are trying to flesh out. But the text of your draft shows that you haven't been in contact with either. You don't read long books. Reading long involves relationship of reader, time, and text. The required interiority has largely disappeared, like bleached coral, to the attention-grabbing of the parasite. You are conditioned to use reading devices that preclude the relationship between extended text and reader that books, even new but always if used, create. What you use in your writing isn't the depth of your reading---all your resonance of allusion gained over a lifetime of thoughtful reading---but the froth of the current web, the Google first page, the timeline. The cumulative result is the driving out of literary and intellectual complexity: the big stuff never gets read. Despite all the hours consumed, you will never read a fraction of what was the literary, historical, philosophical endowment of a well-read intellectual in the late 20th century. If I don't nag you now, you'll complete the course without ever reading the books assigned, let alone all the other works we and they refer to, or any of what they're based on.

This problem isn't misinformation. It's dementation---the active undermining of our intellectual constitution by the metabolic effect of the parasite on our physical and psychological systems. If its symptoms are to be found even in you, even here, they are far more ramified and more subtle, as well as more powerful, than the epiphenomena of opinion polling.

The way to improve the draft, I think, is therefore to get in touch with the writers who have teaching rather than clicks to offer, and to build outward from the basic issues rather than heading straight for the bubbles on the surface.