Overview

In a world where information is abundant, where we are overloaded and overwhelmed with information on a daily basis, attention is the scarcity (Caulfield).

Algorithms are being used by social media platforms and news organizations to keep our attention focused on their websites. These and other digital platforms have discovered that the best way to keep us engaged with their websites is to promote sensational, divisive, or outrage-inducing content. Emotional responses are what keep us clicking, liking, commenting, and sharing—when trying to capture attention, our anger, fear and disgust are a signal in the noise. “People tend to react more to inputs that land low on the brainstem. Fear and anger produce a lot more engagement and sharing than joy. The result is that the algorithms favor sensational content over substance” (McNamee).

“Engagement”

Tobias Rose-Stockwell, a writer and technologist focused on ethical design, explains how emotional reactions are strong indicators of engagement, and how divisive content that captures our attention will be shown in our feeds first. We then share our moral judgments with our own followers, creating what he calls “outrage cascades” that dominate our conversations online.

Indeed, in their report on “Information Disorder,” researchers Wardle and Derakhshan emphasize that: “Social networks are driven by the sharing of emotional content. The architecture of these sites is designed such that every time a user posts content—and it is liked, commented upon or shared further— their brain releases a tiny hit of dopamine (13).

The most notable example of this idea? Most of our content feeds and timelines are no longer sorted chronologically or by relevance. Instead, the decision about which content to show us is instead based on how likely we are to engage with it.