2025: A Dystopic Media Landscape

Predictions are only as good at the data you have to work with, and even then they are only predictions. There are so many factors that will impact the media landscape in the next 10 years: mergers and acquisitions, audience preferences, political regime changes and new laws, the innovation of new technologies, and the list goes on.

The fact of the matter is, the way things are going right now, all media are increasingly and blatantly becoming marketplaces for consumers to meet advertisers. By 2025, I think there will be two very different Internet experiences. A completely free version of the web which comes with free hardware, but that constantly harasses people with advertisements. This will probably be marketed to low income people.

There will also be a highly premium version of the Internet that allows the elite to pay for content and not have to deal with advertisements (as much). 

Newspapers and even digital native news media outlets will be less relevant for news and information, as in the next 10 years people will grow increasingly tired of their hawking of advertisements. 

Instead, we'll go back to a model of advocacy journalism organizations producing important investigative stories. We're seeing this already happening with the rise of ProPublica, Marshall Project, and the Texas Tribune. Non-profits will begin commissioning their own investigative units as social issues become more intense. 

News media's incessant need for advertising profits will be its downfall, and will give rise to media outlets that educate people through well-thought out stories rather than an incompetent barrage of content that is great for profit but horrible for educating the public. 

Ethics and Audiences

The readings this week were really fascinating. I had not read a full autopsy of the Facebook/Cornell study, and the Atlantic's article delivered!

The Atlantic piece offers both a critique of Facebook users for being too over the top, and Facebook/Cornell for being surreptitious and shady. It's interesting to see users/audiences have such vehement reactions to the study, however, people didn't actually leave. Facebook continues to grow. The research Facebook is doing should give audiences pause. Though Facebook claims to have not read personal messages of people in the study, it is manipulating users' experiences as they not only engage with content but with each other. I think this is what I find most ethically questionable. Facebook's algorithm has the power to manipulate our relationships with our family, friends. Yes, it may be useful to helping us connect with one another, but now that the company is a publicly trading entity, its focus has shifted to serving its shareholders. The Huffington Post article describes how Facebook may have impacted an election, and though on the face encouraging people to vote is a positive thing, I think audiences should be weary that a company like Facebook can influence who we vote for. Facebook is not simply a tech company, but also prescribes to certain political beliefs.

On the other hand, it is really interesting to see the strong reactions from Facebook users. We are seemingly manipulated every day by similar A/B tests from our cable and mobile providers, and perhaps even the people at the Belo coffee shop. There appears to be a strong disconnect with people understanding what Facebook provides and what Facebook is. And when its true colors are brightly lit, people freak out en masse. This reaction is ephemeral as people continue using Facebook's service. Perhaps if we paid for Facebook, there may be a different reaction?

If you build it, they may not come

After reading this week's articles, I couldn't help but wonder why the legacy newspapers don't listen to their customer bases more? As Chyi (2015) points out, "if digital natives are prone to news in digital formats, they should have dropped the print edition of their campus newspaper by 2011. However, results collected through a national survey of nearly 200 U.S. college newspaper advisers indicated that the print edition reached nearly twice as many readers as the Web edition on a given day." I think this example is indicative of newspapers not learning from their loyal readership.

On the other hand the digital native publications don't have to play by the same rules. They don't have long-standing guilds (though some now have unions) to factor in to their plans or print operations. They were made specifically for the web and have more or less mastered the art of making money on digital content: Make a lot of stuff, make it cheap, and blur the lines between your content and the advertisements. And of course, make sense of your analytics, more specifically what your customers are demanding.

Finally a guide to study Twitter!

I really appreciated Bruns & Stieglitz's "how to" guide in studying Twitter. I often struggle to think of Twitter as a text or a space I want to study, b/c I'm not sure where to begin my research questions. However, this piece was exactly what I needed! Ok now for more scholarly notes.

1.) It was really interesting to see how few people within the Pew study were on Twitter, and even a smaller percentage were active on Twitter. Additionally I found it very interesting that, "tweets from news media make up a significant portion of a user's feed." I'm curious to know if this deluge of content in the form of story promotion, retweeting stories, up cycling old content from news organizations devalues their social currency with audiences. In a democratized space such as Twitter at what point do audiences see the news as noise?

2.) Finally, if you haven't all read the New York Time's 12 page memo, Our Path Forward, I suggest you take a look. They've hit 1 million paying digital subscribers and are sharing their plan forward. This line stuck out to me and I believe it is very relevant to our class: "Young readers were the first to shift to mobile and the first to embrace social platforms, and they have become reliable first indicators of major trends that ultimately affect our entire audience."

Big Data and Audience Research

I agree with Chris Anderson's oversimplified argument that big data has ushered the end of the scientific method. Though I imagine in the 7 years following his blog post his position has possibly evolved, his article assumes that big data is simply available at our disposal. However, "big data," especially related to to audiences is not easily at the hands of researchers. It sits behind the gated server walls of Facebook, it needs to be munged and reorganized, and there is a relatively high level of human capital that goes in to analyzing this big data. The other thing to note about audience data is that natural language processing of peoples' conversations, social media postings, etc., is still relatively crude. Machine language and NLP have come a long way but in order to get high level results isn't a cake walk.

I think having access to large datasets is excellent, but as Jen Schradie of UC Berkeley wrote in this blog post , "I am not suggesting fishing expeditions in lieu of hypothesis testing nor any Anderson-esque junking of the scientific method. The numbers do not speak for themselves. Instead, it is our job as social scientists to understand the difference between the data, whatever its size, and the method, whatever that may be." I agree with Schradie. We can't simply starting poking at the data. Understanding a group of people, a place, a set of ideas and having some type of expertise is essential otherwise we lack the cultural capital to really engage the "big data" we've collected. 

Connecting Brands with Consumers

I think it's very important for scholars to read texts like Funk's chapter 5, to really understand the motivations and "shop talk," of the media environments they are studying. Funk does an excellent job of laying out Facebook's advertising ecosystem as well as best practices for brands to reach potential audiences (of course this is a bit dated as Jina pointed out). Here's a few things that stood out to me: 

1.) Funk makes an important point that it isn't good enough for brands to just dump money in to a Facebook ad campaign and expect it to work. There is so much nuance and many layers to actually achieving something with your campaign. A 2 year old company with 1000 likes to their fan page approach Facebook advertising much different than a Fortune 500 company. 

2.) It was fascinating to read that 90% of people who like a fan page never actually return and thus brands have to pump out messages through their newsfeed. I found it interesting that Facebook doesn't actually let all those messages go through, but plays the role of gatekeeper to ensure roughly 16% of those messages get to its users. This is with good reason of course. If users feel like they are just getting bombarded with ads there is more incentive to leave the platform because the user experience is getting bad. Then everyone essentially loses. Facebook as we've seen in recent years has gotten backlash several times in recent years for policy changes, though it's important to note that people have never left in droves. 

3.) This chapter also made me reflect on the complete disconnect I have with the digital brands I purchase goods from. I often care about one thing: Am I getting the best deal? However, brands are trying to use spaces like Facebook to tell me their story and why they are important to my life. Facebook limits the amount of text they can use, how many times they can connect with me, and also these brands are charged just to interact with me. Essentially the brands are playing baseball with broken bats in hopes of hitting a home run. I do not go to a brand's website from Facebook. Generally speaking, I go to Retailmenot or some other coupon site to find a coupon, find the good on the brand's site, apply the coupon, and then check out. 

Reflecting on the iab. document, what stood out to me was the metrics being used to track audiences (pages 8-10). All of the measures are  quantitative with exception to social listening. I understand psychological and advertising research are largely predicated on quantitative research, but I think it is important to observe peoples' behaviors while they are making decisions regarding brands.