(2021-04-18) Torenberg How The Internet Ate Media

Erik Torenberg: How the Internet Ate Media. Many people long for a world pre-Twitter, where we all had a shared sense of reality, but that world isn’t coming back. We’ll discuss why in this piece.

The book Infamous Scribblers chronicles the history of the news business and makes the case that the fragmentation we see in media today has been the norm throughout history, and the consolidation of the last 50 years was the aberration.

Social media increased the number of voices in the public sphere, which also increased the number of truths and versions of reality someone could believe.

As a result, we see more distrust in society because we can’t seem to reconcile which version of reality is more “true” than another.

in 2010, Facebook expanded well beyond colleges, and now suddenly all these people could speak who could never speak to each before. Now we knew what everyone was thinking all the time, and it was problematic.

Before social media, a wide swath of the population was just utterly ignored by traditional print/audio/visual media — they never heard what each other had to think. This was the original filter bubble.

Martin Gurri has cataloged the different revolutions in information, detailing each one's social impacts.

Twitter is an interesting case study, because it’s basically eaten all of media.

People sometimes say "Twitter isn't the real world", which is to say that activity on Twitter is just a small % of the population

Whoever you think influences the "real world" — journalists, media companies, educators — they're all strongly influenced by Twitter.

To understand this, a friend gave me the framework of the "OODA Loop"

the idea being the faster you move through the loop, the harder it is for your opponent to understand reality, thus hurting their decision making ability

one of my theories is that the internet offers a hyper-accelerated OODA loop, and Twitter is the fastest loop across the entire internet

TV & newspapers are too slow. By the time they've aired, their stories are already old news. Twitter is always more up to date

So that begs the question: was pre-internet journalism better than what we see today?

the same social media platforms that changed the business of journalism also changed our perceptions of it.

The fragmentation will lead to new cultures, ways of thinking, new ideas, and ultimately more cultural innovation.

the internet ate media, and there’s no going back.