Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator (29 page)

GENETICALLY MODIFIED ENTERTAINMENT

LOLcats, the cute captioned kitty photos, are a viral mainstay that started as good-time fun but are much more than that now. It’s not enough that some may make you chuckle while others may not. A hit or a miss is a risk that must be avoided.

In May 2011, the Cheezburger Network—now also the powerhouse purveyor of fail photos, funny infographics, and daily links, with nearly a half-billion pageviews a month—hired a prominent data scientist. His job: to build a team to monitor every pageview and metric the sites get in order to shape the content around that information. That is, in his words, to engineer “more smiles for people per day.” A media empire paid by the smile can’t afford anything less.

I mean no disrespect. After all, I sold an Internet meme site I owned called
FailDogs.com
to the Cheezburger network. I knew I was never going to be as good as they were. I was just one person, and I couldn’t turn the fifteen minutes of fame from the site into a business. But Cheezburger could, by rendering users powerless to resist the urge to click. And they could do it with an irresistible veneer of cuteness masking their tactics.

Entire companies are now built on this model, exploiting the intersection between entertainment, impulse, and the profit margins of low-quality content. What they produce is not so much information but genetically modified information—pumped with steroids and hormones.

Demand Media, owner of eHow, Lance Armstrong’s
Livestrong.com
,
Cracked.com
,
Answerbag.com
, and others, specializes in this type of algorithmically created media. Relying heavily on computer algorithms and massive data dumps, they craft online perfection in the form of low-cost, click-heavy content that advertisers love. Like successive sieves, each refines the contents of the one that came before it; Demand’s automated editing systems pump out up to thirty thousand video clips and articles about trivial topics like baking cookies or “best of” lists. It generates millions of pageviews a day, and all of it sucks.

Their process is simple. First, Demand’s algorithm trolls the web for lucrative search terms. It dreams up a piece of media, such as a video tutorial or a brief article, that combines as many popular terms as possible and estimates a lifetime value (LTV) of its financial worth. A second algorithm examines this concept again, creating options for the most search-friendly and provocative title. These options are fed to a human editor trained in the same art, who selects the best one. Then another editor reviews the previous editor’s choice and optimizes it further, before settling on the final pitch for what should be created.

It is here, after being processed through secret computer algorithms and surgically modified by data analysts instead of editors, that the product is finally ready for writers. These writers are paid to follow the exacting prescriptions of more data-driven instructions. By the time the content is ready to be published, advertisements will have already been sold against it. These advertisers are Demand’s real audience.
³

When these content rules are not explicitly mandated by data specialists and analysts, they are implicit; bloggers know to default to what will spread and please the advertisers. People taught the logic of machines are Demand’s final sieve. As one Demand Media editor e-mailed to a new contributor whose first article was rejected for not following their surefire format for going viral: “The mistakes you’ve made indicate you’re new to Demand. This will become second nature as you learn the formats and the site requirements.”
⁴
It’s a second nature known well by YouTubers, LOL makers, podcasters, bloggers, and tweeters.

DRUGGED AND DELUSIONAL: THE RESULT

I remember seeing Jeff Jarvis, the blogger best known for his condescending (and unsolicited) advice to the newspaper industry, at a tech conference once. He sat down next to me, ostensibly to watch and listen to the talk. Not once did he look up from his laptop. He tapped away the entire time, first on Twitter, then on Facebook, then moderating comments on his blog, and on and on, completely oblivious to the world. It struck me then that whatever I decided to do with the rest of my life, I did not want to end up like him. Because at the end of the talk, Jarvis got up and spoke during the panel’s Q&A, addressing the speakers as well as the audience. In the world of the web, why should not paying attention preclude you from getting your say?

That’s what web culture does to you. Psychologists call this the “narcotizing dysfunction,” when people come to mistake the busyness of the media with real knowledge, and confuse spending time consuming that with doing something. In 1948, long before the louder, faster, and busier world of Twitter and social media, Paul Lazarsfeld and Robert Merton wrote:

The interested and informed citizen can congratulate himself on his lofty state of interest and information and neglect to see that he has abstained from decision and action. In short, he takes his secondary contact with the world of political reality, his reading and listening and thinking, as a vicarious performance…. He is concerned. He is informed. And he has all sorts of ideas as to what should be done. But, after he has gotten through his dinner and after he has listened to his favored radio programs and after he has read his second newspaper of the day, it is really time for bed.
⁵

This is the exact reaction that web content is designed to produce. To keep you so caught up and consumed with the bubble that you don’t even realize you’re in one. The more time kids spend online, studies show, the worse their grades are. According to Nielson, active social networkers are 26 percent
more
likely to give their opinion on politics and current events off-line, even though they are exactly the people whose opinions should matter the least.

“Talkativeness is afraid of the silence which reveals its emptiness,” Kierkegaard once said. Now you know why sharing, commenting, clicking, and participating are pushed so strongly by blogs and entertainment sites. They don’t want silence. No wonder blogs auto refresh with new material every thirty seconds. Of course they want to send updates to your mobile phone and include you on e-mail alerts. If the users stops for even a second, they may see what is really going on. And then the business model would fall apart.

XVI

THE LINK ECONOMY

THE LEVERAGED ILLUSION OF SOURCING

IN 2010, AFTER MANY YEARS OF SUCCESSFULLY TRADING bogus stories up the chain, I was in the ironic position of desperately trying to stop it from happening—at the highest of levels: CNN. It was more than just karma. When you feed the monster as I had, it will eventually come back and attack you.

This was the situation: A disgruntled store manager sent e-mails to
Gawker
“exposing” what he or she claimed were discriminatory hiring practices at American Apparel. Why
Gawker
? Because he or she knew that
Gawker
loved to write about the company—snarky blog coverage I had encouraged both directly and covertly in the past. The manager alleged that the company refused to hire “ugly people,” and supposedly enforced this policy via photographs sent to corporate headquarters.
Gawker
ate it up.

The manager’s anonymous e-mails, along with a handful of “leaked documents” about American Apparel’s dress code, were published on the site as proof that the accusations were true. There was only one problem. Not only were the practices
not
discriminatory—legally or morally—but they were not even new. The same dress code had been written about nearly a year earlier by other blogs.

More important, asking for a photograph of a retail applicants’ personal style was far from invasive surveillance. American Apparel isn’t Panopticon. The company was simply looking to make sure that managers hired the kind of real people who shopped in our stores—expressly reducing the pressure for cosmetic alterations like breast augmentation, heavy makeup, tattoos, piercing, plucking, hair dying, and straightening that most retailers actually do select for. We were specifically trying to
reduce
discrimination. Not that the leaked documents were some smoking gun, anyway. What
Gawker
had was a hodge-podge of unsanctioned and unverified notes from low-level employees, style advice from the creative department, and little else.

The controversy was a farce. The only source was the anonymously complaining ex-employee, and even then their claims were significantly exaggerated by the sites that wrote about them. I watched as this initial report from
Gawker
spread from sites across the news spectrum, getting bigger and more outrageous with each new mention. Fashion blogs turned the accusations into proven fact; the anonymous words of the ex-employee became “officially stated policy” on others. Stock blogs “analyzed” the effect the policy would have on the stock price. Other news blogs rolled up other allegations to take the story to new levels—like remarks supposedly overheard by chattering retail employees that they represented as company statements.