The reason why news media is so polarizing...
Dec 14, 2021 · 3 mins read
0
Share
The attention economy
Political news used to be packaged alongside everything else: sports, entertainment, etc. If you watched TV or read a newspaper, it was hard to avoid. Then something interesting happened…
Save
Share
A new era of choice meant that you could take a deep dive into your favorite topics and ignore everything else. This divided the media landscape into the interested and the uninterested.
Save
Share
As the competition for people’s attention spans intensified, the internet got better at understanding what we like and giving us more of it.
Save
Share
Being interested in politics essentially means taking sides, as the ideological differences between parties are so great that they’re often defined as polar opposites (left vs. right).
Save
Share
So if you were interested in politics, you started seeing online content with the same underlying message: “This is why your side is right.”
Save
Share
Outrage, it turns out, attracts lots of clicks – and virality is the name of the game when it comes to news media.
Save
Share
Social media platforms allow us to curate a public-facing image: an avatar of what we believe in and stand for.
Save
Share
Since sharing something online is like making a statement about what group we belong to (and don’t belong to), there’s little appetite for timid stories. Attention-grabbing stuff is what wins out.
Save
Share
As a result, the internet’s “economy of attention” began to reproduce basic social dynamics online: it’s easier to make a new friend when you’re united against a common enemy.
Save
Share
But there’s also a glaring downside to this: the more connected we are to an identity or group, the harder it is to reconsider our position. We start shutting out the possibility of being wrong.
Save
Share
0