Athena: Futility

Dear Augustine,
It's five days before the election now, and every few years it seems like things get crazier and crazier. But it's not even just elections anymore, there are so many things that just get incredibly overblown in all sorts of ways even in a non-election season. Many of them are politically-related, but certainly not all.

There's a certain part of me that can't wait for November 9th--when we'll get a hint of reprieve from the endless political ads, flyers, Facebook rants, and articles. And I live in a battleground state and on a state border--which means ads are non-stop, some of them are even for my neighboring state...about issues and contests where I cannot even have a say. It's overwhelming, ubiquitous, and...depressing.

I think what frustrates me sometimes is that it seems like there is no realistic way out of the absolute mess that we're in--on so many levels. I was chatting with a friend the other day about the 'news', and while it absolutely seems reasonable to get frustrated by what qualifies for 'news' nowadays...I feel like we often neglect the part we play in the cycle as well. The news has changed drastically over the past few decades--we can talk about the 24-hr news cycle, the internet, the way funding has changed, etc. There are so many factors at play that it would be impossible to cover them all, but it seems like one of the biggest problematic areas to me is how desperate newspapers are to get views, clicks, and engagements. In a certain sense, they have to cover things or title them in a way that is going to draw attention, and they have so much more competition now than they ever did before. They need the ad revenue and engagement to survive and continue in their business...and clickbait articles and titles, or "bombshells" and "surprises" that capitalize on ambiguity, or inflammatory reporting as opposed to lengthy, nuanced discussion gets more attention. And that's our fault too--we fall prey to these things, we have our guilty pleasure-reading or we just can't help ourselves from clicking on that ridiculous story to call it out...and we play into the cycle ourselves. And even if we could control our clicks, reduce our propensity to fall for the shallow, simplistic, gimmicky "stories"...we know that the vast majority of our fellow citizens won't. So news orgs will continue to play into that and design things to more effectively prey on our illogical sensibilities in new and more efficient ways, and we'll demand more of these crap articles, which will get published more and more, and the cycle continues.

There's no real incentive on a large scale to change the model--it's not like you can have a government-funded news org, because that would come with its own host of problems. And even if you could have a publicly funded org that somehow wasn't associated with a government...you couldn't get rid of the private sector competition, which would either push the publicly-funded one out of existence or prompt it to become just as problematic as all the rest.

And this is a rant of sorts, but it's largely because it feels like things are futile--like there's no way of ever really incentivizing change when you can only control your own behavior. And maybe not even that all the time. And thus I end up in my own endless cycle of cynicism, ranting, and then futility.

+Athena