We are not their customers

In 1996 I read James Fallows’ Why Americans Hate the Media. It was one of those experiences that alters where you stand as you look at something. Since you are standing in a different place, what you are looking at looks different. It’s what we mean, I guess, when someone has said something thoughtful and true and you say, “Well, that gives me a different perspective on the matter."

I never saw The Media quite the same way again.

It didn’t instantly transport me to the view I have of it now, but it started the process of asking questions that I hadn’t even known were questions before. And it started a fascination with the question of how do we know what we think we know? How close is what we think we know to reality?

I should add that when I read it I was teaching a class in critical thinking. And sometime not long after I reread Vance Packard’s The Hidden Persuaders, written in 1957.

I think a lot of things about the media these days, but all of what I think about it is shaped by what I think is a fundamental fact that’s often missed - we are not their customers.

So many discussions of the media about how frustrating, infuriating, outmoded, misleading, shallow, etc it is – and why we hate it - end up with someone saying, well, if they can’t deliver what their customers want, we’ll stop buying.

Note the “we.” And that’s the problem. We are not their customers.

The customers of a business are the ones who literally buy the product, who hand over money for a good or a service. We may hand over fifty cents for a newspaper or a few dollars for a magazine, but any newspaper or magazine publisher will tell you that the income from subscriptions and newstands won’t keep the lights on. And we get radio and TV news for free. We may pay a cable bill, but Time Warner or Comcast aren’t forking over millions of dollars to keep NBC or Fox News in business.

Who are their customers, who pays them, for what service?

Advertisers. Other businesses, who enlist their help to recruit customers for their business.

So what is The Media selling?

Not the Nightly News, or Morning Joe, or American Idol. They’re selling eyeballs (print, TV) or ears (radio), which is shorthand for our attention.

They’re selling us. To their advertisers.

Consider a commercial fisherman, trawling for cod or tuna. The fish are not their customers. The wholesalers who buy their catch are their customers.

We are the fish. The newspaper and magazine stories, the TV and radio programs are the bait, not the product. Our attention is the product, what is being sold.

If mass media is in trouble now, if it’s not selling what their customers (advertisers) want to buy, it’s because more and more of us fish are not finding the bait as tasty as we used to. Do we really want to demand that they provide better bait? Or do we start to ask ourselves if we want to be sold?

[posted on 8/1/10]

How we see others

When I started this blog, I'd just stumbled on Emily Pronin's paper How We See Ourselves and How We See Others. Short version of some of what she had to say - when we judge others, all we have to go on is what we see and hear. When we judge ourselves we consider all of our thoughts, emotions, experience, and so on. We don't understand why they say and do the things they do. We don't know what they were thinking, what they really meant. So we tend to be harsher with others than with ourselves. 

When I wrote that last post, everything I was feeling was saturated in the sense of loss. Jerry's gone. Lowell is gone. And those I loved, who I miss every day. Mother, best friend. That guy who was technically my husband, and truly my friend. Not to mention the father of my child. 

While I was at Threadgill's earnestly discussing healthcare reform, it started raining. I ran out to my car to close my windows and as I was walking back, I was thinking about the Armadillo, which was right . . . over there. Just a few yards away from where I was walking just then. The next night, as I was watching Jerry and Lowell on my laptop, it was one of those moments when a memory is so real for a little while that it's as if it is happening right now. Maybe it felt so real because just the night before I'd been standing in the same place. The same dirt, the grass, the pavement. Right there. 

The stage at the Armadillo had an overhang in the front - it was about four feet off the floor and there was a space under the overhang about two or three feet wide. I used to crawl under it and then pop up right in front of the crowd, often resting my elbows on the stage itself as the band played. I rationalized that it wasn't totally rude since I was short, and small, so almost anyone could see over me, and I didn't take up much space. 

Anyway, I remember being so close to both Jerry Garcia and Lowell George as they played that I could almost reach out and touch them. In my mind and my memory, they are still right there, in front of me, alive. Making music. Loud. And the music is vibrating all through me and I'm dancing and feeling just so damn lucky to be there, to feel the music they're making. The losses, the deaths, of the last ten years of my life. Watching and remembering two musicians that I didn't know, but remembered fondly for how much fun they had rocking out and glad they shared it with me and everyone else who loved their music. And of course I can't watch them without thinking - they're gone now. 

It's a damn short movie

How'd we ever get here? 

Just us kids hangin' out today 

Watchin' our long hair turnin' gray 

Not so skinny maybe not so free 

Not so many as we used to be

And of course that led me to think of the ones close to me who are also gone now. I started to write - isn't it strange that they're gone and I'm still here. The song that was in my head as I was writing wasn't a Grateful Dead song or a Little Feat song. It was James McMurtry's Just Us Kids.

But I didn't write it. Because . . . it's so obvious. Maybe it's not. We judge each other harshly because we don't see the things that are so obvious to them that they don't say them out loud.

Eight biases - the first four

Emily Pronin's paper, "The Bias Blind Spot," describes three studies which attempt to identify the reason that people consistently view others as more biased than themselves. The first study began with having participants read a booklet describing eight specific biases. Some I recognized, some I didn't. So here are brief descriptions of four of the eight biases described in the booklet (I'll do the next four another time):

1. The self-serving bias - attributing one's successes to one's own personal attributes or effort, but one's failures to external forces beyond one's control. "I avoided the accident because I am a good driver and reacted quickly. I had the wreck because the rainy street was slick."

2. Choice-supportive bias - remembering mainly the positive qualities about a choice made and mainly the negative qualities about the choice not made. "I stayed home Friday night because I was really tired. It felt good to just relax for a change. I had a great weekend because I had a lot of energy. The party I chose not to go to was too far away. Several of the people who were going to be there are annoying and boring. I would have spent most of Saturday morning with a hangover if I'd gone." (Reduces the dissonance of the possibility that the choice not made would have actually been better. Coulda been a great party.)

3. The halo effect - the tendency to see additional positive qualities in a person or object after noticing one positive quality (or additional negative qualities after noticing one negative one). If someone strikes you as friendly or attractive on first meeting, you're more likely to judge them as intelligent, or talented, or industrious, etc. than if the first thing you noticed about them was that they are physically unappealing, or have a snobbish attitude. Even though an ugly or snobbish person may be as intelligent, talented, or industrious (or even more so) as the friendly, attractive person.

4. Pronin calls the fourth bias "biased assimilation of new information." I think she is referring to what is commonly called confirmation bias. (One of my favorites.) New information that confirms one's current opinions or understanding is considered to be very important, highly relevant, and is remembered for a long time. Information that contradicts one's beliefs is dismissed as unimportant or the rare exception - and often promptly forgotten. One particularly interesting effect of this bias is that when people are presented with (true) information that reveals that a deeply held belief is, in fact, false, more often than not they will not only not change their (false) opinion - they will embrace it more strongly.

And also

When I said I could spend a year thinking about this paper, I should add that this paper, too, is an essential part of what Pronin has to say.

How We See Ourselves and How We See Others

You know, I really love the internet. I mean, I really love it. I'm one of those who thinks it will change everything in ways that we are just beginning to glimpse. And that, overall, those changes will be for the better.

But one of its effects is to make it hard for me to write. I expect I'm hardly unique in this, but I have no way to be sure - yet.

Decades ago, I'd have what I thought was a brilliant idea or a profound insight and I couldn't wait to write it down. Such brilliance must be preserved!

But now . . . whatever I'm thinking, before I have a chance to write it down, I discover that someone else already has. And furthermore, they've thought it out in much more depth and expressed it much better than I could. So I lose interest in writing my own thoughts. I mean, what's the point of saying something that's unoriginal, poorly expressed, and shallow - that is, my thoughts on the matter.

I started this particular blog to have a place to write down my thoughts on how we see each other, the stories we tell ourselves about the people around us and how that affects what we choose to do. And how those choices shape our lives and the lives of those same people that we make stories about.

Then I come across How We See Ourselves and How We See Others.

Sigh.

I could spend a year thinking about this paper.

It’s all about the narrative

Sometimes I end up with a phrase stuck in my head that seems to answer a question that I’ve been thinking about, puzzling over, vexing myself to try to figure out for a long time – years even. There’s an aha! That’s IT!

For a long time it was, “The one thing that trumps everything else is the need to feel special.” Maybe I’ll make another blog about that one some day.

But right now, I’m fixated on The Narrative. Or narratives. That is, the stories we tell ourselves. The ones that make sense out of whatever we’re experiencing or thinking. That have a beginning, middle, and end. A plot. That have prototypical characters. Stories that “come out.” As in, “how did it come out?” Did it have a happy ending? Did the good guys win? Or was it one of those bleak ones, where you can’t win, and the point of the story is to make clear that you can’t?

The essential part is that the story makes sense. It’s logical.

And of course, it’s almost always wrong.

As my sister Fredda said, “Well, if it’s about people, and it makes sense, it’s guaranteed to be wrong. People don’t make sense.”

What she said.