Noise Cancelling

Do you remember clickbaiting? In the two millennia, this was a vicious way to attract attention. The practice was simple: assign an exciting teaser to a boring article. That will get people excited and increase engagement. What was criticized by quality journalism then is the standard today.

The noise and irrelevance of online content has reached a new high. The media landscape has changed even further, but our brains hasn’t. Of course we would like the media to change. Down level a bit. But we know this is not going to happen.

Instead we have to adapt. People aware of this problem call for more media competence. The ability to detect and filter fake news, fact check or simply ignore information. However, I don’t we should call for the individual responsibility. This is has been tried time and time again.

I propose that we should simply let it happen, but be aware of the new emergent properties. People will spoil their brains with toxic social media, but unconsciously they we will develop new ways to filter information (hopefully).

Making your mind up what task or information has priority is difficult. With a lot of noise I expect that the ability to prioritize and thus filter irrelevant information will improve drastically.