“Never Become The Person Your Twitter Followers Want You To Be”

Hunter Walk:

Don’t be egged on by the adrenaline rush of online fights or the euphoria of being applauded. Don’t measure your success by the popularity of what you say or the attention it receives. If you do, you’ll slowly be pulled to the extremes of any position.

I’m just saying check yourself that you are expressing what *you* care about and not just cooking up meals for an audience. You don’t need to drag yourself into the mud with bad faith repliers. And you don’t need to put more hate or anger into the world over stupid shit.

Why people keep falling for viral hoaxes

Ars Technica:

When confronted with new information, humans don’t always do the logical thing and evaluate it on its own merits, Phillips says. Instead, we often make snap decisions based on how the information adheres with our existing worldviews.

If the story pushed by a meme or hoax fits in a way that feels like a coherent narrative to a critical mass of people, it’s game over, says Phillips.

People who read Facebook article previews think they know more than they actually do

Orang yang membaca preview artikel di Facebook cenderung berpikir kalau mereka tahu banyak.

Dikutip dari journals.sagepub.com:

Despite the fact that the average social media user only clicks on a small fraction of political content available in their News Feed, social media use correlates with political knowledge. From where, then, does this knowledge come? We argue that Facebook’s News Feed itself, with its short article previews, provides enough political information for learning to occur. However, this learning comes with an additional consequence: audiences who only read article previews think they know more than they actually do, especially individuals who are motivated to seek emotions.

Baca judul? +1 poin.

Baca ringkasan/preview artikel di bawah judul? +100 poin.

Is Sharing Your Feelings Always Healthy?

Markham Heid via Medium:

“Emotions are contagious, and you can impact the emotions of others by sharing how you feel,” Caruso says. He points out that emotions often arise suddenly, can be fleeting, and are dependent on a lot of contextual factors, from how well you slept to how recently you’ve eaten. “How you’re feeling in the moment can be the product of all these unrelated things,” Caruso says. And by expressing what you’re feeling, not only do you pass some of your emotion to others, but you also have to deal with the aftermath of that disclosure.

“The way we’re built, we naturally want to describe what we’re feeling to others, but the reality is that sometimes this would hurt other people or would be embarrassing to us,” says James Pennebaker, a professor of psychology at the University of Texas. And when you share your feelings with someone else, you risk them refuting or rejecting the validity of what you told them, which can be devastating. “In that situation, you may end up worse off than if you’d kept what you were feeling to yourself,” Pennebaker says.

Social media runs on rage

Scott Galloway via Medium:

Most people cite as culprits the tone set by our leaders and the media’s adoption of rage as a business model. No doubt. But I believe the real fire starter is the tobacco of our generation, social media. It’s the algorithms that have determined that the path to more engagement, clicks, and Nissan ads is paved in rage. The algorithms sense if you lean left or right, then begin shoving you to the poles and serving you increasingly provocative and extreme content you can’t turn away from, to scratch a tribal itch.

Mengapa (otak) kita lebih tertarik dengan berita buruk

Mikkel Reincke Kristensen via Medium:

when you go to a news site at any given time, chances are that you will see a scary headline, some problems around the world, gossip and then the occasional good news. And the problem does not lie with the news site. It lies with us, or more specifically, our brain.

It turns out that our brains crave sensational news, and bad news hit just the right spot. News media just want clicks, and if it turns out that bad news gives those clicks, they are naturally going to report those, primarily.

In our brain we have 2 almond-shaped groups called the amygdala in each temporal lobe. Back in the old days, where humans lived in the wild and had to focus on survival, this part of our brain served as observing and sensing danger to us. If a stick cracked in the forest while you were gathering berries, this part of our brain would make us consider the fact that it could be a deadly predator. Even though it might just be a hedgehog or the wind, the amygdala made sure that we were alert.

Today, day to day survival is hardly a problem anymore, and the amygdala serves a different purpose. It instead warns us about probabilistic danger. If Ebola has killed 200 people on the other side of the world, well should it come to you it would be problematic. As a result of the amygdalas influence, we notice and focus on the bad news to a much higher degree that the good news.

Intinya adalah, kalau dulunya bagian otak yang merespon situasi berbahaya sangat berguna dalam bertahan hidup, sekarang bagian otak tersebut berfungsi menjadi pemberi peringatan. Sehingga, ketika ada berita buruk maka otak kita akan lebih terfokus ke masalah tersebut dibanding kepada berita lain yang jauh lebih baik/positif.

YouTubers are not your friends

The Verge punya artikel menarik yang membahas soal hubungan/interaksi parasosial antara penonton dan YouTuber.

Sociologists Richard Wohl and Donald Horton originally coined the concept of parasocial interactions and relationships in 1956 to explain how audiences developed attachments to media figures. It boils down to one-sided affection: a person invests emotional energy and attachment in a media figure, and they develop a sense of kinship and intimacy that makes them feel as though they know the celebrity — even though the celebrity has no idea they even exist.

Continue reading “YouTubers are not your friends”