February 11, 2008
Short-termism in (readers of) online news
Seamus McCauley has an interesting thought, inspired by, um, me. In The Logic of Life, I write:
"the experimenters offered the subjects a snack: fruit or chocolate. Seven out of ten subjects asked for chocolate. But when the experimenters offered other subjects a different choice, the answer was different too: ‘I’ll bring you a snack next week. What would you like then, fruit or chocolate?’ Three-quarters of subjects chose fruit."
This is just one of many examples when our short-term, dopamine-fired preferences conflict with what we might choose given an opportunity to reflect in tranquility. Seamus then asks what that story implies for online news:
Apply for a moment this understanding of decision-making to newspapers and we arrive at a not-very-comforting conclusion. A newspaper is a package of information, the celebrity gossip and TV listings bundled in with the op-ed and the current affairs. Choose the bundle of news in a newspaper and you satisfy both parts of your decision-making brain. The dopamine system gets the immediate gratification of reading about the fabricated erotic misadventures of some soap actress or the Spurs result; the cognitive system gets the glow of knowing there’s real, hard, investigative news in there somewhere too (don’t worry, you don’t ever have to actually read it to get the effect).
Online, the news package is unbundled (we already know this) and hard news outside the bundle is hard to monetise (we already know this too). But the effect on reading habits of unbundling hard news from the newspaper package seems likely, from this understanding of how decisions are made, to have a disastrous impact on the propensity to read that news (this might be new). Online, news consumption is all about immediate gratification: you choose the story you want to read now every single time.
I think Seamus is saying that you shouldn’t be getting cheap thrills from this blog but should read something worthier instead… His whole post, with lots of tempting short-termist links, is well worth a read.
I’m not sure I understand. After all, when I go to a newssite on the web, I also get the gossip plus the politics, no?
Posted by: LemmusLemmus | February 11th, 2008 at 12:48 pm | Report this comment‘I’ll bring you a snack next week. What would you like then, fruit or chocolate?’
The responder is clearly not given an opportunity to ‘reflect in tranquility’. They don’t have until next week to make the decision, do they?
Posted by: disaggregated | February 11th, 2008 at 5:56 pm | Report this commentIn some of his later work, Mancur Olson made a similar point about the media’s focus on celebrity and soft news.
He characterises the preference for such news over hard, political news not in terms of the short-term dopamine-induced desire for cheap thrills, but in terms of rational ignorance and (as was his wont) the failure of collective action. I wonder if there’s room here for a combined theory that links doped-up decision-making to rational ignorance?
Posted by: Mike | February 11th, 2008 at 10:49 pm | Report this commentSeamus’ analysis is incomplete, because technology also empowers me to effectively make the “week-ahead-fruit” choice every time. Note that while I can’t get my newspaper delivered without the “celebrity gossip and TV listings”, I can choose to fill my RSS reader with only those news sources and blogs that delivery “hard news”. Maybe this is arena where the increased choice from technology allows me to make myself better off by restricting the freedom of my future self to go find online mind-candy?
Posted by: Daniel Hall | February 12th, 2008 at 8:33 pm | Report this comment