Schrodinger’s Audience: How News Analytics Handed America Trump
May 10, 2016 8:15 AM Subscribe
...Gawker CEO Nick Denton once proclaimed that ''Probably the biggest change in internet media isn’t the immediacy of it, or the low costs, but the measurability.'' Today, all online media outlets rely on sophisticated analytics to track, monitor, and judge which stories are the most popular. Some of these analytics are made public, through ''most read,'' ''most emailed,'' ''trending'' or ''related'' sidebars on their sites. Others are maintained internally, as a tool to aid editorial judgment.Schrodinger’s Audience: How News Analytics Handed America Trump
The thing that we have to remember here is that the act of measuring a process will also change that process. Analytics sends a signal to journalists and their editors (Trump brings in way more traffic than Bush/Cruz/Walker/Clinton/Sanders/Carson). And this signal then helps guide their news routines (people seem to want more Trump, let’s give it to them), which in turn sets up a positive feedback loop, in which Trump’s endless media dominance feeds into the narrative that this election is All About Trump.We are doomed.
This post was deleted for the following reason: Hey, sorry, this is interesting but brief and is largely about this phenomenon in relation to Trump, so should probably go in the open Trump thread. -- LobsterMitten
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To summarize: parties are not just politicians, but coalitions of actors who care intensely about certain policy outcomes. These actors work together to get politicians elected who will serve their interests; voter interests are a means, not an ends. And, according to Noel and company, such parties succeed because they control all of the apparatus necessary to win elections...
This is a big problem for the parties as described in The Party Decides. Remember, in Noel and company’s description party actors care more about their policy preferences than they do voter preferences, but in an aggregated world it is voters aka users who decide which issues get traction and which don’t. And, by extension, the most successful politicians in an aggregated world are not those who serve the party but rather those who tell voters what they most want to hear...
And so, without any of the apparatus traditionally provided by parties, much of it obsoleted by the Internet, and thanks to the ability to connect directly with voters (because of aggregation), Donald Trump is marching on in direct defiance of the Republican Party’s decision. (And yes, Trump primarily communicates via Twitter, but he is dominating Facebook.)
posted by a lungful of dragon at 8:21 AM on May 10, 2016