ATTENTION!!!!
Based on the prompt and some very brief brainstorming, we somehow very quickly came to the idea of creating a podcast about Facebook. It’s all what we immediately thought of when discussing attention and the different ways our attention is held by media around us. Such a huge majority of young people use Facebook constantly, and whether or not we are posting or commenting we are all constantly trawling through it and passively consuming a huge amount of information – Facebook is holding our attention and feeding us constant streams of rubbish without us even realising it. Even if you do realise it, we’re powerless to the algorithms of the website and the way it manipulates us to be constantly engaged by not very engaging things such as other people’s holiday photos or memes that our friends are constantly sharing. The algorithm that I mentioned, actually filters things our of your feed that you might not find interesting and allows your own Facebook feed to be a personalised reflection of you, your own values and the things you might like to see. If you choose to hide some things from your feed, Facebook has learnt what you might not be interested in, and if you’re tagged in photos frequently by your friend Tom, Facebook may assume that you and Tom are pretty close friends and show you a lot more of what Tom is posting than, lets say, your weird Uncle that you added 5 years ago. Not many people really think about it, and that’s what most good podcasts present – an idea or a new perspective on something we think we already know about. Diving further into the issue, we decided to focus specifically on fake news, giving us an opportunity to talk about how our attention is more easily captured by entertainment news, left wing news and opinion articles – or generally news that might be funnier and more interesting but not necessarily important (and most shockingly) not always true. Some information we pay attention to on Facebook are right out lies.
I’ve already found some great sources that cleverly explain the many intricacies of fake news on Facebook and it’s effect on the public and even the US election.