{"id":43610,"date":"2018-06-22T01:00:50","date_gmt":"2018-06-22T05:00:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=43610"},"modified":"2018-06-01T09:19:39","modified_gmt":"2018-06-01T13:19:39","slug":"qotd-the-narrative-and-social-media","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2018\/06\/22\/qotd-the-narrative-and-social-media\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: The &#8220;narrative&#8221; and social media"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>The <em>Times<\/em> piece brought to its conclusion a dialectic that has increasingly consumed the news media in the age of Twitter. A narrative generated on social media is fed back into the \u201cmainstream\u201d press, and then in turn fed back into Twitter in the form of reporting that appears to confirm the pre-existing narrative. It acquires along the way the force of sanction, rewarding those who participate in the dissemination of the narrative, and punishing those who dissent from it in the form of mob-style attacks and ostracism. This machinery for the spontaneous coordination of orthodoxy exploits vulnerabilities in our evolved psychology. \u201cConfirmation bias\u201d is the tendency to lower our threshold of proof for claims that conform to what we are already primed by habit, familiarity, and the desire to believe. \u201cThe availability heuristic\u201d is the tendency to mistake the vividness of an occurrence for its frequency. Use these quirks of the mind to feed the bias held by partisans that the only people that could possibly oppose them are knaves and fools, and you can gaslight even otherwise bright and skeptical people into accepting and repeating blatant falsehoods.<\/p>\n<p>Wesley Yang, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.tabletmag.com\/jewish-news-and-politics\/262280\/jordan-peterson\" rel=\"noopener\" target=\"_blank\">&#8220;The Shocking Truth About Jordan Peterson&#8221;, <em>Tablet<\/em><\/a>, 2018-05-28.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Times piece brought to its conclusion a dialectic that has increasingly consumed the news media in the age of Twitter. A narrative generated on social media is fed back into the \u201cmainstream\u201d press, and then in turn fed back into Twitter in the form of reporting that appears to confirm the pre-existing narrative. It [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[28,53,41],"tags":[1204,1020,593,310],"class_list":["post-43610","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media","category-politics","category-quotations","tag-jordanpeterson","tag-progressives","tag-socialmedia","tag-twitter"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-blo","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43610","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43610"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43610\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":43611,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43610\/revisions\/43611"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43610"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43610"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43610"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}