Overcoming the modern media filter

[Alan M]

Lots of people talk about a liberal or conservative media bias, but if you’re trying to get your opinions out there on the Internet there is a new and chilling bias you need to acquaint yourself with.
http://www.soloblogger.com/why-your-blog-doesnt-get-any-love-from-google/

[quote] Over the years the Internet has slowly morphed from an open venue where anyone could be heard into a closed invitation only soiree where the average person is kept behind a rope line.[/quote]
[quote] Let’s take a look at the biggest story of the 2012 election Mitt Romney’s 47% comment spoken at a private fundraiser and recorded on a smart phone by a bartender working the event. It was the story that almost never broke. Why?

None of the Internet gate keepers were willing to give him a venue that he could be heard in. For months he labored alone uploading small clips of the video he took to You Tube and then he posted links to those video clips on the Washington Post’s website, the Daily Kos and the Huffington Post. He could only post to the public comments sections of those sites because it was the only venue those sites made available to him. The Daily Kos ended up banning him concluding he wasn’t credible because nobody knew who he was, and he wasn't able to generate even negative attention on the other sites because his comments didn't stand out among the sheer mass of public comments.[/quote]

[freshwest]

1. Bots are a part of the problem. They overwhelm search results and many sites limit the results.

It's not all the fault of the sites, but the ability of monied interests to literally make their dollars equal speech, as they say it is speech. It's too commericalized as well.

When I first started going online I used scroogle, which got its results from google but left out the paid results. It was very fast and gave information from universities, things that were a long ago, or not that long ago. It gave you exactly what you asked for, with up to a hundred good results.

Now it's gone and the other search engines are loaded with religious and conservative answers even if you are quite specific with search terms.

The waiter could no more get a chance to be heard than he would be on commerical television or radio networks to get the word out. It's getting worse all the time. I see no solution. We don't own this technology.

[Alan M]

2. I was thinking a lot about this part of your comment

The waiter could no more get a chance to be heard than he would be on commerical television or radio networks to get the word out.

Sadly, I think you are wrong in the sense that if he would have taken his video to a local newspaper, radio station or television station he would have gotten his video out much sooner. As he probably would have been able to speak to a real person at some point and been able to pitch his video to them. Isn’t it Ironic that most people still think of the Internet as the most democratic free speech friendly medium out there, but in reality it the toughest medium there is to get your message out?

[Igel]

3. So the "new and chilling bias" has two parts.

The first is that those who own the press get to decide what's printed.

Not new. Not chilling. Completely reasonable. He was doing the equivalent of sending in letters to the editor in a frequent basis. Those were often ignored. How often usually depended on how they were worded and what they said to begin with. Also it depended on what the editorial stance of the paper was.

The second is that a citation index is biased. They all are. When I went to the various citation indices for my field I didn't expect to find journals or sources listed that were one-off, marginal, or not well respected. They're there not to provide the best results for the most people, not the perfect results for everybody. The first isn't nearly as difficult a task as the second. But if they tried to index every chance working papers volume, every chance website, every paper related to that field that occurred in journals usually linked to *other* fields, the citation index would be huge; it would reference thousands of other sources; most of the other references would be unimportant; and most of what was referenced would be unwanted by 99% of the people looking up citations. The citation index would drop in value.

An online dictionary I used to love had this happen to it. First, it had a few main bilingual dictionaries listed, with one or two older monolingual ones. It added bilingual dictionaries for certain fields. It was useful because it was useable. Then it added more dictionaries, and allowed users to add to entries. Now you look up a term and you have a choice of 30 definitions, some for mechanical engineering, some for politics, some for economics, etc. And a lack of context. For a given field, 3 of the English terms might be used, but with different meanings; but in that field, the term in the other language only has one of those meanings. You can't tell. It's a site of marginal use these days. In being all things to all people, it became few things to few people.

As it is, when I type in search terms in Google often I'm directed to those sites that get the highest traffic. That's usually a good thing. But when it's not, it's an outrage-inducing thing--and that's the problem. My uneven responses. Useful 95% of the time, I notice when it's not useful. Even if I search for my wife's blog, those same terms apply to hundreds of sites and thousands of pages. Google (or Bing, or whatever) is going to weight what's right for me with what I'm likely to want given other people's and my own past searches. That's the 95% usefulness bit. If I scroll to page 18 and pick my wife's blog, it's more likely that next time I search my wife's blog will be much higher in the rankings. Similarly, if 200 other people pick my wife's blog it'll turn up higher in the hit list. It gauges usefulness by use.

The guy tried the wrong approach. He assumed that what he had so was important surely people would notice. He marketed a new widget in a way that was inappropriate. He went to the wrong people. He was naive, not savvy, and is blaming others for not compensating for his naivete and spotting just truly how important he and his video were. And that's foolish.

[Alan M]

4. It is chilling

I do think it is very chilling when someone that is a left leaner, that is familiar with the major left leaning sites on the internet can’t get the news story of the entire election cycle published because these sites have their filters set up to automatically weed out the individual activists or true believers that these sites supposedly cater to.