And down we (all) go
In eight short episodes, the podcast series «Rabbit Hole» by the New York Times shows the effects of an internet dominated by algorithms, ruthlessness, and greed.
Working in the field of digital media and media literacy many people approached me with the question, whether I had seen the Netflix production «The Social Dilemma». I only watched it a few weeks ago and honestly am a bit torn.
On the one hand, the interviews are very insightful. The selection of interviewees is relevant: Tim Kendall, former President of Pinterest and former Director of Monetization at Facebook; Tristan Harris, former Google Design Ethicist and now co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology: Justin Rosenstein, the co-inventor of the Facebook “Like” button; Cathy O’Neil, author of Weapons of Math Destruction and many more. Their statements are very powerful, and in many ways unsettling.
To make «The Social Dilemma» more accessible director Jeff Orlowski, known for his wild-life and climate documentaries «Chasing Coral» and «Chasing Ice», chose to add a bit of family drama. Instead of enhancing the experience of «The Social Dilemma» the bad acting – mainly on part of super ham Skyler Gisondo – usurps the documentary’s message about the high price users of social media pay for it.
Less is more
The makers of the New York Times podcast «Rabbit Hole» on the other hand stick to their guns. Tech columnist Kevin Roose starts out with the introduction of a young man called Caleb. Caleb doesn’t have a proper job and lots of time on his hands. Most of it he spends playing video games and when his gaming computer gets stolen browsing through Youtube. Thanks to the know-how of Google’s engineers the algorithms used to propose other «interesting» video content guide Caleb more and more to the political fringe. First to the extreme right and then to the left. This trajectory corresponds with my personal view of the political landscape where the far right and the far left, coming from opposite sides, meet in their extremism.
Roose and his colleagues have no need for extra drama like the family story in «The Social Dilemma». The people they interview have gone down the rabbit hole that Youtube’s algorithms are digging deeper by the minute to keep users more engaged. In the mini-podcast-series that lives of sharp analysis couple of interviews stand out. The talk with Youtube-superstar Felix Arvid Ulf Kjellberg, better known as PewDiePie, puts together the fragments of some of his more notorious episodes. The bigger picture sets things into perspective and especially into a context which is very often missing in the headline-driven news business.
Further down the rabbit hole
Compared to the light-hearted and rather apologetic chat with PewDiePie, the sole individual with more than 100 million (!) subscribers on Youtube, the interview with Susan Wojcicki, CEO of Youtube, doesn’t help to build trust in the video-sharing platform. Wojcicki evades to the point questions with regard to the aim of the search algorithms that propose new videos to viewers. Unfortunately, Youtube isn’t the only social network that works in this way, so the hope that things will change sometime soon is ephemeral.
«Rabbit Hole», aired the first time in April 2020, may lose some of its initial momentum in later episodes but is still a must-hear. In the day and age where conspiracy theories have been made mainstream by a narcissistic ex-president, who has sown distrust in the media and stylized himself as the (political) messiah of the right, understanding the mechanisms of the internet is crucial. The algorithms help to drive people apart and keep them in their information bubble. The chances that some fresh information or alternatives will penetrate it are minuscule. The biggest minus of «Rabbit Hole» is the fact that the series comes to an end after only eight episodes.