Viral Media Rewards Absurdity

"I can't believe Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize for intentions instead of action..."

I heard the same sentiment expressed with varying levels of clarity and expletives dozens of times Friday. "What on earth has come over the commission?" "Nobel is rolling in his grave," and "They have officially made this into a sham," and "Why the hell would they do this?"

I'll tell you why. I'll prove it on one sentence.

Can you name the winner of the 2008 Nobel Peace Prize without looking it up. No? It's Martti Ahtisaari. Here's the sad part: that name probably doesn't help you. A good percent of us could not identify this former President of Finland for love nor for money.

That's alright, lets try again. Can you name any winner of the Nobel peace prize in the past five years? When I tell you that 2007 was Al Gore and some other people for some global warming stuff, you might say "man I knew that," but the recognition on Muhammad Yunus and Grameen Bank (2006), International Atomic Energy Agency and Mohamed ElBaradei (2005), or Wangari Maathai (2004) is pretty low.

So what's special about this? Well, lets consider this: news is a form of media. Media is an industry. Industries seek to make profit. How does media make money? Media makes money from advertising. Advertising pays more when more people see it more. Media wants to make as much money as possible. Media wants as many people to watch it as possible. Media reports the news which people will watch.

This dynamic is as old as the news as a business is (which some people link especially strongly to the development of cable news stations). The issue is: now not everybody gets their news from the news stations. As a matter of fact the majority of the news which I receive is transmitted to me virally either by a friend in an IM or via an IRC channel.

So what gets transmitted? Mostly it's the inane and the insane, in short the absurd. You know the memes as well as I do. I see easily as many links to the likes of Chris Crocker, various forms of Bill O'Riley expressly because he is losing flipping a shit or making an ass of himself, and Reuters' Oddly Enough as I do to "actual news." Try getting the same sort of stories you get off the BBC on Digg. They are probably there, but they are also probably awash in a great deal of other stuff.

Awash isn't a bad word for this whole situation. We're awash in way more information than we can reasonably process. We rely on summaries of everything, from what our friends are up to to the disturbing little bullet points that accompany a one page news article on CNN because they believe we have lost our attention span so badly that we are unable to finish and analyse a one page news article for ourselves.

And what is coming out on top? Well, your diligent readers will probably pick, choose, and not fluctuate but items which actually go viral reward the news site with a huge traffic spike. Spikes like this are very lucrative both financially. They are also psychologically attractive for the same reasons the lottery is.

Check out what is right at the top of the webpage of CNN, which is generally regarded as a fairly reasonable news site. Will the naked burgler that CNN reports as caught change your life? How about that an "ultrarunner" says shoes are the devil? This stuff is not news, its just a light laugh that sells well.

So if somebody is determined to make the news or "have an impact," they are going to have an easier time doing it if they are doing something that will go viral: the inane or the insane, the absurd. The Nobel Peace Prize, like all Nobel Prizes was founded essentially as a form of activism by the man who invented dynamite as an attempt to recognise those who have helped improve humanity. This was to offset the destructive and warlike ramifications of his own invention. The goal is to highlight and reward those who have done something significant to better humanity.

So how can the people who award the prize make sure the prize has an impact? By making sure everybody knows about who won it. How do they do that in this modern age?

They pick somebody who is doing good, but where the statement is just absurd enough to go viral.

Now I'm not proposing that this is some giant media conspiracy. I'm arguing that this is an unconscious algorithm that evolves from the combination of the strength of viral media introduction, media companies trying to make as much money as they can, and the people who are making news attempting to be sure they have an impact. This is the age that rewards Sarah Palin's cutesy folksy gimmicks, and reactionary "opinion pieces" where people completely lose their shit on youtube.

So, in conclusion, stop linking garbage, go read some damn news, and make the world a better place. Hell, while you're at it you might even give yourself an education. :p