SXSW Dispatch: As American as Fear, Baseball and Apple Pie

If you were not at South by Southwest for day #2 of the Interactive sessions, you missed researcher Danah Boyd's truly insightful and thought provoking talk on an issue of critical importance to 21st century society.

You see what I did there? I tried to trigger a little fear response in you...play off the fear that you've missed something to hook you into reading more of this post. Turns out the tactic is a tried and true method for attracting and sustaining attention. But mainstream media channels and social media platforms monetize it, and in pursuing that goal raise the stakes from a harmless hack on human behavior to something socially detrimental. Fear is a subject Boyd is currently researching, and she gave her SXSW talk to tell us where that research has taken her to-date. She maintains that "being American has become being fearful of others," and made three claims in the presentation to explain.

First, Boyd claims Americans live in a culture of fear largely created to push consumers toward making specific financial decisions. This culture of fear is in no way new, but recent advances in technology act as force multipliers that generate levels of fear that can be toxic to a healthy society.

One of those multipliers is "the attention economy," which she claims provides a fertile ground for the culture of fear. Quoting Herbert Simon she said, "In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else; a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes... the attention of its recipients." In the attention economy, fear is a leading driver, capturing and monetizing value in ways few editorial strategies can. This control is easy to gain because, Boyd went on to tell us, fear is not predicated on statistical risk assessment, but rather on the perception of risk. And, as anyone who has ever worked in PR knows, perception is often reality...even if you have hard data stating otherwise.

Culturally we are suckers for word-of-mouth recommendations. And Boyd's final claim is that social media, at a scale not matched in our evolution, amplifies the culture of fear by reinforcing false perceptions over statistical realities. The attention economy is a world of 'too much to know.' So much so, that we have to resort to defensive filters to manage the inflow of information. Some of those are algorithmic, but many are word-of-mouth (or 'text of type') via our social media channels. And while we think we're managing the deluge, in such an environment we are often actually consuming fear that has been processed and reprocessed by the network.

Boyd cautions that it is easy to fall into dystopian rhetoric on this topic, and she isn't anti-fear, per se. Quite the contrary, she sees fear as a "reasonable response to external stimuli." It's how we learn, and it can be fun (think adrenaline junkies confronting their fears). But when triggering fear in others becomes manipulative it then becomes a tool for control, and Boyd's true objections are to the consequences of fear operationalized for social control.

Why does this matter to a futurist? Because if Boyd is correct, the wave of for-profit social media platforms launching in the next few years will be a major social component to account for in futurecasting. And of course, the role of the futurist also lends itself to helping society confront fear. Understanding the pervasiveness of fear allow us to develop similar but positive tactics to help spread a more reasoned vision of the future.

For more info on Danah and her research visit: http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts
...or follow her on Twitter @zephoria