When I meet my friends and tell them about my last vacation instead of my work, how I slept, and how often I brush my teeth, is that also “manipulation”?
On social media, yes, travel bragging is a form of manipulation.
(Social) media manipulation in one image
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#12The problem is that everyone dies some day so there's never going to be equality between causes of death and reporting rates. You might expect some correlation between preventable causes and reporting, and in-part that's what's being seen here.
Partly about being preventable, yes, but also about being shocking or dramatic (shootings, crashes, natural disasters).
Re: (Social) media manipulation in one image
#13Re: (Social) media manipulation in one image
#14The problem is that everyone dies some day so there's never going to be equality between causes of death and reporting rates. You might expect some correlation between preventable causes and reporting, and in-part that's what's being seen here.
Many cancer and heart disease deaths are preventable. There's no direct correlation with preventability. The correlation is with fear and spectacle.
Re: (Social) media manipulation in one image
#15This is so strange to me. It's the news, it's supposed to report on the uncommon. No one cares that the morning commute's traffic is just as it was the day before and the day before that, but they do care that an accident shut down the main highway. It was commonly understood that news represents the unusual, not the usual.
At some point, media literacy went out the window in the US. Probably right around the time humanities education did.
Re: (Social) media manipulation in one image
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Re: (Social) media manipulation in one image
#18The first leftmost column of most common causes of death (heart disease, etc) ... would be a "dog bites man" story.
The rightmost columns of media coverage (homicides, terrorism, plane crashes, etc) ... are "man bites dog" stories. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_bites_dog
It's just the nature of journalism and headlines.
E.g. A frequent story that hits the front page of HN is "I'm quitting social media..."
But the much more common scenario of "I'm still keeping my social media account active today just like I did yesterday" ... is not submitted -- and nor would it be upvoted to the front page.
Real-life high frequency of normality doesn't make for compelling news.
Re: (Social) media manipulation in one image
#19This kind of graph always irks me as it almost seems to imply that "unbiased" or "objective" (and therefore ideal) news reporting would just be some kind of daily feed with coverage of randomly sampled events.
Re: (Social) media manipulation in one image
#20When I meet my friends and tell them about my last vacation instead of my work, how I slept, and how often I brush my teeth, is that also “manipulation”?
The difference being that while people have a good intuition on one may spend their vacation and what one would talk about, it’s not so easy to extrapolate for other things.
Sure, everybody knows that media talks more about homicides and terrorism than the thousands of people dying or „old age“-kind of things, but it’s not always easy to keep in mind on how far apart these numbers are.
I think „manipulation“ may be to strong of a word here, since it assumes intent to manipulate, which is not necessarily to focus on „out of the ordinary“ events. But I think nonetheless that this infographic is interesting and important, because it reminds us that these biases exist and how big they are.