We can all do our bit to resist the culture of lazy

Opinion: 100% Media 0% Nonsense

The media we create for ourselves is the best tool we have to combat noise and disinformation.

Of all the horrific and bizarre things to come out of last week’s US election, the collective decision to give Donald Trump another four years as president seems to be an endorsement of laziness as a virtue.

Trump is widely regarded as the US’s laziest-ever president. As he prepares to govern as a nepo baby in his eighties, there are serious questions to answer over who will actually be running the world’s most powerful country when Trump is nowhere to be seen.

It’s commonly said that people vote emotionally instead of rationally, so there must be something of Trump being so comically inept and inactive that resonates with people, even if they tell pollsters that they want to work hard and earn more money.

You can see this laziness on display any time you enter a train carriage or, depressingly, sit on your own sofa. Too many of us have become trained to switch our brains off, whip out our phones and let algorithms feed our minds.

This is what fuels disinformation: bog-standard laziness.

Platforms can no longer be bothered

When Trump first ran for office in 2016, the role of Cambridge Analytica and Facebook to promote Trump using lies was revealed after the fact and caused a worldwide scandal. 

How quaint.

Now, look at what Meta (rebranded at holding company level to lessen the corporate stink of the Facebook brand) stands for: Mark Zuckerberg told Republican leaders in the summer that he was pressured by Joe Biden’s administration to take down anti-vax conspiracy claims and now regrets it. 

Or YouTube, which last year said it would no longer block false claims about the 2020 election — namely that widespread electoral fraud was to blame for Trump losing to Biden. It was a conspiracy so effective that no evidence has ever been found and yet was strangely missing last week, even though Trump repeatedly said fraud was happening again.

Or Spotify, which continues to throw a fortune at Joe Rogan for hosting a chat show despite having the journalistic instincts and skills of a 13-year-old boy. A political endorsement from such a mind should be an embarrassment, but these are the depths to which US politics and media interact in.

And as for X… Elon Musk dropped all pretence of ex-Twitter being an online “public square” and, having ruined it as a commercial proposition, sought to fully weaponise it as a Trump disinformation machine. His personal X account now rivals Trump’s as a sewer of conspiracy theories, dehumanising attacks on immigrants and minorities, and other outrageous lies.

These platforms were once surprised by the disinformation being spread by users and claimed it was too big of a problem to solve.

Now, disinformation is accepted. Disinformation is embraced. Disinformation is here to stay. 

This will only get worse as generative-AI tools become increasingly mainstream. Anyone with an internet connection can create text, video and images within seconds using a minimal level of direction. We’ve already seen how fake ads are disrupting the way brands communicate with audiences. Not to mention how real-time A/B testing will enable countless legitimate — yet painfully mediocre — creative ads to fly around cyberspace. 

All of this presents a massive opportunity for those willing to hold their nerve and reject noise.

We’ve had the cure all along

There are outsized gains to be had for creators and media consumers who are willing to reject the algorithmic terms of trade.

But it requires thinking and practice.

Once we learn how to be mindful about our decisions in an online world, we can still have unparalleled access to the world’s information and creativity without being bombarded by noise and disinformation. We can use AI to optimise a quality piece of content, not just throw a load of stuff into ChatGPT and assume it will give us something credible. 

Of course, none of this is easy.

Thinking is a skill that requires commitment and practice. Nearly all of us in this industry can become better thinkers, but it does require a very deliberate approach towards any media platform that presents content via an algorithm-operated news feed. 

For advertisers, it will mean taking a greater interest in your creative output and the media strategy used to get that creative out there. A more thoughtful creative approach that cuts through to a large audience can save money because you don’t need to spend as much on targeting smaller groups (more “spray and fame” than “spray and pray”). 

This is why I do what I do.

Writing is thinking

Like many of you, I was addicted to social media and used to spend hours every day scrolling through feeds and expending all my creative energy on trying to create instant responses to breaking news stories and feeling disappointed when hardly any of this genius would go viral.

I failed to see I was merely providing hours of free labour every day for tech billionaires and their investors. Yes, I’d get an occasional private message from a prospective employer or a radio producer would invite me to appear on a programme. But that’s a pretty pathetic return on investment when I could have used that time to learn new skills, make new contacts or simply read more for the pleasure of it. 

And those are exactly the things I do since quitting the disinformation bullshit machine. I actually feel empowered to return to X and perhaps launch Instagram/TikTok accounts, because I will treat them as distribution outlets, not feeds. 

And it boils down to what I’m doing now: writing. 

Here’s a little secret to leave you with: writing is not the result of thinking — writing is thinking. 

All the ideas I have had over the years as we rebranded The Media Leader to create the industry’s leading trade title was through writing. The discipline of writing a weekly column has been transformative, because it forces me to clarify loose thoughts into a logical set of ideas that are not only coherent but also interesting.

Sometimes I get it right and sometimes I don’t. But do I make better decisions and have better ideas as a result? Absolutely, and not just at work: at home and with my friends, I feel more comfortable with who I am and more confident with my decisions about what I want from life. 

That’s the power of quality media: to help us make sense of the world as well as entertain us.

That should be, to copy my favourite ad slogan, “reassuringly expensive”. 

We are the media we deserve

The only thing you can do to resist this climate of trash is to take a deep breath and give your brain the time and space it needs to do what it was designed for: to think.

Less mindless scrolling through endless feeds for entertainment and more active searching for what will really make you happy in the long run. 

And it just so happens that the media we create for ourselves, even just by scribbling our thoughts on a piece of paper, is the best thing we can do to combat noise and disinformation.

All media does is present the world to us with artificial means. It’s up to us to seek out the best of it. 

Omar Oakes is UK editor-in-chief of The Media Leader. 100% Media 0% Nonsense is a weekly column about the state of media and advertising

The views in this article are expressed by the UK editor-in-chief for publication in The Media Leader UK and do not reflect the views of Adwanted Group.