The Gray Area with Sean Illing15 Nov 2018

Whitney Phillips explains how Trump controls the media

Here’s a fun fact: The best training for understanding the president’s media strategy is to have studied internet trolls for years and years. Okay, maybe that fact wasn’t so fun. Maybe it’s incredibly depressing. At any rate, Whitney Phillips did exactly that. She was one of the earliest scholars of online trolling (yes, that’s a job). She was studying trolling when it was a tiny sideshow. And she was there, studying it, as online trolling got amplified by algorithmic platforms and a click-hungry media. As Gamergate made it a political movement. Then, most importantly, she was there, watching, as the media manipulation tactics that she had seen perfected by the trolls became the playbook for how Trump controls the media’s agenda, and the national conversation. I’m in the media. I’m inside this machine looking out. It can be hard, from inside, to understand what the hell is happening. But Phillips is outside the machine looking in. And she understands, better than anyone I’ve talked to, what’s gone wrong, and how hard it will be to fix. Recommended books: Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman Algorithms of Oppression by Safiya Noble Custodians of the Internet by Tarleton Gillespie Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Denne episoden er hentet fra en åpen RSS-feed og er ikke publisert av Podme. Den kan derfor inneholde annonser.

Episoder(765)

How to sink into silence

How often do you find silence? And do you know what to do with it when you do? Today’s guest is essayist and travel writer Pico Iyer. His latest book is Aflame: Learning From Silence, which recounts h...

10 Mar 202546min

How to change your personality

If you could change anything about your personality, anything at all, what would it be? And why would you want to change it?Writer Olga Khazan spent a year trying to answer those questions, and docume...

3 Mar 202539min

Is ignorance truly bliss?

Are you ever happier not knowing something? As Aristotle famously claimed, “All human beings want to know.” But denial and avoidance are also human impulses. Sometimes they’re even more powerful than...

17 Feb 202534min

Is America broken?

What do you think of America’s institutions? Alana Newhouse, founder and editor-in-chief of Tablet Magazine, says that may be the most important political question in America. In an essay published mo...

10 Feb 202549min

The cost of spending time alone

Americans are spending an historic amount of time alone, a phenomenon that is often referred to as an "epidemic of loneliness." But are we actually lonely? Or do we prefer being by ourselves? And if w...

3 Feb 202541min

Attention pays (with Chris Hayes)

Where is your attention right now? Where was it a minute ago? A second ago? Where will it be a minute from now? One of the primary features of this age — the age of the internet and smartphones and al...

27 Jan 202550min

How to be happy

What does it take to be happy? Professor of psychology Laurie Santos just might have the answer. This week The Gray Area takes a break from its regular programming to bring you an episode of another ...

20 Jan 20251h 6min

The screens between us

What is the first thing that you touch in the morning? What about the last thing you touch before you go to sleep? For many of us, it’s our phone. Digital devices are with us constantly, often putting...

13 Jan 202545min