Book Review: The Hype Machine
I recall very well a statement that I read many years ago that says a book must be an ax for the frozen within us, it means the book must awaken and motivate us to rethink our deepest held beliefs for us to read it, I do believe the hype machine book by Anan Sinan Aral falls into that category, aside from being highly acclaimed by many known scholars and managers, it’s a book written by someone who spent his career researching and studying social media the frozen sea we live inside it most of the time, after reading the book I decided to review it because in doing so I myself will discover new insights and angles.
The first chapter of the book titled the new social age introduces the idea of the hype machine and that “ its main objective is the human psyche” perhaps this phrase summarizes the whole goal behind social media, and I believe it could be amended to the manipulation of the human psyche to serve the goal of the designers, creators and even investors of social media platforms, for on one of them are interested in merely mediating the neutral communication between humans, the author explains in this book how social media is touching each and every part of our life through tweeting, online ads, dating, eating, etc and how only fifteen years ago all of that was not exist and we had only phones, fax and emails to communicate.
The title of the second chapter, the end of reality, seems rather strong to describe the misinformation phenomena, it alludes as if we are not encountering the truth anymore online, but the author listed many striking examples that make the case, theses cases ranging how wall street in 2013 was moved by a fake tweet from the hijacked Associated Press Twitter account, to the fake photo about the gas shortage of gas shortage during Hurricane Harvey in 2017, and many other examples from election integrity and public health fields. All these examples show how our perception of what’s true is being influenced by social media. The author himself cited a study he conducted with his colleagues on Twitter that explains how fake news travels faster than real one.
But the hype machine is not a mere technical product it’s a whole socio-technical system that consists of the subtractor the digital social network, the hype loop, and the medium, these three are deeply intertwined and together they form the hype machine as the author explains in the third chapter.
The author started chapter nine with a quote by Herbert Simon that says “ a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention”, this quote summarizes the whole idea of the attention economy, Sinan explained how this idea is linked to the hype machine, and how big tech companies such as Twitter, Facebook and Google are vying for the consumers’ attention in order to sell it to the companies and intuition to run their ads, commercial microtargeting and political campaign such as Cambridge Analytica are perfect examples to the usage of the attentions of users to serve particular goals.
In the last chapter, the author moved from analyzing the problematic nature of the hype machine to the possible solutions such as #breakupbigtech that is suggested by senator Elizabeth warren, and the antitrust laws proposal to stop the monopoly over online life, Sinan also explained the complexity of defining what’s true and false as a society in order to enact laws to curb the fake news and the difficulty to protect free speech while removing harmful content.
Overall this is a book definitely with the time and the price, it gives an inclusive analysis to all the issues related to how the hype machine is impacting our daily life, the author treads in a very clever way in the space between technology and social aspect of it, it’s a very strong invitation to not taking our time online for granted.
