The Pigeon Dance
How do you make it all work for you when you don't actually know what makes it tick? Also, check on your friends.
Back in my undergrad psychology days, there was a famous experiment that was popular to inflict on students of the Behavioral Psychology courses—famous for the introduction of concepts of conditioning and reinforcement-versus-punishment and reinforcement schedules—largely because of its easy repeatability and because the only animals it fucked up were pigeons, which most college freshman and sophomores have already learned to hate, so for the student with the right (or wrong) kind of temperament, the results could be considered to be hysterical. It could also be counted on to fuck up the occasional student, which most professors consider hysterical. So the practice continues.
In this experiment, caged pigeons would be raised in isolation to a standard age of pidgie adulthood, with regular and generous free-feeding schedules and no special attention of any kind from handlers, until at some point the feeding stops and the pigeons are starved down to 90% of their free-feeding weight. (This isn’t considered particularly cruel because a pigeon’s free-feeding weight is typically quite a bit above average for pigeons. But it does cause them a bit of stress and “motivates them for training for which food pellets are an effective reward.”) At this point they are placed in a cage (could well be their old cage) with an opaque cover and a timer programmed to release food pellets at randomized time intervals. They will be fed this way for a period of up to a couple of weeks, so the overall food volume for any day needs to be in the range of a healthy (if not free-feeding) diet.
It is very important that the pigeons be left alone with no variations in visual, auditory, temperature, light-level, or other kinds of sensory input. Whatever environmental conditions you choose, they need to be healthy and constant.
Also: no peeking. Although in modern times, a cheap webcam can be installed in the cage as long as nothing about the camera ever changes.
And in a couple of weeks, you whip the cover off and see what kind of bizarre bullshit the pigeon is doing. And it will be bizarre.
See, with a random reinforcement schedule, the pigeon has no idea when a pellet will arrive. But even pigeon brains are geared to think that the world is made of patterns, some of which are relevant to survival, and that within those patterns actions have consequences. So if a food pellet drops while the bird is meandering counterclockwise, the pigeon will tend to meander clockwise more often. If the next food pellet drops even more quickly while the pigeon is turning clockwise and has one foot in the air, then the pigeon will start turning clockwise while hopping on one foot.
When some of these techniques seem to stop working, they might adopt others. And/or go back to the clockwise hop now and then just in case. But by the end of two weeks, the pigeons are, each in their own way, a deranged mess, each performing nonstop their own little insane mystical food dance, convinced that if they stop, the food might not ever come. And for months and months afterward, even back to regular feeding schedules, the dance, or parts of it, can continue.
This is what Behavioral Psychology defines as superstitious behavior: an action taken in expectation that it will possibly increase the likelihood of an overtly favorable event occurring, regardless of the possibility of there being a causal relationship between the action and the result. It’s so pervasive and universal among the animal classes that the potential to have superstitious behavior induced is considered to be a test of a species’s level of cognitive ability.
I’ve wasted 600 words on this lead-up so I can address the concept of superstitious behavior in the context in which I mean it, without the reflexive/defensive triggers for or against religious or spiritual practice or certain cultural traditions—though there’s likely to be some blowback there regardless. It can’t be helped. But I’ll continue.
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Social media gives lonely, isolated people access to their friends, remoter family members, old acquaintances, and groups of like-minded people with similar interests. Once upon a time, anyway. This was much more true before every popular venue became advertising-supported and algorithm-driven.
This was the case with the old LiveJournal/MySpace/Friendster/dialup-BBS days. Consider it a time of free-feeding for the lonely and attention-starved. (It’s the current situation with Mastodon and the rest of the Fediverse, and a number of similar venues that have yet to cave to algorithmic methods of reducing database access and server/ISP resources and income generation. If you’ve missed the free-feeding era, that’s where it’s gone.)
Abandonment of the chronological presentation of posts from your reading list starts the starvation process. Most services opt for this at the start of algorithmic presentation because it reduces resource load on their end. They want it all to work like newspaper journalism. Put the important stuff at the top of the feed and the least important stuff at the bottom and you can stop scrolling down when you feel satisfied—or when you give up because you feel it won’t happen this session.
Then they install the ability to let viewers participate in the ranking. Posts that generate strong reactions/comments get bumped upward. Of course. So far it’s more annoying, but it’s still kind of predictable and deterministic. But the real issue is that it’s not making money. None of this is making money at all. So you sell advertising space. For every x posts people scroll, show one ad. That seems simple enough, and people expect it. And the truly starved will keep scrolling and scrolling and scrolling. Keep them frustrated enough but not TOO frustrated, and they’ll fund your site all on their own.
But advertisers won’t pay as much for a shotgun ad (show it to anybody, anywhere, anytime) when it’s way more effective to show it to people who, say, read the language the ad is written in, who live in regions where the product or service is available, who are interested in things that place them in demographic categories more likely to buy, etc. This works for the social media site too, because showing the right users the right ads wastes less internal resources and generates more revenue. So here’s where we start the data collection, which we can sell to all kinds of advertisers and marketing research firms so they can see what’s selling where and to whom out-of-band. I.e., they don’t even have to advertise on the site for the info to be useful to them. If they can guess your address, they’ll fill your mailbox instead, or even send salespeople to your door.
Here’s where it gets more wonky: advertisers will pay even more to have their ad near a post that’s relevant to the lifestyle they’re trying to associate themselves with—something high-energy, with video or interesting imagery, with a tone relevant to what they’re selling, and something with a lot of positive reactions/comments. But … this means they now are bargaining for the ability to promote the posts more relevant to their products to get them higher in the feed so they can pay more. The social media venue wants to do this too—to have more posts the advertisers want to pay to be next to higher in the feed, so they can charge the advertisers more.
That’s the first part where shit gets a little nondeterministic. Because there’s a chaotic positive feedback loop between posts the advertisers want to be next to and the advertisers who want to be next to certain posts.
The second part is that, thanks to the fucked-up Supreme Court Citizens United ruling, there’s now a near infinite amount of money for ads and not-quite-ads—propaganda and social engineering of various political and politics-influencing natures—to buy space and shit-up the already deranged feed. Even outright propaganda from any country looking to interfere in the goings-on of any other country, as long as the money laundering makes the money clean enough before it’s accepted by the time it’s paid.
And then there’s the third part: fake users and fake posts specifically created to be promoted/promotable, constructed by ad agencies and propaganda mills, all elbowing each other in the tits to get to the top of your feed.
Somewhere at the bottom of your feed, assuming you can scroll that far in the time you have without hitting some kind of server error and having it all start again from the top, is your food pellet—that actual connection to a friend or family member with a message you need to see (but maybe not too many other people, so it doesn’t get the reactions to promote it). Maybe you get to it, maybe you starve. Maybe the people who need to see what you have to say get to the pellet you leave, maybe they starve. In the meanwhile, we all do our own little pigeon dances, trying to figure out how to encode what we need to say, obscuring, censoring, or euphemizing certain words here, tacking on others or nailing on irrelevant tags, adding meaning-free images or video snippets, so that our actual human friends who need to see it might actually get a chance to see it, so we can get the feedback and responses that let us know we’ve been seen: the stuff we’re all starving for. Maybe our dances work and maybe they don’t. It’s legit superstitious behavior, though, because we can never know, only hope.
AND ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE TARP COVERING THE CAGE, the advertisers and political propagandists are doing their own little pigeon dances trying to get their noise to the the tops of our feeds, because the algorithm is automated, adaptive, nonlinear, and positive-feedback-driven chaotic (in the mathematical sense, but, yeah, in that other sense too) with just a titch too much complexity. If you’re familiar with mathematical complexity and chaos, you know all you need is an oscillator—a cyclical process of any kind, or, better yet, a couple that are linked—and an overabundance of positive feedback.
For most of us who are starving for social contact and validation, ad-driven (and now propaganda-driven) algorithm-using social media sites are all dance, no pellet. The knock-on effects of post-pandemic isolation has literally made this life-or-death for some of the loneliest.
What I’m saying is check on your friends. ESPECIALLY those you haven’t heard from in a long time. Somewhere they’re just dancing away until they have no choice but to drop.
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