Opinion

Satire is dying because the internet is killing it

Arwa Mahdawi

Facebook’s [satire] tag may prevent people believing Kim Jong-un was
voted the sexiest man alive, but the damage is done

facebook
‘The problem with satire in an age of finite attention and infinite
content is that it makes you stop and think.’ Photograph: David
Sillitoe for the Guardian

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Forget self-driving cars or virtual reality nano-technology algorithms,
the newest innovation to emerge from Silicon Valley is square brackets.
Facebook is testing a “satire tag” that will clearly label fake news
stories from well-known satire sites like the Onion as [satire]. No
longer will you need to rely on outdated technology such as common
sense to realise that content like Area Facebook User Incredibly Stupid
is [satire], the square brackets will do it for you.

It should perhaps be noted that Facebook isn’t introducing the satire
tag because it thinks we’re all morons, but rather because it knows
we’re all morons. In a statement, the social network explained that it
had “received feedback that people wanted a clearer way to distinguish
satirical articles from others”.

Some of those people may well be journalists who have had embarrassing
lapses of satire-blindness in the past. The Washington Post, for
example, was once fooled into reporting that Sarah Palin was, in a
somewhat unlikely career move, taking a job at al-Jazeera. And the

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man alive, even using the accolade as an opportunity to run a 55-image
slideshow of him, complete with quotes from the Onion spoof. Although,
it’s possible this may itself have been satire – I’m unsure.

And that’s the problem. The internet has become so weird, so saturated

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The point of this carefully curated list is that you often can’t tell
the difference between satire and real news online. There are several
reasons for this. The first is the underlying business model of the
internet. We don’t like to pay for stuff online so the internet is

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clicks.

The second big contributor to satire-blindness is our diminishing
attention span. The average American attention span in 2000 was 12
seconds; in 2013, it was eight seconds. This is less than the average
attention span of a goldfish (nine seconds).

As Vladimir Nabokov once said, “Satire is a lesson, parody is a game.”
But if there’s one thing we’ve learned from the internet, it’s that
everyone prefers games to lessons. The problem with satire in an age of
finite attention and infinite content is that it makes you stop and
think. It interrupts the speed and simplicity of the
discover-click-share cycle that makes platforms like Facebook lots of
money. By introducing satire tagging, Facebook has helpfully gone some
way in eliminating the unhelpful friction of thought and, in doing so,
made life easier for us all.

Should the satire tags prove to be a success, I’m hoping Facebook will
extend the square bracketing and provide clear labelling for every post
on my newsfeed. Here’s to a future filled with [millennial