I just built an app to control my own addiction (addictionlocker.com) and have thought a lot about this recently.
My two cents: the media has gotten good at giving us what we want, and what we want is conflict. If bad news and fighting weren't what we wanted they wouldn't publish it. By engaging with it, we tell it what we want, and they just deliver more of it. Extrapolated ad absurdum; YouTube and Facebook's algorithms serve you what you're interested in, otherwise you'd get bored and go somewhere else. The rest of the media just got good at doing this too...
I just built an app to control my own addiction (addictionlocker.com) and have thought a lot about this recently.
My two cents: the media has gotten good at giving us what we want, and what we want is conflict. If bad news and fighting weren't what we wanted they wouldn't publish it. By engaging with it, we tell it what we want, and they just deliver more of it. Extrapolated ad absurdum; YouTube and Facebook's algorithms serve you what you're interested in, otherwise you'd get bored and go somewhere else. The rest of the media just got good at doing this too...