According to the latest Google Trends data, the world has suddenly become very interested in the Zika virus. Though the virus has been known to infect humans for over half a century, its outbreak in South America and the Caribbean over the past year sparked global attention last month with the potential link of the virus and microcephaly in Brazil, along with the coming Summer Olympics. The suddenness of global interest in Zika in spite of its longstanding existence underscores the role technology and the media cycles of journalism play in shaping our understanding of global issues.
In today’s information saturated world it is all too easy to assume that if something happens anywhere in the world we will instantly find out about it and that the intensity with which it appears in front of us corresponds to its global importance. Yet, in reality, media effects and, increasingly algorithmic decisions, play a tremendous role in our awareness of the world around us.
Perhaps most famously this played out in 2014 when Twitter was filled with a moment-by-moment chronology of the Ferguson protests, while Facebook was instead a collage of ALS ice bucket challenge videos. Facebook’s algorithms determined that the ALS videos were of far greater interest and relevance to the Facebook community than the protests in Ferguson and apparently preferenced them for many users over reports of the Ferguson unrest.
Yet, this kind of prioritization also plays out every day in the myriad editorial decisions that determine what makes up the world’s news media reporting. When Nepal was struck with an earthquake, nearly a quarter of all global coverage in the first 24 hours was about the foreign tourists trapped on Mouth Everest. Moreover, the surge of coverage in the immediate aftermath of a natural disaster reaches its peak in just 72 hours, before declining to half that much in one week and back to nearly original levels in less than two weeks. In fact, this pattern appears to hold across the entire world and is not influenced by how geographically proximate the countries are. While the 2010 Haiti earthquake has long since faded from headlines, the country is far from fully recovered, yet receives little coverage today.
Similarly, the November 2015 Paris attacks garnered more than nine times the global media attention as the April 2015 Kenyan attack, despite the Garissa attack involving the targeted killing of children at school. Less than 24 hours prior to the Paris attacks, attacks in Lebanon and Iraq prompted discussion of a double-standard for Facebook’s Safety Check service when Facebook defended activating its service in Paris, but not in “other parts of the world, where violence is more common and terrible things happen with distressing frequency.”
Similarly, despite taking thousands of lives in Africa, Ebola did not capture the global spotlight until the first Americans became infected and arrived back in the United States for treatment. Language barriers, low penetration of social media and the lack of Western journalists in the affected areas at the beginning of the outbreak all contributed to low international attention.
In the case of Zika, Google Trends shows that interest in the virus did not really begin until this past December and accelerated in January as the first American infection was confirmed and concerns rose over the potential of the Summer Olympics to create a global epidemic.
As reports began rolling in of infections in other countries, the media began paying attention with many outlets simply running stories that no cases had been found locally. In the United States, news outlets in South Carolina, Montana and New Mexico all reassured their readers that the disease was unlikely to reach them, while Texas outlets reported heavily on the state’s first case of sexual transmission of the virus. As the virus spread to cover more than 25 countries, Vietnam, India, Sri Lanka, Oman and Egypt all announced increased border monitoring and screening of travelers. Denmark, Sweden and Switzerland all reported cases, as did Australia, while local authorities noted the same mosquitoes exist in Queensland and a case was confirmed on Sumatra Island. Venezuela’s medical community demanded the government resume publication of epidemic infection data, which it had halted more than a year ago. Each article published about Zika increased public awareness and in turn led to even further coverage, creating a cyclic effect of ever-growing volume.
Why does it really matter how algorithmic or human editorial decisions control what we see online? Perhaps the greatest promise of the Internet was that by virtue of instant access to information from all over the globe, the citizens of the online world would become global citizens, aware of everything happening in their global world. Yet, simply because we have the technical ability today using news aggregators and machine translation to watch events unfold in realtime from across the globe, few of us actually do.
The majority of what we know about the latest on the Syrian civil war, or reconstruction in Haiti or the spread of the Zika virus is determined by editorial decisions of what is “important” or “relevant” for us to know. As computer algorithms begin to play an ever-growing role in making these decisions for us, we are fast reaching a world where “likes” will become the new arbitrator of what is important in the world and where, in spite of more and more information, we will know less and less.
