Ezra Klein: prediction

Transcript context

…So if the news is in virtual reality, you won’t watch certain things if you won’t see a horror movie. It’s funny, because my bias on this probably goes the other direction. When I watch most media, I am surprised by the discomfort people seem to seek out. I am a fan of the part of movies before anything goes wrong. I really enjoy that first 25 minutes before any kind of conflict emerges in the plot. And I continuously wish that movies would just sort of let me hang out in that happy universe for a longer period of time. When I watch any show recommended by anyone I know, including you, even if the show is putatively a cheery, happy show, the level of discomfort that people seem to want to endure of awkwardness, of conflict, is much higher than where I am. Cable news is another good example. I do not have the constitution to wake up and watch people yell at each other about politics. I don’t know where people get that capability, but I very much don’t have it. My lesson from this I think is in some ways the opposite of yours. People are attracted to a much higher level of conflict than I completely understand, and my sense is that will remain true in a VR-AR world. I don’t really see a reason to believe that would change. So now I could see something that would say there will be a bias against particularly gruesome stories, that there will not be a sharp uptick in people wanting to experience what things are like in Aleppo in a VR-AR world. But I don’t think that moves towards kittens and feel-good stories of happy events. I think you probably have a lot of what I would think of as sort of where news is now — a lot of conflict but conflict in a space of discomfort, conflict in a space of safe outrage, conflict in a space of you think you’re right and the other person is wrong, not necessarily a move towards actual cheeriness. People seem to like cheeriness a lot less than I would think they would. Let’s take podcasts. In your talk with Malcolm Gladwell, you each discussed how it can be hard to use numbers in podcasts, and I agree with that. But in terms of which issues are favored, as podcasts become more and more important, what does this skew our attention towards?…

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