Information vs. physical pollution
"Pollution is the introduction of contaminants into the natural environment that cause adverse change.[1] Pollution can take the form of chemical substances or energy, such as noise, heat or light. Pollutants, the components of pollution, can be either foreign substances/energies or naturally occurring contaminants. Pollution is often classed as point source or nonpoint source pollution. In 2015, pollution killed 9 million people in the world.[2][3]
Major forms of pollution include: Air pollution, light pollution, littering, noise pollution, plastic pollution, soil contamination, radioactive contamination, thermal pollution, visual pollution, water pollution." Wikipedia.
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/
Would you agree with the following edit of the above?
"Information Pollution is the introduction of fake or altered information into the natural environment that cause adverse change.[1]" Natus Nee
"Society derives some indirect utility from pollution, otherwise there would be no incentive to pollute. This utility comes from the consumption of goods and services that create pollution. Therefore, it is important that policymakers attempt to balance these indirect benefits with the costs of pollution in order to achieve an efficient outcome.[30]"
What utility do people gain from information pollution, and what incentivizes the process?
"Fake news (also known as junk news, pseudo-news, or hoax news)[1][2] is a form of news consisting of deliberate disinformation or hoaxes spread via traditional news media (print and broadcast) or online social media.[3][4]
Fake news is written and published usually with the intent to mislead in order to damage an agency, entity, or person, and/or gain financially or politically,[7][8][9] often using sensationalist, dishonest, or outright fabricated headlines to increase readership. Similarly, clickbait stories and headlines earn advertising revenue from this activity.[7]" Wikipedia
"About 400 million metric tons of hazardous wastes are generated each year.[40] The United States alone produces about 250 million metric tons.[41] Americans constitute less than 5% of the world's population, but produce roughly 25% of the world's CO2,[42] and generate approximately 30% of world's waste.[43][44] In 2007, China overtook the United States as the world's biggest producer of CO2,[45] while still far behind based on per capita pollution (ranked 78th among the world's nations).[46]" Wikipedia
Where it is at least possible to assess who and where the pollution comes from, the size, cost, assessed damage to our environment, health, potential consequences, etc., with information pollution both the polluter and the damage caused is much more difficult to identify/assess.
https://japantoday.com/category/picture-of-the-day/cleaning-up-the-streets-2
"An unidentified man, who calls himself Mangetsu-man (Mr Full Moon), cleans Nihonbashi bridge in Tokyo, with volunteers on Tuesday. While most superheroes fight crime, for one such Japanese hero the enemy is garbage and his "super" weapons are a broom, a dust pan and an army of volunteers who have joined his mission." Japantoday
Whoever has been to Tokyo have most likely noticed that there are no trashcans on the streets: the trash in hand creates a discomfort to strangers who are used to throwing it "somewhere". Yet, Tokyo is perhaps one of the most clean cities on the planet. And it has to do with culture, and the sense of ownership that each citizen has for the country. From schools to street shops to big corporations: everyone goes on street to clean after self and others. Recently Japanese expats were seen after cleaning the streets of Paris.
http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20191006-what-japan-can-teach-us-about-cleanliness
Citizens of Information Planet: utility and economics
Maybe time came when we need to take action and start cleaning our planet from the information garbage? Maybe we should start removing the information trashcans from our streets? Maybe we should become true citizens of the World Wide Web?
Perhaps, to address the pollution and start taking action, we first need to understand the utility and economics behind the pollution?
95% of the online content is produced by over 200 million active sites and blogs that populate the World Wide Web is consumed for free. Advertising, so far, is the main source of monetization of this information. In other words, advertising pays for the work of so many content creators. Most of the ads revenue is "collected" by few intermediaries, now the most powerful platforms that have the full control of the Web. They decide who gets what.
According to Aegis, in 2019 the online adspend was about $254 B. 10 most powerful content distribution platforms control the distribution of over 80% of these funds, and charge a hefty up to 50% fee for the service they provide.
emarketer.com
The revenue of just two of these platforms was about $65.8 B in 2019.
To understand how the economics of current media work, let's review the case of Youtube (owned by Google). It has reported $15B revenue in 2019, of which it has distributed $8 B to its channels, creators of content that helped Youtube generate the revenue. Let's leave aside the issue of Youtube taking 46.7% fee for its services, taking into account primarily that it is pretty costly to maintain such a platform and provide the best user experience so far in video content distribution, the fact that most of the $8 B Youtube distributed to top 1% of its channels (31M in 2019) is worth stressing.
“A large portion of YouTube’s advertising payouts goes to the top 1 percent of creators. The creators who feel like they’re being screwed over the most by YouTube are the ones in the middle.” (Verge)
AdSense, another platform that Google owns, distributes 68% of its total earnings ($ 140 B, oko.uk) to sites that generate traffic for the ads it distributes. Other powerful platforms are much less generous than these 2. The trend goes that year after year the powerful platforms become even stronger by acquiring close competitors or driving them out of the market.
Apple's proposal perhaps was the most blunt in revealing how much it costs the content creators and distributors the services of the similar content distribution platforms: the latter are in many cases a direct competition to the tenants.
$ 60 per annum to 198 M sites and blogs
We can derive from the above that most of the online media lives on a survival mode, with an average $ 60 per entity per year.
Centralization in the media space, discourages hundreds of millions (200 million to be precise) of content creators and distributors from engaging in online media enterprising. Or, in other words, millions of producers are discouraged from becoming the true citizens of the media world.
So, on one hand we are facing dramatic shift to digital (online adspend is over 41% of overall adspend), and on the other hand an unfair revenue distribution which forces many to either leave the space or refrain from making investments in media. The latter shrinks the space for independent media enterprising.
Severe competition for the remains in revenue distributed to all drives the market to its current condition, making click-bait battle the most prominent. In such conditions, even the mainstream media starts competing with the same attitude, deteriorating the overall media quality even further, which further results in having the least trust towards media.
"Digital news has brought back and increased the usage of fake news, or yellow journalism.[5] The news is then often reverberated as misinformation in social media but occasionally finds its way to the mainstream media as well.[6]" Wikipedia
How to solve the problem with Information Pollution?
There are many initiatives that have surfaced to provide solution to this fundamental problem: from regulatory or institutional perspective in particular.
Below is the solution launched last year by the PUBLIQ Foundation with its mission to democratize the information and the WEB. It calls for the creation of a new Media economy, based on its proprietary distributed P2P network and protocol for open and direct exchange of digital assets, facilitated by PUBLIQ's internal utility token PBQ.
It guarantees all content creators and distributors full inclusion, freedom of expression and protection of their IP rights. The strategy will result in the creation of a new and much larger market driven by the owners of the new Internet.
The main asset in this ecosystem is the free, authentic and immutable content, a service (CAAS) which fairly rewards creators whenever and however it is consumed.
Total ownership and revenue are constantly distributed to all the members of the network in real time and based on merit.
PUBLIQ believes that hundreds of millions of owners, as in the case of Japanese citizens, are the best guardians for the new media space. Once being properly motivated and being able to earning fair rewards for all their hard work and dedication, they will take the lead in "cleaning up" the information space making it their own.
We are living during amazing times where technologies like blockchain and AI have the power to address inequalities in our societies and reshape the world in a fairer way, to make it a better place. For media, it is time to start a new era where creators are put first and forward and fairly rewarded for their creations and the hardships often endure to produce them.
Internet of Owners than, how we shall call it?