what shows up in our feed is a ranking of visibility, not importance. algorithms surface what is engaging, emotionally charged, or already gaining momentum, so our sense of “what matters” gets outsourced to what performs well online. a viral clip can make something feel urgent or dominant even when its actual impact is limited. the mistake is backfilling importance onto whatever we’ve already seen a lot of instead of asking what actually changes behavior, incentives, or outcomes.
the coldplay concert video is high visibility, low structural importance. we retrofitted importance onto it through moralizing and discourse.
there’s also a dunning-kruger layer to this. the system rewards confidence and clarity, not depth. people who know less can sound more certain, and that confidence travels well online. the more complex and grounded a view is, the harder it is to compress into something that performs. so we end up with a lot of very confident takes about things that aren’t actually that well understood, and they dominate attention.
outcomes that materially change people’s lives are still driven by decisions made in quieter contexts: policy meetings, job interviews, personal relationships. these processes don’t optimize for engagement and rarely show up on the timeline in full. when they do, it’s usually as simplified narratives or post hoc framing, sometimes through "traditional" media.
people act on what seems to matter while what actually determines results stays less visible and harder to access. we’re stuck in a split between attention and causality. entire "new" media ecosystems optimize for attention and start to treat it as causality.
online influence can shape perception, but translating that into real-world outcomes is much less direct than it looks.