Here’s How Threads Plays Out

Lessons From The Cable News Era

One of the perks of aging is that you get to witness patterns over time. When I was in my early career years after graduating from Pratt, I found myself working as a broadcast designer at Fox News Channel.

Yes, that Fox News.

I started my employment there before the channel even launched—so it was literally right at the beginning. Because we live in a politically polarized world, people often dismiss the legitimacy of Fox News in spite of the successful run it has enjoyed for decades. Fox, targeted and catered to a frustrated and underserved audience, who lost trust in the traditional news sources available to them. So yes, Fox became a “red” colored media outlet. Turns out that a lot of people wanted to tune into content from a source that reflected what they perceive as their values. And they did in the millions

Keep in mind, at this time, CNN was the undisputed champion of cable news and MSNBC was also getting started. What originated as one, became three.

There’s a few nerdy terms for this phenomenon:

-Media fragmentation

-Filter bubbles

- Conformation bias

The net outcome ends up becoming the same thing—we seek out the worldview that aligns with our own, and this becomes where we spend most of our time and energy…

So, this is where things will net out with Threads and more broadly the future of microblogging. CNN was a lot like Twitter in terms of market dominance. Threads is seizing on the moment of an underserved audience in search of a platform that reinforces their values. Where there was only one, now there will be two or maybe three.

So in retrospect, this kind of thing has been going on for a while. At the risk of showing my age, the late nineties to be more precise. The end result is this: media literacy has never been more critical. Between our tendency to seek out likeminded ecosystems combined with rapid advancements in AI that now makes real and manufactured indistinguishable, we’re reaching a critical mass where informed and independent thought are under threat. It’s on us all to protect both if we’re to truly advance society.

End of thread.