hce_nthu
112年
英文
第 50 題
📖 題組：
Many of us can still remember when the news used to be a pleasant distraction from everyday life, the desk-bound office procrastinator’s preferred form of escapism. It is remarkable how rapidly things have changed. More and more, the news is not a source of escapism, but the thing one yearns to escape. This feeling represents a new and acute phase of a long-term historical shift: we used to live in a world in which information was scarce, but now information is essentially limitless, and what is scarce is the supply of attention. As advances in technology made it easier to distribute news – and more news providers began to compete for readers – a subtle inversion began: the reader’s attention, not information, became the truly valuable commodity. In an intentional arms race, every news provider – and ultimately, every news story – competes against all others to worm its way into consumers’ minds. Beginning in the 19th century, entrepreneurs such as Benjamin Day, the founding publisher of the New York Sun, hit upon a revolutionary business model: sell a paper for less than it cost to produce, pack it with lurid stories, then make your money selling space to advertisers, who were effectively buying access to readers’ attention. This naturally encouraged exaggeration and fabrication. And as news comes to dominate public consciousness, extreme, lurid and even false stories come to dominate the news. After all, the commercial imperatives don’t even necessarily require a story to be true, so long as it is maximally compelling: fake news is not an aberration from, but rather the logical conclusion to, a media economy “optimised for engagement.” It’s worth stepping back to notice how strange it is, considering the underlying purpose of news, to spend this much of our time thinking about it. If our interest in news has evolutionary origins, that’s because there are obvious survival advantages in staying aware of local and immediate threats to one’s own life and tribe. One major achievement of civilisation is that we’ve expanded our capacity for caring to include news that doesn’t affect us personally, but where we might be able to make a difference, whether by voting or volunteering or donating. But the modern attention economy exploits both these urges, not to help us stay abreast of threats, or improve the lives of others, but to generate profits for the attention merchants. So it pummels us ceaselessly with incidents, regardless of whether it truly matters, and with human suffering, regardless of whether it’s in our power to relieve it. The belief that we’re morally obliged to stay plugged in – that this level of time commitment and emotional investment is the only way to stay informed about the state of the world – begins to look more and more like an alibi for our addiction to our devices.
Many of us can still remember when the news used to be a pleasant distraction from everyday life, the desk-bound office procrastinator’s preferred form of escapism. It is remarkable how rapidly things have changed. More and more, the news is not a source of escapism, but the thing one yearns to escape. This feeling represents a new and acute phase of a long-term historical shift: we used to live in a world in which information was scarce, but now information is essentially limitless, and what is scarce is the supply of attention. As advances in technology made it easier to distribute news – and more news providers began to compete for readers – a subtle inversion began: the reader’s attention, not information, became the truly valuable commodity. In an intentional arms race, every news provider – and ultimately, every news story – competes against all others to worm its way into consumers’ minds. Beginning in the 19th century, entrepreneurs such as Benjamin Day, the founding publisher of the New York Sun, hit upon a revolutionary business model: sell a paper for less than it cost to produce, pack it with lurid stories, then make your money selling space to advertisers, who were effectively buying access to readers’ attention. This naturally encouraged exaggeration and fabrication. And as news comes to dominate public consciousness, extreme, lurid and even false stories come to dominate the news. After all, the commercial imperatives don’t even necessarily require a story to be true, so long as it is maximally compelling: fake news is not an aberration from, but rather the logical conclusion to, a media economy “optimised for engagement.” It’s worth stepping back to notice how strange it is, considering the underlying purpose of news, to spend this much of our time thinking about it. If our interest in news has evolutionary origins, that’s because there are obvious survival advantages in staying aware of local and immediate threats to one’s own life and tribe. One major achievement of civilisation is that we’ve expanded our capacity for caring to include news that doesn’t affect us personally, but where we might be able to make a difference, whether by voting or volunteering or donating. But the modern attention economy exploits both these urges, not to help us stay abreast of threats, or improve the lives of others, but to generate profits for the attention merchants. So it pummels us ceaselessly with incidents, regardless of whether it truly matters, and with human suffering, regardless of whether it’s in our power to relieve it. The belief that we’re morally obliged to stay plugged in – that this level of time commitment and emotional investment is the only way to stay informed about the state of the world – begins to look more and more like an alibi for our addiction to our devices.
Based on the passage, it is most likely the author would agree with which of the following statements?
- A The reader’s attention, which has become scarce, needs to be stimulated again.
- B Engagement with current affairs is a key to good citizenship.
- C We are morally obliged to stay plugged in, committing time to the limitless information about human suffering.
- D A media economy “optimized for engagement” encourages exaggeration and fabrication.
- E Benjamin Day’s business model successfully makes the news a pleasant distraction from everyday life.
思路引導 VIP
如果一家媒體的生存完全取決於能否『抓住你的眼球』來換取廣告費，而非報導的正確性，那麼為了在激烈的競爭中脫穎而出，這家媒體在處理新聞時，最有可能會優先強化哪些特質？這種『追求參與度』的目標，最終會對新聞內容的真假產生什麼樣的誘因呢？
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AI 詳解
AI 專屬家教
恭喜你精準地掌握了這篇文章的核心觀點！你能從長篇的論述中，辨識出作者對於現代媒體生態的批判性思維，這顯示出你具備非常優秀的閱讀理解與邏輯歸納能力。
媒體經濟與真實性的權衡
這題的關鍵在於文中第二段末尾提到的 「參與度優化」（optimized for engagement）。作者深入分析了當讀者的「注意力」成為稀缺的商品時，媒體為了在「注意力軍備競賽」中生存，會優先選擇最能吸引目光的內容。在這種商業邏輯下，故事是否真實已不再是首要考量，只要能產生最大的點閱動力，誇大其詞甚至無中生有（exaggeration and fabrication）就成了必然的結果。選項 (D) 準確地捕捉到了作者對這種惡性循環的擔憂。
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