The Fly Bottle: How Humor, Satire, and Social Media can make us Savvier News Consumers by Mike Gillis
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Mr. Mike Gillis is the head writer for the satirical news outlet, The Onion, where he has published thousands of headlines and articles, alongside scripting and directing video and podcast content. He has written pieces for The New Yorker, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, ClickHole, and College Humor. Mr. Gillis graduated from Dartmouth College in 2012.
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The Fly Bottle: How Humor, Satire, and Social Media can make us Savvier News Consumers by Mike Gillis
- 2. THE FLY BOTTLE: How humor, satire, and social media can make us savvier news
- 3. “To show the fly the way out of the fly bottle ” “To show the fly the way out of the fl
- 4. Guy In Philosophy Class Needs To Shut The Fuck Up
- 7. PRESENTING THE FINEST JOURNALISM HISTORY HAS EVER SEEN
- 12. 0 25 50 75 100 125 Trillions of Readers CNN.com NYT.com Google News TheOnion.com (Compared with other industry leaders) DAILY ONION READERSHIP
- 13. 0.0 1.5 3.0 4.5 6.0 7.5 Data provided by U.S. Dept. Of Integrity The Onion NYT WaPo (On Pittman-Walter Scale) JOURNALISTIC INTEGRITY ONION READERSHIP
- 14. The Onion has won virtually every award for journalistic excellence in the world, including: AWARDS & HONORS•The H.R. Grambeihm Award •The National Galstein Award •The International Press Golden Badge For Investigative Journalism •The Jewish Men’s And Women’s Award •1993 Academy Award For Best Actor (Philadelphia)
- 15. Some of the famous individuals currently working for The Onion: NOTABLE STAFF
- 16. Some of the famous individuals currently working for The Onion: NOTABLE STAFF • Herman Melville
- 17. Some of the famous individuals currently working for The Onion: NOTABLE STAFF • Herman Melville • Stephen King/Dean Koontz
- 18. • Herman Melville • Stephen King/Dean Koontz • OJ Simpson Some of the famous individuals currently working for The Onion: NOTABLE STAFF
- 19. • Herman Melville • Stephen King/Dean Koontz • OJ Simpson • Bashar al-Assad Some of the famous individuals currently working for The Onion: NOTABLE STAFF
- 20. SOCIAL MEDIA
- 27. THE FLATTENING
- 33. ALGORITHMS
- 34. THE WAY OUT
- 41. What goes into a headline
- 42. 1,500 headlines pitched every week
- 43. 1. Trump Accuses Government Of Playing Up Existence Of Death Under His Presidency 2. Study Finds 18 Million New Cancer Cases This Year In Single Tumor-Covered Amorphous Mass Of A Man 3. Politicians Pay Respect To Mac Miller's Body As It Lies In State 4. Officials Warn Hurricane Florence + The Machine Could Absolutely Wreck Virginia With Emotional Neo-Soul Rhythms 5. Freeloading Refugee Children Taking Up Thousands Of Prison Cells Meant For Real Americans 6. Study: Majority Of Americans Would Vote For Candidate Hidden In Alluring Mystery Box If Given The Choice 7. FEMA Officials Panic After Accidentally Evacuating 1 Million Residents In Direction Of Hurricane 8. Man Waiting Out Hurricane Spends Lazy Day Promising God That He’ll Evacuate Next Time If He Somehow Makes It Out Of This Alive 9. Jamie Dimon Backtracks After Claiming He Could Facilitate Corporate Interests Poisoning Every Aspect Of American Life Better Than Trump 10. Migrant Children Announce Over PA System That Kids Run Detention Center Now After Duct Taping Angry Warden To Chair 11. Man Not About To Clean Apartment When He’s Just Going To Move Out In 6 Months 12. ‘Well, If Those Snacks Weren’t For Everyone, They Should Have Been Labeled Properly,’ Says FEMA Intern Who Ate All Of The Dehydrated Food Intended For Evacuees 13. Ronan Farrow Lands Silently On All Fours Behind Executive Just As Man About To Put Hands On Assistant’s Lower Back 14. Pope Francis On Vatican Abuse Scandal: ‘Just Tell Me Whose Feet To Wash’ 15. Disaster Agencies Parceling Out Emergency Dip Rations To North Carolinians Ahead Of Hurricane
- 44. 1. Trump Accuses Government Of Playing Up Existence Of Death Under His Presidency 2. Study Finds 18 Million New Cancer Cases This Year In Single Tumor-Covered Amorphous Mass Of A Man 3. Politicians Pay Respect To Mac Miller's Body As It Lies In State 4. Officials Warn Hurricane Florence + The Machine Could Absolutely Wreck Virginia With Emotional Neo-Soul Rhythms 5. NIB: Freeloading Refugee Children Taking Up Thousands Of Prison Cells Meant For Real Americans 6. Study: Majority Of Americans Would Vote For Candidate Hidden In Alluring Mystery Box If Given The Choice 7. NIB: FEMA Officials Panic After Accidentally Evacuating 1 Million Residents In Direction Of Hurricane 8. Man Waiting Out Hurricane Spends Lazy Day Promising God That He’ll Evacuate Next Time If He Somehow Makes It Out Of This Alive 9. Jamie Dimon Backtracks After Claiming He Could Facilitate Corporate Interests Poisoning Every Aspect Of American Life Better Than Trump 10. BL NIB: Migrant Children Announce Over PA System That Kids Run Detention Center Now After Duct Taping Angry Warden To Chair 11. OL: Man Not About To Clean Apartment When He’s Just Going To Move Out In 6 Months 12. ‘Well, If Those Snacks Weren’t For Everyone, They Should Have Been Labeled Properly,’ Says FEMA Intern Who Ate All Of The Dehydrated Food Intended For Evacuees 13. Ronan Farrow Lands Silently On All Fours Behind Executive Just As Man About To Put Hands On Assistant’s Lower Back 14. NIB: Pope Francis On Vatican Abuse Scandal: ‘Just Tell Me Whose Feet To Wash’ 15. Disaster Agencies Parceling Out Emergency Dip Rations To North Carolinians Ahead Of Hurricane
- 48. TAKEN SERIOUSLY
- 51. Nitro Expected To Win Westminster Dog Fight Emails received to date: 1000+ RESPONSES TO OUR CONTENT
- 52. Government Admits It Was Only Behind Destruction Of North Tower Emails received to date: 1 Thanks for your article! It was both towers, though :( RESPONSES TO OUR CONTENT
- 53. Any questions?
Editor's Notes
- We live in a world of
- What occurred to me when I first was offered the chance to give this talk was the Wittgenstein quote that philosophy is a way to show the fly the way out of the fly bottle. In other words, to reveal an exit to the maze of delusions. It seems to me that satire offers a powerful way to do that with the media narratives that circulate through social media. It’s a crucial aspect of a democracy that its citizens can actually point out bullshit and misinformation when they see it, and satire engages that at its core. With all that said, here is one of our headlines:
- Let me show you what The Onion is at its best, and then I’ll show how the current media landscape makes that job harder.
- So that’s what we do. We critique the powerful, using hyperbole, contrast, irony, and analogy to draw attention to false narratives and general bullshit in the news. And let me address how we help our readership escape the proverbial fly bottle of delusions.
- So let me discuss exactly what I think is so beneficial about satire vis the mire of internet misinformation that we find ourselves in now. And how that’s helpful to a democracy.
- The bizarre vocabulary used to hold up “what a newspaper sounds like”. Here we’re critiquing news-speak. Why is it slug-like? Getting a reader to start asking these questions is a good first step into realizing that media outlets, be they journalists, conspiracy mongers, or press secretaries, aren’t providing unalloyed truth. There’s always a spin in the language.
- The bizarre vocabulary used to hold up “what a newspaper sounds like”. Here we’re critiquing news-speak. Why is it slug-like? Getting a reader to start asking these questions is a good first step into realizing that media outlets, be they journalists, conspiracy mongers, or press secretaries, aren’t providing unalloyed truth. There’s always a spin in the language.
- So that’s what we do. We critique the powerful, using hyperbole, contrast, irony, and analogy to draw attention to false narratives and general bullshit in the news. And let me address how social media has made our job harder.
- So that’s what we do. We help readers find their way out of the fly bottle of disinformation by using hyperbole, contrast, irony, and analogy to draw attention to false narratives and general bullshit in the news. And let me address how social media has made our job harder.
- We rely on parody.
- …. and our readers being able to recognize parody. Flattening makes it harder.
- Social media also draws revenue from websites like ours, training viewers to use them as an intermediary rather than coming directly to TheOnion.com. We need money to survive.
- Finally, social media can fuel polarization through algorithms that draw viewers into spirals of increasingly-rigged thinking, according to a new University of Berkley study. This in turn encourages newspapers to be increasingly clickbait and biased, playing to their audiences. In all these ways—encouraging polarization, redirecting revenue, and flattening all content types, so satire lives alongside pure misinformation—websites like Twitter and Facebook seem to be fighting against satire’s mission of encouraging self-critique. If we’re trying to get people out of the fly-bottle, social media is doggedly trying to shove them back in.
- But there are benefits to social media, and there are ways to engage this
- sat·ire /ˈsaˌtī(ə)r/ noun the use of humor, irony, exaggeration, or ridicule to expose and criticize people's stupidity or vices, particularly in the context of contemporary politics and other topical issues.
- … so a very in-depth process like this is essential to making what we create stand out from misinformation and clickbait. Our we just pushing a propagandistic/biased narrative ourselves? Or are we trying to speak truth to power in a way that seems based in critical thinking, factual, and in service of our readers?
- With that said, there are times that social media fails and it’s actually pretty fun.
- So we still have a far way to go. But
- In making this presentation, I was brought to question: Is social media the fly bottle itself? In other words, are these sites so compromised, so inextricably intwined with spreading false narratives, polarizing users, and reinforcing biases that the only way to escape their malign influence is to simply stop using them? And I still wouldn’t go that far. There’s still good to be done through their use as a tool to spread satire and to encourage readers to critique the misinformation-laden media ecosystem we find ourselves in. But as satirists we need to be diligent in making our jokes hit, we need to constant challenge our reader’s biases, and when they err, as they often do, we need to take social media head on. Thanks.