Seeing Red
mailing list DEBUNKS social media trick.
Happy Erev Daylight Savings1, all.
Longtime readers know there are only four seasons, at least as far as this mailing list is concerned: cuffing szn, Spotify Wrapped szn, Harden in retrotrade, and the X Games.
Well make no mistake about which season we’re in. The Sixers just fired so many defective Rockets, you’d think their front office was run by Hamas:
But I digress.
Today I want to talk about the color red.
More specifically – have you ever wondered why all your iPhone notifications are red?
Why didn’t Apple go with something like blue, or yellow, or periwinkle? And why can’t you change the color?
Some of you are ahead of me on this, and are now thinking about how red is a color commonly associated with anger, urgency, and danger.
When I think of red, I think of police sirens, and firetrucks, and STOP signs.
I think of EXIT signs in movie theaters (why are these signs always shouting at me?). I think of one of those big red circles with a diagonal line through it.
I think of matadors, whipping their bulls into a frenzy. I think of fuming cartoon characters, steam blowing out of their ears, as they scream at the top of their lungs.
I think of blood.
Red makes me anxious, and wound up.
I have a hunch I’m not alone.
And that iOS developers deliberately provoke this psychological response by demanding our attention with notifications that make our brains go “URGENT! ALERT!! ANXIETY!!!”. And it becomes impossible not to check, check, check.
I have a suspicion that many social media managers think about this, too.
Here are six Instagram infographics2 from six different sources with radically different agendas that I’ve seen floating around my own personal feed lately:
You see it, right?
Do you get the same feeling I do?
Why are all of them so red? And why are they all shouting at me?
Worth noting - this effect doesn’t just work when inciting outrage for what’s going on in the Middle East. Hell, here it is applied to the recent Harden trade:
I’ve known about this effect for a while. At the risk of giving away one of my own viral secrets for free, I’ll let you know that I do this in my own posts all the time:
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Personally, I think every verified news outlet should be required by law to write all of their text posts in a neutral color with no caps-lock, aside from proper punctuation.
I also think every journalistic endeavor with a modicum of integrity owes it to their audience to be as impartial as possible when reporting the news. But that’s just me.
If you call yourself a news outlet, but only post things designed for people to either emphatically agree or vehemently disagree with, that isn’t news – that’s infotainment.
Call me old fashioned, but the news should be “what happened”. For example, if I were to tell you that last night, the Chicago Bulls lost by 9 points to the Dallas Mavericks, your response should not be, “FINALLY, someone who tells it like it is!!!”.
I am by no means trying to change anyone’s stance on this conflict.
I am simply trying to make you hyper-aware of some of the ways your best intentions are being weaponized against you by outside forces with vested interests.
If you are interested in taking action towards counteracting this effect, I encourage you to turn on Grayscale in your iPhone Settings. It’s how I prefer to browse, tbh.
Alternatively, you can stop getting your “news” from your fucking Instagram feed.
By the way, did I invent in my head that Congress voted to finally get rid of Daylight Savings pretty recently? Like, within the past year? Or did I Mandela Effect myself?
or as I like to call them, propa-graphics.