About Noise Level
This is Noise Level, written by Soren Duggan.
This newsletter is about information – how we consume it, who gives it to us, and what it does to us. We are inundated with information today; almost all of it is online content generated by influencers, consumed by social media users, and integrated into our culture through downstream effects. The shift away from TV news anchors and newspapers toward online influencers and algorithms happened so quickly and authoritatively that we still don’t grasp its impact.
My fascination with the digital information ecosystem comes from two very different places: the time I have spent personally immersed in online culture, and the decade I spent in the US Army and intelligence community. In Afghanistan, I watched us try endlessly and fruitlessly to shift the Afghan public’s opinion of their government and the Taliban with little to no digital interconnectivity. In Syria, I saw ISIS perfect the art of digital recruitment while they took advantage of radicalizing rabbit holes that preyed on disaffected young people. We were, at best, reacting to it in real-time.
In 2019, I left the national security space to focus on what I believe to be the most important problems facing our nation: social isolation and political division. I saw political tribalism impact my Special Operations team’s ability to operate while a politically polarized Congress failed to fund us. I watched Russia revel in our dysfunction while spamming our social media feeds with troll accounts and disinformation – an operation that cost them less than a house does in America. Since 2019, I’ve focused on these problems through my non-profit work and my research at Harvard.
I’ve been captivated by the narratives and content that spread on social media, both at home and in my previous job. Understanding how social media shapes our perceptions of reality and harnessing the influencer economy to unite rather than divide us is crucial. Without this, our division will only worsen. I am on a quest for a solution.
Why subscribe?
Subscribe to get full access to the newsletter and publication archives.
