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David Manche

Professor Terence Hartnett

RH131: Rhetoric and Composition

November 22, 2020

Essay #4

How the Digital Phenotype Effects the Physical World

The effects of digital culture on society have been clearly progressing since the World

Wide Web was released in 1993. This led to the creation of the digital phenotype, which is the

observable interaction that people have with digital devices. Some effects are significantly more

drastic than others, other effects are slow changes that become more evident when looked at

from the bigger picture. Between these changes, it can be difficult to determine causality. One of

the most well documented effects of the internet is the acceleration of information. Humans

consume new information at unprecedented rates due to the efficiency of the model that does it.

It is not clear whether this occurs because the Internet is changing how we intake information, or

if humans are better suited to taking in information at a faster rate. This acceleration of

information has led to, and been led by, the sensational. More interesting information is more

entertaining than just more information, especially when taking in a lot in a short span. The

creation of sensational media has completely changed the way that the world is represented to

people in a digital culture. The effects that sensational digital culture have on the digital

phenotype are not isolated to the digital world.

Anything can be sensational if it leads to general interest. The media relies on the general

interest of a population in what is happening locally and globally. Storytelling is the foundation

for language and the communication of information. Since news outlets rely on consumers to
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read their articles to stay in business, stories that the media tells should be important or

interesting enough that people will read it. Unfortunately, not all the important stories are

interesting. If the goal is to make something that is important more interesting, it is necessary to

lower the prioritization of truth and occasionally replace it with opinion or speculation. This

process of adding interest to a story has led to the sensationalism surrounding popular media

sources in the modern world. In a digital world, it has become vital.

It is unrealistic to expect a news outlet to survive in a digital world without some

sensationalism or bias. Even if a media outlet is not purposefully biased, they may be

accidentally biased. Accidental bias may be explicit—the journalists casually allow their

opinions to influence their speculation and/or word choice in a way that can be seen in the

writing—or implicit. While explicit bias is derived from the scorekeeper role of media, implicit

bias involves the watchdog and scorekeeper roles of media. Since the media is responsible for

keeping track of events and picking what events are worth writing about, just the specific choices

that the outlet makes on what to write about and what to ignore can be biased. All these biases

allow consumers to develop a preferred media outlet. The consumer picks an outlet that writes

what they want to read, what the consumer believes is true, and “Considering oneself immune to

sensational accounts lets the tabloid news consumer adopt moral outrage, reinforcing

assumptions about the world” (Barnhurst 1250). This feedback loop enables media outlets to

make even more money faster by telling the consumer about what they want to hear rather than

what they need to hear. In a digital world, where clicks equal revenue, more articles bring more

money. More articles in less time leads to less effort in removing bias, which tailors to the

audience and drives more engagement. Through this whole process, the news becomes less

reliable and the consumer becomes more involved until eventually it becomes unrealistic for the
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consumer to return to blatant objectiveness. More articles and news to read means less time spent

on each article, and the sensationalist media makes the consumer go through information faster

until eventually they do not spend enough time processing information to notice any obvious

bias. The speed at which the consumer digests information has certainly changed over the years

and should be attributed to a change in the digital phenotype.

However, a strict analogy would consider a digital phenotype as a literal phenotype that

explains some genotype, which cannot be changed. In 2015, four professionals in the biomedical

field released an article suggesting that human interactions with digital technology could be

considered extended phenotypes and can be used to advance healthcare. Their original question,

“Can aspects of our interface with technology be somehow diagnostic and/or prognostic for

certain conditions?” was answered with a resounding yes in nearly no time at all (Sachin et al.

462). This was the same year that the original Apple Watch was released, and certain features of

the wearable technology made potential digital phenotypes a reality. It began with a more

indirect connection, such as the ability to track your workouts, but has since become so direct

that the Apple Watch can detect a fall and offer emergency medical services to the wearer. The

original study of digital phenotyping compared tweets of users and insomnia; in only 5 years

digital technology is already directly being used to track irregular behaviors as a standard

activity. Yet, excluding the digital phenotype to the medical field is limiting.

The digital phenotype is applicable in a wider context than just healthcare. Traditionally,

a phenotype is focused on the observable interactions between the genotype and the

environment, rather than the influence of environmental factors on behavior, but it is important

to consider all behavior as part of the extended phenotype. The internet is a digital environment

and any interactions that humans have with any digital technology can be described as
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phenotypic in nature. The attention that an insomniac can pay to something on a digital screen is

directly proportional to the attention they could pay to something in the real world. While certain

properties of technology, like an increase in blue light or more active engagement, may drive an

insomniac to be able to pay closer attention to a screen than the real world, their attentiveness

will still be lower than that of a well-rested and healthy individual. Beyond that, a person that has

learned to associate the word “doge” with a Shiba Inu will still think of a Shiba Inu when they

hear someone say “doge” in real life. The brain does not differentiate the connections that it

forms and uses in the digital environment from the ones it forms and uses in the physical

environment. The digital phenotype that the consumer develops from their time on a device will

change their perspective, whether intentionally or not.

Due to the fast-pace nature of the digital environment, the digital phenotype is

greatly affected by sensational media. Even from the traditional healthcare-based perspective of

the digital phenotype, the digital phenotype could affect the real phenotype of certain diseases.

Unfortunately, it is difficult to delve too deep into how the digital phenotype affects clinical

phenotypes because of the data collection required. Scientists hardly know how to collect the

data they need, let alone what data to collect in the first place. This creates a great deal of

difficulty when drawing a connection, and since “complex data can be summarized in different

ways, not all summaries are equally useful, and one-size-fits-all summaries are unlikely to

leverage the full potential of the data,” at this point it is practically impossible to simplify the

digital phenotype into a genotype (Onnela and Rauch 1693). When looking at the digital

phenotype as an extended phenotype, it becomes simpler to describe how the sensational media

affects the consumer.

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Sensational media affects the consumer by giving them a specific brand of truth and

teaching them to crave the sensational. Theses deliverables present themselves as extended

phenotypes that are positively reinforced over more media consumption. By giving them this

profound perspective on the world, the consumer begins to make assumptions about how the

world works and a general sense of what is going on. The consumer begins to form expectations

that require the world to be interesting. The news needs more news, so they make more stories

and add some higher level of interest and intensity to them. The consumers begin to think that

the world is a bit busier than it ever was before, when in reality the consumer simply isn’t

concerned with keeping track of what has been happening. This creates the illusion that the

world is coming to an end or is somehow more violent than it has ever been. The media certainly

has been recording a lot of horrific things happening in the world recently that weren’t recorded

before but consider taking a max/min approach. If not much is recorded from a year in history,

even if it was up until recently, it doesn’t necessarily mean that nothing was happening. From an

optimistic view, maybe it was a good year or at least a boring year. At the same time, there may

have been a great deal of war crimes and atrocities being committed that simply weren’t being

covered. There is not valid evidence to suggest that recent times have been any crazier or violent

than any other time, there is just a great deal of coverage nowadays. The problem with a great

deal of coverage and a great deal of stories is that there are a great deal of problems.

On the other side, the best part of a great deal of media coverage for making progress in

the world is that the first step to finding a great deal of solutions is finding a great deal of

problems. The fact that there is a great deal of media coverage is proof that the world is in a

better position than it ever has been but that requires some sacrifice from the consumer. The

consumer must, when exposed exclusively to sensational media, believe that the world is
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somehow busy. The world is not busy. The consumer is busy, whether with their own problems

or the problems assigned to them by the media. When weighing the importance of a media article

to the consumer, the consumer is almost never directly affected by the topic of the article,

sometimes not even tangentially. Yet, they are designed with such heavy human interest and

reinforcement of opinion that the consumer is legitimately entertained by information that is

functionally useless on both a local and global scale. They do nothing but make the consumer

more busy. The busyness is programmed directly into the digital devices that the consumer reads

it on.

This busyness reminds the consumer of their dependency by giving them notifications to

reengage them. The consumer adapts to the digital environment once more, and in a digital

environment, quick movement and absorption of information is rewarded with more time for the

consumer to waste. As with anything involving the brain, it can be extremely difficult to

determine whether the technology was adapted to humans or if humans adapted to technology.

For teens that spend a great deal of time on their phones, “Digital media use could be a result,

rather than a source, of typical adolescent sensation seeking,” but it is impossible to pick

between the chicken or egg (Sibley and Coxe 2599). The complexity of connections involving

the brain create difficulty for determining causality, especially when it involves an active

feedback loop. The media that is consumed is designed for consumers and consumers adapt to

the media that they consume. In the real world, the adaptations that are favorable in a digital

world may be useless or even detrimental. Sensational media, such as Instagram, may cause a

consumer to have a different outlook on what their life should look like. If the whole world is

chaotic, it only seems natural to have a chaotic life. The consumer may not come to the

realization that their life is actually boring, and that if they have the time or place to read the
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news, their life probably isn’t actively chaotic or busy. And still, due to the interconnectedness of

the brain, the perspective and behavior of the consumer is fundamentally shifted in both the

digital and real world.

The changes in behavior brought about by favorable circumstances in a sensational

digital environment cannot be excluded from the physical world. While it is totally possible to

determine behaviors based on digital media usage, it may also be possible to determine digital

media usage based on behaviors. The sensational outlook that is drilled into the consumer of

digital media will not change in the foreseeable future but as the awareness of problems rises, the

frequency and severity of the global problems may decrease and end up cycling media back into

objectiveness. Against that, the handling of certain existential problems, like climate change and

coronavirus, have proven that the public may not concern them with problems that seem

intangible. Ironically, nearly all the stories covered by the media are intangible to the average

consumer. The world is far more boring than digital media would like the consumer to believe.
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Works Cited

Barnhurst, Kevin G. “Contradictions in News Epistemology: How Modernism Failed

Mainstream US Journalism.” Media, Culture & Society, vol. 37, no. 8, Nov. 2015, pp. 1244-53,

doi:10.1177/0163443715596504.

Jain, Sachin H., et al. “The Digital Phenotype.” Nature Biotechnology, vol. 33, no. 5,

May 2015, pp. 462-63. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1038/nbt.3223.

Onnela, Jukka-Pekka, and Scott L Rauch. “Harnessing Smartphone-Based Digital

Phenotyping to Enhance Behavioral and Mental Health.” Neuropsychopharmacology, vol. 41,

no. 7, Feb. 2016, pp. 1691-96, doi:10.1038/npp.2016.7.

Sibley, Margaret H, and Stefany J Coxe. "Digital Media Use and ADHD Symptoms."

JAMA, vol. 320, no. 24, 25 Dec. 2018, 2599-2600. doi: 10.1001/jama.2018.18095.