The Audience We Reward Is the Society We Create

There is an Igbo lady on Facebook whose content I have admired for quite some time.

She lives in Japan and has built a thoughtful window into a country that many Nigerians know mostly through anime, automobiles, technology and the occasional story about an extremely disciplined train arriving thirty seconds late.

Her videos about Japanese society, culture and relocation are informative. They are often practical. More importantly, they make you think.
Recently, however, I noticed a subtle change.

The information is still there, but something else has begun competing for attention. The camera angles have become more suggestive. Cleavage is becoming more conspicuous.

The content has not completely abandoned substance, but the packaging increasingly understands something that every successful social media creator eventually learns:
Attention has a market price.

I do not say this to condemn her.

That would be the easiest and least intelligent interpretation of what I am saying.
I understand the economics.

Social media has created a peculiar labour market in which an individual can sit in a bedroom, on a farm, in a Tokyo apartment or beside a Nigerian roadside and compete for the same scarce commodity: our attention.
And attention pays.

Sometimes it pays with money.
Sometimes with followers.
Sometimes with influence.
Sometimes with validation.
Sometimes with the intoxicating knowledge that thousands of strangers are watching you.

The question, therefore, is not why creators have discovered what attracts attention.

The question is:
Why are we rewarding it?
The creator is not the whole story
There is a convenient habit in Nigerian conversations.

Whenever social media becomes vulgar, unintelligent or excessively sensational, we blame the content creator.

The influencer is blamed.
The TikToker is blamed.
The skit maker is blamed.
The blogger is blamed.
The young woman dancing is blamed.
The young man shouting into a microphone is blamed.

But there is an uncomfortable economic reality beneath all of this.

Creators respond to incentives.

If an intelligent ten-minute explanation receives 600 views while a provocative 20-second clip receives 600,000, the platform has effectively conducted an experiment.

It has told the creator which product sells.
And creators, being human beings rather than saints employed by the Ministry of Moral Perfection, learn.

Quickly.

If outrage produces comments, manufacture outrage.
If nudity produces engagement, increase nudity.
If insults produce shares, insult somebody.
If political misinformation generates traffic, package it as breaking news.
If stupidity generates laughter, repeat the stupidity.
If controversy produces followers, become controversial.

The algorithm does not ask whether the content made society wiser.

It asks whether people stopped scrolling.
And that distinction may be one of the great cultural problems of our age.

Marshall McLuhan saw this coming

Marshall McLuhan’s famous formulation, “the medium is the message,” comes from his 1964 book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man.
He was not merely saying that television, radio or newspapers carry messages.
His argument was more radical.
The form through which information travels changes how people perceive, organise and experience that information.

The medium itself therefore becomes part of the social message.

That insight becomes particularly powerful in the age of TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube and X.

The digital environment does not simply ask:
“What is being said?”
It also asks:
“How quickly can it be consumed?”
“How visually stimulating is it?”
“How likely is it to provoke an emotional response?”
“How many people are reacting?”
“How long will people stay?”

That changes the ecology of public conversation.
A complicated idea requires patience.
A scandal requires none.
A serious argument requires attention.
A fight requires only curiosity.
A book demands time.
A 15-second clip demands a thumb.
And the thumb is winning.

Enter the “Olodo Uprising”

This is why the growing celebration of what some Nigerians jokingly call the “Olodo Uprising” deserves more serious attention than the laughter it generates.

The phrase is funny. The phenomenon is not.
It describes a cultural environment in which ignorance can become a performance, intellectual laziness can become entertainment and the absence of knowledge can itself become a source of popularity.

We should be careful here.
Being uneducated is not the same as being unintelligent.

Someone without formal schooling can possess extraordinary wisdom.

Someone with a PhD can be spectacularly foolish.

The problem is not academic qualification.
The problem is anti-intellectualism.

Anti-intellectualism is not simply ignorance.
Ignorance says: “I do not know.”
Anti-intellectualism says: “I do not know, therefore knowing is unnecessary.”

That is a much more dangerous position.

Plato understood the danger of celebrating the wrong things

A quotation often attributed to Plato says:
“What is honoured in a country will be cultivated there.” Whether one uses the exact wording as a direct Platonic quotation is less important than the principle running through Plato’s political thought.

In The Republic, Plato repeatedly asks what happens when a society confuses what is desirable with what is genuinely good. He worries about education, imitation, appetite, political leadership and the formation of character.

His deeper concern is not merely who rules.
It is: What kind of human being does the society produce?

That question should frighten us. Because societies teach through reward. We do not educate children only through textbooks.
Children watch.
They observe who becomes famous.
They observe who becomes wealthy.
They observe who gets invited to television.
They observe whose photographs receive 100,000 likes.
They observe who is mocked and who is celebrated.

They notice that the intelligent child may spend six hours studying while the loudest adult becomes an internet celebrity by saying something ridiculous.

They learn.

And then we wonder why the culture changes.

The child is not confused. The child is observing incentives.
Imagine a Nigerian teenager.
She watches one young woman spend months discussing science, books or social issues.
Two thousand people respond.
Then she watches another person make a provocative video.
Three hundred thousand people respond.
She watches a serious journalist spend hours investigating a public issue.
The story receives modest engagement.
Then a celebrity makes an unsupported accusation against another celebrity.
The internet catches fire.
She is not stupid.
She is learning economics.
She is learning what society pays for.

And if the lesson is repeated often enough, she may eventually conclude: Knowledge is respectable, but attention is profitable.

That is how cultures change. Not through one dramatic event.
Through thousands of tiny rewards.
We are creating a market for nonsense
This is the part we do not like admitting.
There are millions of pieces of foolish content online because there are millions of people willing to consume them.

Supply follows demand. If Nigerians stop clicking, sharing and commenting on something, its reach declines.

If Nigerians reward something repeatedly, platforms distribute it more aggressively because engagement is the currency through which attention is monetised.

This is not unique to Nigeria. It is how digital platforms are designed.

But the consequences become particularly serious in a society already struggling with educational inequality, unemployment, political misinformation and declining trust in institutions.

The internet does not create our cultural weaknesses from nothing.
It amplifies them. That distinction matters.

Social media did not invent Nigerian anti-intellectualism.It industrialised it.

The algorithm has no moral philosophy

This is perhaps the most important thing users need to understand. The algorithm does not know that your mother worked hard to send you to university.
It does not know that your country needs better civic education.
It does not know that a particular writer spent twelve hours researching a piece.
It does not know that a misleading political claim could inflame an already tense society.

It knows that people are clicking.
That is all.
The machine is not evil.
It is simply optimising according to the incentives built around it.
If outrage generates engagement, outrage becomes economically valuable.
If beauty generates engagement, beauty becomes economically valuable.
If sex generates engagement, sex becomes economically valuable.
If ignorance generates engagement, ignorance becomes economically valuable.
If knowledge generates engagement, knowledge becomes economically valuable.
The machine follows the market.
We are the market.

That is the part nobody wants to discuss.

This is bigger than social media

The consequences do not end with social media.
The same reward system exists in politics.
A politician who says something outrageous may receive more coverage than the politician who spends three hours explaining a complicated policy.

A political insult can generate more engagement than a budget document.
A scandal can become national news while a successful public programme receives three paragraphs.

We complain that politicians perform.
Then we reward performance.
We complain about propaganda.
Then we share propaganda that confirms what we already believe.

We complain about politicians who appeal to ethnic sentiment.

Then we cheer when our own ethnic group is praised.

We complain about religious manipulation.
Then we share inflammatory religious content because it attacks people we dislike.

We complain about bad journalism.

Then we reward the publisher who gives us the headline we want rather than the truth we need.

The problem is not merely that politicians manipulate citizens.

Citizens also teach politicians how to manipulate them.

Journalism has the same problem

This is where the media must examine itself.
A newsroom under commercial pressure has to make difficult choices.

A serious investigative report may take weeks.
A sensational celebrity story may take ten minutes.
One requires reporters, editors, documents, verification and legal review.
The other requires a headline.
If the sensational story receives twenty times the traffic, the commercial incentive is obvious.

This does not mean every newsroom should abandon standards.

It means audiences must understand that quality journalism has a cost.

You cannot demand investigative journalism while refusing to support the economic ecosystem that produces it.

You cannot demand truth and then reward whoever tells the most entertaining lie.

A society eventually gets the journalism it is willing to finance.

Education suffers quietly

The consequences are even more serious in education.
When a culture consistently presents intellectual effort as boring, young people receive a dangerous message.
Reading becomes uncool.
Complexity becomes suspicious.
Experts become objects of ridicule.
Grammar becomes something to mock.

Someone who has read extensively is dismissed as “forming.”

Someone who speaks confidently without knowing anything becomes “a vibe.”
The most dangerous sentence in such an environment is: “Abeg, no dey form big grammar.”

Sometimes “big grammar” is exactly what an idea requires.
Not always. But sometimes.

There are subjects that cannot be reduced to roadside wisdom.
Macroeconomics is complicated.
Climate science is complicated.
Constitutional law is complicated.
Public health is complicated.
Geopolitics is complicated.
History is complicated.

And Nigeria’s problems are certainly not waiting patiently for a 30-second motivational video to solve them.

We are also destroying our tolerance for complexity

This may be the most subtle damage.
Serious thinking requires the ability to hold two apparently contradictory truths at once.
A government can do something good and still deserve criticism.

An opposition party can expose genuine wrongdoing and still behave irresponsibly.

A politician can be personally decent and politically incompetent.

An economic reform can be necessary and painful.

A religious person can be sincere and still be wrong.
A social media creator can produce excellent content and gradually become more commercial.
A person can disagree with you without being stupid.
But digital culture often rewards absolute positions.
You must love.
Or hate.
Support.
Or condemn.
Agree.
Or insult.

There is little economic reward for saying: “Let us examine the evidence.”

That sentence does not trend very well.

Nietzsche would have recognised the temptation

Friedrich Nietzsche repeatedly warned about the human desire for conformity, comfort and the approval of the crowd.

His concept of the herd is more complicated than the way it is often used online, but one part of his critique is particularly relevant: individuals can surrender independent judgment because belonging to the crowd is psychologically easier than thinking independently.

That is precisely what digital platforms can encourage.
You see thousands of people laughing.
So you laugh.

Thousands are angry.
So you become angry.

Everyone is condemning somebody.
You join.

Everyone is praising someone.
You praise.

Nobody asks whether the crowd is correct.
The crowd is simply moving.

And the algorithm rewards movement.

Freud would probably ask what we are getting from it

Freud offers another uncomfortable question.
Why do people repeatedly consume things they know are trivial?

Because humans do not seek knowledge all the time.

We seek pleasure.
Distraction.
Belonging.
Excitement.
Sexual stimulation.
Catharsis.
Recognition.

The problem is therefore not that entertainment exists. Entertainment is necessary.

A society without laughter would be unbearable.

The problem begins when entertainment becomes the dominant currency through which everything else must compete.

A documentary must become entertaining.
A teacher must become entertaining.
A politician must become entertaining.
A journalist must become entertaining.
A serious writer must become entertaining.
A religious sermon must become entertaining.
Everything must entertain us before we agree to pay attention.

But civilisation cannot be built entirely around what feels good to consume.

Some things are valuable precisely because they demand effort.
Reading.
Learning.
Research.
Listening.
Thinking.
Compromise.
Civic participation.
Parenting.
Scholarship.
Democracy.

None of these comes with a “skip intro” button.

The ancient Greeks had already discovered the problem

Euripides repeatedly explored societies in which crowds, leaders and individuals become intoxicated by emotion.

Greek tragedy understood something modern democracies occasionally forget: A crowd can be emotionally sincere and intellectually wrong.

That is why tragedy remains relevant.
It does not ask merely: “Who is good?”

It asks: “What happens when frightened, proud, angry or ambitious human beings make decisions together?”

That is a much harder question.
And Nigeria is not exempt.
A crowd can be wrong.
A majority can be wrong.
A viral video can be wrong.
A trending hashtag can be wrong.
A popular influencer can be wrong.
Popularity is evidence of popularity.
It is not evidence of truth.

That distinction should be written above every Nigerian smartphone.

Even religion warns against following the crowd blindly

This is another area where religious texts deserve more serious treatment than the casual quotation culture often gives them.

The Qur’an repeatedly challenges the assumption that majority opinion automatically constitutes truth. Qur’an 6:116 warns believers not to follow the majority of people blindly when they lack knowledge.

The verse occurs within a wider passage addressing divine guidance, human speculation and the danger of following assumptions rather than truth.

The point is not that minorities are automatically right.

That would simply replace one form of foolishness with another. The point is that truth cannot be established by counting heads.

The Bible makes a related warning in Exodus 23:2: “You shall not follow a crowd to do evil.”
Its immediate context concerns judicial conduct and the danger of allowing a crowd to distort justice.

Again, this is not an argument against crowds.

Crowds can demand justice.
Crowds can resist oppression.
Crowds can change history.
The warning is against surrendering moral judgment simply because everyone else appears to be doing something.

That is precisely the danger of digital culture.

The crowd is now permanently in your pocket.

The Bhagavad Gita asks for discernment

The Bhagavad Gita is equally useful if we resist turning it into motivational wallpaper.
In Chapter 2, Krishna’s instruction to Arjuna concerns disciplined action, discernment and the ability to act without allowing emotional turmoil to overwhelm judgment.

The larger lesson is not “ignore consequences.”
It is that action should be governed by disciplined understanding rather than uncontrolled impulse.

That is almost the opposite of algorithmic culture.

The algorithm wants your immediate reaction.
Pause.
Click.
Anger.
Share.
Laugh.
Comment.

The Gita asks for something much harder: Discern first. Act second.
Imagine if Nigerians applied that principle to social media.

Half of our comment sections would disappear.

And perhaps that would be progress.

The Rig Veda offers a better model of intellectual culture

The Rig Veda contains the famous invocation:
“Let noble thoughts come to us from every side.”
Its original context is religious and liturgical. It is not a modern declaration about social media.

But its intellectual spirit is useful.

It asks a civilisation to remain open to worthwhile ideas regardless of where they originate.

That is exactly what Nigeria needs.
Not a society that asks: “Who said it?”
But: “Is it true?”
Not: “Is he APC?” “Is she PDP?” “Is he Labour?”
“Is she Muslim?” “Is he Christian?” “Is he Igbo?”
“Is she Yoruba?” “Is he Hausa?”
“Is she from my state?”

But:
Is the argument sound? That is intellectual maturity.

We should stop confusing access with knowledge

The smartphone has democratised access to information.It has not democratised wisdom.
A person can have access to ten million articles and understand none of them.
A person can watch five thousand educational videos and remain incapable of distinguishing evidence from assertion.

Information abundance therefore creates a new problem.

We are no longer primarily fighting ignorance.
We are fighting undisciplined information consumption.

The Nigerian with a smartphone can now encounter more information in one morning than a nineteenth-century scholar could encounter in months.

But more information does not automatically create better judgment.

Without discernment, information becomes noise. And noise is exactly what algorithms are exceptionally good at producing.

The audience therefore has power
This is the part I want creators to hear.
You are not helpless.
Every time you click, you vote.
Every time you share, you recommend.
Every time you comment, you increase distribution.
Every time you follow, you create an economic incentive.
Every time you subscribe, you finance somebody’s work.
Every time you buy from a creator, you tell the market what you value.

This is cultural democracy. We complain about the culture while participating in its construction.

That contradiction cannot continue.
If you want intelligent creators to survive, support them. Read their work. Share it.
Comment thoughtfully.
Subscribe.
Buy their books.
Attend their events.
Recommend them.
Do not merely say: “This is good.”

Then proceed to share somebody’s nonsense to 47 WhatsApp groups.
Your behaviour is the real review.

This is not an argument against beauty

And let us be honest enough to avoid hypocrisy.
There is nothing inherently wrong with beauty.
There is nothing wrong with fashion.
There is nothing wrong with sexuality.
There is nothing wrong with entertainment.
There is nothing wrong with dancing.
There is nothing wrong with a woman knowing that she is beautiful.
There is nothing wrong with a man being charismatic.

The question is not: “Why are people showing their bodies?”
The question is: “What happens when the market begins rewarding the body more consistently than the mind?”

That is a completely different question.
And it applies to men too.
The shirtless motivational guru.
The fake billionaire.
The aggressive political commentator.
The comedian who knows nothing but speaks confidently.
The celebrity who turns every tragedy into content.
The preacher who turns every fear into a fundraising opportunity.
The politician who turns every public problem into a photo opportunity.
The phenomenon is not female.
It is cultural.

What we reward becomes normal

This is the central principle.
A society does not need a committee to decide what is normal. Repeated reward does the job.
If corruption is repeatedly rewarded, it becomes normal.
If intellectual dishonesty is repeatedly rewarded, it becomes normal.
If public service is rewarded, public service becomes attractive.
If scholarship is respected, scholarship becomes aspirational.
If entrepreneurship is supported, entrepreneurship grows.
If investigative journalism is funded, investigative journalism survives.
If serious art is bought, artists produce more serious art.
If thoughtful creators are supported, they have less economic pressure to become clowns.
Markets are not merely mechanisms for buying things.

They are mechanisms for communicating value.
Every click is a tiny price signal.
Every like is a vote.
Every share is an endorsement.
Every follow is a signal.
We are therefore participating in a gigantic cultural auction.

The disturbing question is not whether the auction is taking place.
It is: What are we bidding for?
The society we complain about may be the society we are financing
This is where the Nigerian conversation needs to become uncomfortable.

We cannot complain that our young people do not read while refusing to buy books.
We cannot complain that journalism has become sensational while rewarding sensational headlines.

We cannot complain about shallow influencers while making them rich through engagement.

We cannot complain about political ignorance while ignoring serious civic education.

We cannot complain about declining standards while applauding mediocrity because the mediocre person belongs to our camp.

We cannot complain about anti-intellectualism while treating intellectuals as pretentious.

We cannot complain about the death of meaningful conversation while turning every disagreement into abuse.

At some point, we have to accept responsibility.
The audience is not an innocent spectator.
The audience is the investor.

And this is why you and I should keep writing

There are enough people shouting.
There are enough people dancing.
There are enough people fighting.
There are enough people manufacturing outrage.
There are enough people selling certainty where there should be questions.
There are enough people turning every public issue into entertainment.

What you and I should contribute is this.
A place where an idea can breathe.
Where a Nigerian can encounter Plato without feeling that philosophy is only for professors.
Where Aluko can illuminate contemporary politics.
Where Shakespeare can explain power.
Where Freud can help us understand ourselves.
Where Nietzsche can disturb our comfortable assumptions.
Where African history can correct our selective memory.
Where religion can be examined seriously rather than weaponised cheaply.

Where politics can be discussed without pretending that every politician is either a saint or Satan.

Where complexity is not treated as weakness.
Where disagreement does not require insult.
Where writing can still ask the reader to sit down for a while.

That may not always win the algorithm.

But perhaps the algorithm does not need to win every argument.
Because civilisation is partly a question of attention
What we pay attention to becomes visible.
What becomes visible attracts investment.

What attracts investment grows.
What grows becomes normal.
What becomes normal eventually becomes culture.
And culture eventually becomes the environment in which the next generation grows.
That chain is frighteningly simple.
Attention becomes incentive.
Incentive becomes behaviour.
Behaviour becomes culture.
Culture becomes expectation.
Expectation becomes society.

So the next time we complain about what social media has become, perhaps we should begin with a less comfortable question.

What did we help it become?
Because creators are responding to us.
The platforms are responding to us.
The advertisers are responding to us.
The market is responding to us.
And our children are watching all of it.
They are learning what we celebrate.
They are learning what we ridicule.
They are learning what we consider success.
They are learning what we reward.

So perhaps the real “Olodo Uprising” is not the rise of foolish content.

Perhaps it is our willingness to finance foolishness with our attention while complaining that intelligent culture is disappearing.

That is the contradiction we must confront.

Good content does not disappear because good creators suddenly cease to exist.
It disappears when the audience stops rewarding it.

So read the difficult article.
Buy the serious book.
Listen to the thoughtful podcast.
Share the useful documentary.
Support the journalist who investigates.
Follow the creator who teaches you something.
Tell the artist whose work moved you.

Argue with the writer without insulting the writer.
Give the scholar an audience.

Give the intelligent creator a reason to remain intelligent.

And yes, enjoy the dance.
Enjoy the comedy.
Enjoy the beautiful photograph.
Enjoy the harmless foolishness occasionally.
Life is too short to spend every hour discussing Plato.

But if all we consume is amusement, we should not be surprised when we eventually become amusing to ourselves and useless to our society.

A civilisation is built by what its people repeatedly choose to value.

So choose carefully.

Because the audience is not merely watching the culture.
The audience is writing the culture.

And whether we realise it or not, every click is a tiny vote for the Nigeria we are preparing to become.