Attention economy
The scam of pseudo-attention metrics
Part of the scam is that the pyramid scheme of attention will somehow pay off for a lot of people. It won’t. It can’t. The math doesn’t hold up. Someone is going to win a lottery, but it probably won’t be us. And a bigger part is that the things you need to do to be popular (the only metric the platforms share) aren’t the things you’d be doing if you were trying to be effective, or grounded, or proud of the work you’re doing.
Mean
Yes, I know that this was yesterday’s prompt, but I didn’t get to it (even though I posted other things) and I did have something I wanted to say:
One thing I try not to be on the internet these days is mean. But it is an effort. I’m good at the snark. I can bring the snark. Some people encourage me to let the snark run free.
Sometime the snark is deserved. I retain the right to be snarky about Zuckerberg and the FaceBorg.
But I don’t think it’s good for me, or the state of discourse on the internet. I don’t think it makes me feel good about myself. It brings me attention, but it’s not attention I value.
10 years ago, I had a long drive to Sutton every morning for work. The one way I could guarantee I’d arrive in a good mood was to go out of my way to be courteous to other road users.
I feel the same way about the internet. Let’s not turn social media into a secondary school environment where the meanest win. Be helpful. Be useful. Don’t associate with those who aren’t.
Be better.
Serfing USA
Jeremiah Owyang : Chances are, you’re probably a serf.:
To modernize the last word of Mikhail Aleksandrovich Bakunin’s famed quote; “In antiquity, slaves were, in all honesty, called slaves. In the middle ages, they took the name of serfs. Nowadays they are called users.”
Trapped in the attention farm
Ever notice that mostly what people post on Twitter is designed to get attention for the author. I think that’s due to the award incentive of the system. Flow == more followers == power and prestige.
Yes. It’s the big and dangerous trap of Twitter, especially for journalists. Twitter increasingly rewards attention-seeking behaviour, rather than useful behaviour.
Online community dynamics change as the membership grows. In particular, most networks require increasing attention-seeking behaviour in order to get any attention at all.
Interesting that Pinterest is leading the way on this. People do not pay nearly enough attention to it.
Pinterest takes the lead in the fight against online misinformation
Discourse is not Twitter’s strength, not because of the thread structure, rather that it’s a write-only community of attention seekers 🔥
The victorious defeat of the open web
It just occurred to me that the prevalent idea that apps killed the open web is completely and utterly wrong. The open web is still there, it still works, and it still needs no-one’s permission before you can publish there. Sure, the vast majority of the attention is elsewhere, in siloed apps, but then it was in the glory days of the web, too.
Maybe that’s OK. Maybe that’s how it should be. And that’s maybe where those of us who enjoy something different, something alternative, something fun can build new and interesting things. We need new mechanisms to help people navigate these alleyways, and to connect with each other, as most of the old ones are gone or transformed. But that can be done.
Maybe, just maybe, the victory of the apps has handed us the blessing of being counter-cultural again. And that’s exciting.
OK. Let’s talk about that bloody egg — and why it does matter.
Yes, it’s come to that.
I love the neologism “memeocracy” to describe the impact of influencer culture in the attention economy. I love the impact of it significantly less.
Barbados, late 2011
I’ve just been pottering around editing some old photos, from our last pre-children holiday. Two days after I got back, my life changed forever in two ways: we agreed to buy a house, and I realised that my time at my old employer was up. I was figuring out what to do next, and so these photos have never had the attention they deserve.
I’m enjoying coming back to them with seven years' distance.
I used to shoot a lot more landscapes back then…
Such a lovely, simple concept:
Technology is no longer scarce, our attention is. Technology is breaking our attention. Tech should consume as little of our attention as possible, and only when necessary; that’s the core of calm technology.
The two basics of digital #journalism that too many people forget: Attention and Atomisation
Do you what I like about smart speakers? They just sit quietly, waiting to be called upon, while mobile phones behave like noisy, annoying insecure devices, constantly demanding your attention. Grow the heck up, phone.
I have to confess, I paid basically zero attention to the royal wedding in the build up to it. But seeing the royals give a hearty two fingers to the racists we’ve seen rise post-Brexit?
As long as Twitter rewards hoaxing with attention, it’s going to get ever less useful for breaking news.
Apple’s acquisition of Texture (a digital magazine subscription app) means we should probably be paying Apple News more attention than we are. But we should go in with our eyes open as to the downsides.
It's not our attention that's being monetised, it's our data
The Centre for Human Technology doesn’t want your attention:
What the Center identifies as the ‘monetization of attention’ is, actually, the extraction of personal data. (Curiously, they do not use the phrase ‘big data’, or ‘your personal data’ anywhere in their website text.) This attention (or, personal data) is extracted from our digital and analog behavior and then is used to profile and target us to sell us lies, misinformation, or worsen our depression by showing us advertising for make-up.
It only took three attempts to get the headline typo free on this.
Bring back the subs.
I am old enough to have learnt to not to blog every opinion that crosses my brainmeats.
I am clearly not old enough yet to be silent without drawing attention to the fact I’m being silent.