Attention economy
15 years on, journalists are still talking nonsense about blogs
This person has no idea what they are talking about:
The reason no one talks about “blogging” anymore is that, for what blogs were good at — sending your personal views on the news (or some other topic) to a dedicated audience — other tools offered simpler, more effective tools for doing just that, most notably social networks. Why go through the trouble of setting up your own blog and slogging through a cumbersome back-end CMS when you can just create an account on Twitter and start sharing hot takes in a couple of minutes?
Well, here’s an hack who clearly has it paid any attention to what’s happening in blogging right now.
Plenty of people talk about blogs and blogging. Just not in politics and news journalism. Go and have a look at fashion, and it’s a different story.
It makes it hard for me to take the rest of the story seriously, though.
This is an absolutely fantastic essay on how fragile the cultural works created on the web have become, through the lens of the late Clive James’s website: Internet Amnesia.
How much more vulnerable is all that creativity locked away in the big social platforms?
Rob Beschizza: Study: Facebook quitters report more life satisfaction, less depression and anxiety
Not a surprise. I nearly joked that it could prove to be the mental health equivalent of smoking - and then realised that was no joke.
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 🔥