attention industry

Asymmetrical Communications.

[This is a re-envisioning of a two year old post, entitled: Paris Hilton and the Attention Arms Race.]

Attention used to be about volume.  If you were one of the chosen few with a voice loud enough, you would garner the segment of the population that cared about what you had to say.  Loud voices included, on a society-wide level, newspapers, radio stations, television networks, and heads of state.  On the lower rung, you would have community leaders, local religious leaders, executives, etc.  On the lowest rung, the cool kids, parents, older siblings, pretty girls, etc.

As the broadcast paradigm has collapsed, the fight for attention has gotten depressing.

[Aside: When I say broadcast paradigm, I’m more or less talking about the entire history of media, post-oral histories, and pre-internet.  The second writing was invented, it was a matter of a chosen few publishing, and others reading and not responding.  While desktop publishing could be argued as flipping this paradigm, nothing physical produced at home had the same reach that made an authoritative published work powerful.]

Two important things happened: Firstly, More.  As in, more channels, more original programming, more new, more hours, more competition for attention.  All of it targeted at the same mass audiences, or (recently) the mass niches, the audiences which are targeted in such a crude way that they are still mass generalizations.  Examples of this are BET, Oxygen, etc.  Targeting an entire race, or an entire gender, is not targeting.  The second thing that happened was the internet, or more accurately, Democratization.  Now everyone can create at the same (potential) volume.

End result: Signal is Noise.

Even ignoring the incoherent, the spam, the juvenile and the offensive, the sheer amount of content being created is such that volume isn’t enough to guarantee impact.  Relevance isn’t enough, nor it quality.  Much as scale forces the logical mind to accept that there is probably life elsewhere in the universe, scale forces me to accept that there is a staggering amount of content that is interesting, insightful, original, and totally up my alley, that I will never see.

I am not arrogant enough to think that this applies only to me, because I’m not that special.

Another two things.  One: Assuming signal is noise, decorum, tact, and self-censorship evaporate.  Challenging the boundaries of the acceptable is an effective way of gathering attention in a time of unprecedented competition.  As evidence, I don’t present a link to Two Girls, One Cup (DO NOT GOOGLE THIS.)  Two: While the creation of content is still of value, distribution, as well as building and maintaining an audience, necessarily have to opt out of the volume model.  Getting louder doesn’t work, but getting connected (socially, organizationally, even politically) does.

It’s a question of an Arms Race (hat tip to the Rebel Sell, which introduced me to the concept of the collective action problem) versus a Ground War.  Oddly enough, this started happening in media at the same time it started happening in international relations.

The massive media industrial complex was getting hurt, badly, by the asymmetrical blogging, pirating and podcasting cells.

The exciting thing, is that corporations are starting to understand how to play a ground war.  It’s against their DNA, in a lot of cases, so it’s starting slow.  We’ve got companies like Comcast going one on one when it comes to customer service via twitter, Nissan enlisting people to blog/create to win their latest car, Macallan hosting Twitter Tastings.

The media-industrial complex is starting to fight a ground war, but only once they realized that an arms race has no winners.