On the Baffling Durability of Notifications.

Facebook recently updated its iPhone application, and the most disruptive feature, in my estimation, is the inclusion of push notifications as an option.  Up until this point, I’ve received certain Facebook notifications via email, to be sure I didn’t miss important information, invitations, or messages from personal and business contacts.

The thing is, notifications are just that - a notice.  And via email, especially for gmail users like myself, the fact that they exist after reading is somewhat counter intuitive.

Push notifications are perfect for this.  My phone vibrates, and more or less says ‘if you care, check this area of your Facebook account’ at which point I have the option of viewing the content on my phone, or ignoring the message.

This has me reconsidering the point of notification emails.  Email is used not because it fits the job, but because it is constant: nearly everyone has an email address, and they will check it more regularly than they will other messaging platforms.  Where text notifications wouldn’t provide enough utility (for me) a push notification sends home a very clear message - this information should not be durable, and in fact, shouldn’t be sent in a durable medium.

I’ve turned off all of my Facebook email notifications, to see if there is actually a downside for receiving these messages to my phone in a non-durable fashion.  But off the top of my head, this is a simple way to eliminate a lot of the inbox clutter I (and probably you) face on a day to day basis.  Push notifications to a mobile application, from all of my social platforms, would probably cut my email by about 25%.

Attention Triage.

I’m an unrepentant information addict.  And in general, I find when someone complains about information addicts, or the downsides of constant connectivity, they’re focusing on the wrong problem.  Most people suffer from an inability to prioritize, rather than an overflow of information.

I’m a big believer in attention triage: I keep a constant flow of curated information available for me to explore, but I do my best to keep in control of how my attention is divided, and what elements of my informational flow are getting due consideration.

Major benefits of information addiction?

• Connectivity: I’m available, responsive, and aware of what is going on in the lives of people I care about, topics I care about, and facts I benefit from knowing.
• Decision Making: A constant flow of information, and the ability to access more when desired, means I make decisions based on what I know, as often as possible, rather than guessing or assuming.
• Denying Limitations: I learn, connect, and communicate when and where I can, regardless of the location, time zone, or accessibility of any of the participants.
• Mental Agility: This likely doesn’t apply to everyone, but I think better when I can take short breaks, and switch topics periodically.  I crave (and benefit from) being introduced to new information, and new ideas when working on an unrelated task.
• Prioritizing: Mentioned above, but I feel my ability to prioritize tasks and demands is improved by constantly exercising this capacity, in regards to deciding what gets my attention when, and for how long.

Less direct are other benefits - I adore the fact that I’m creating a searchable, sharable record of some of my conversations and actions.  Doing this turns existing into an act of creation, in a way.  I’m aware that people think of this as self-indulgent, but I doubt they’d feel the same if I was scribbling in a journal, rather than posting on a blog, or twitter, or facebook.

I suppose my big point is that there’s a difference between being aware and obsessed.  I consider myself an information addict, in the sense that I am addicted to staying aware of relevant information.  But that awareness doesn’t need to distract me from other things happening in front of my face.  Beyond that, I consider online interaction ‘real’.  It doesn’t have the immediacy of speaking face to face, or participating in group activity, but denying the ‘reality’ of a genuine interaction of two people, even two people who will never meet, is counter-intuitive for me.

Finally, I think we all set our own limits and expectations.  A side effect of being an information addict is that the people around you will notice.  There are times when something more immediately important keeps me away from email, twitter or text messages for a few hours.  An extended wait to hear back from me is unusual to the point where a delayed response can send an unspoken message, intentional or not.

[The subject matter of this post was heavily inspired by this post: “Stop Clicking & Start Living”.]

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.

Greatest ‘Hits’: Paris Hilton and the Attention Arms Race.

[This post originally appeared on my old blog, BrokenGentleman.com, on Feb 18, 2007]

As mentioned in this earlier post, The Rebel Sell influenced my view of many things in society as a kind of arms race. While I read not too long ago that Paris Hilton could best be considered a platform, rather than a celebrity (the argument being that she can aid promotion by associating things with herself, but can’t promote her own works successfully), I’m starting to think that she’s actually the perfect example of the arms race worldview in terms of the mass media.

Let me explain.

We live in an over saturated media landscape. Whether it be advertising or television channels, or celebrities, we are blasted in the face with an insane amount of information on a second by second basis. I don’t know about anyone else, but even going to school in a suburban area, I’ve gotten so used to the noise that silence feels eerie.

What do small children do when no one is paying attention? They start to yell. And when all the children start yelling, they begin to act out. In the same way the girl that no one paid attention to in grade 10 ends up making some bad decisions in her quest for attention, people (in this case, media producers) decide that being a little ridiculous isn’t a big problem, as long as people are looking. Upping the t&a isn’t that high a price to pay, as long as people keep looking. Starting every episode of CSI with three dead hookers and an exploding caddy isn’t that bad, if someone will please for the love of god look.

Having your homemade nightvision porn leak online for every teenage boy to spank it do isn’t shameful anymore. It means people are looking. And the simple fact that people are looking means that you matter, regardless of issues of respectability.

Paris Hilton being famous is the end result of the attention arms race. So are movies where Johnny Knoxville and the Jackass crew get the shit beat out of them by bulls. It has nothing to do with quality. It’s the simple reality that there is so much signal out there, that getting people to look is seen as a matter of being more attention-grabbing than the other guy.

This makes perfect sense, given the broadcast model of mass communication that has dominated for the last several decades. More reach meant more power. Louder meant more power.

The problem is, signal is now noise. All of it. And yeah, people will look when a screech emerges from the static, when a bright flash disrupts the snow. But what happens when that stops being a distraction, and people turn off the radio and the TV?

When signal is noise, you basically have three options;

1) Create a new type of signal.

2) Make people seek you out, instead of vice versa.

3) Get louder.

Obviously, the last option eventually stops working. So, two more things to explore. But the point I’m trying to make is, if you want attention, and screaming isn’t getting it, a conversation will. Interaction is louder than night vision pornography. Creating a discussion among others is essentially viral marketing. Creating a discussion with them, and with you, often falls into the world of crowdsourcing.

Which I guess, is something to talk about next post.