I'll take the opportunity to drop one of my favorite quotes from Herb Simon (Turing award and Nobel prize winner, artificial intelligence pioneer, father of behavioral economics, founder of CMU's Computer Science department):
"""
In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it. (Simon 1971.)
"""
> a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes.
one could also say that when there's a scarcity of newsworthy events, or things to cover that might sell advertising to certain demographics, you get entirely new media things (like TMZ) which are the trashy digital version of the UK tabloid
press.
if such media organizations within that category think there is a scarcity of attention, they'll fabricate something new and shocking and hype it endlessly until it becomes a top item.
media entities creating entire media properties/brands for the purpose of reporting about the goings-on of other media entities/celebrities/brands.
it's like an ouroboros of media made from kardashians, hype, fear, angst, anger (hello rupert murdoch).
now combine the above with what I would charitably describe as weaponized advertising technology, building profiles on individual facebook/twitter/instagram/tiktok/whatever social media users and their extended friends network.
I wouldn’t say there is a scarcity of newsworthy events. You could spend all your waking hours just reading about important things happening in the world and still not run out.
However, reading newsworthy events takes a lot of brain energy, and you can’t sustain that all day. That means if you want people to spend a lot of time consuming your content, it has to be easy to consume content.
I totally agree there really isn't a scarcity of newsworthy events worldwide for the persons who care to read sober, rational news media reporting on various things (economy, politics, wars, transportation, international aid/development, etc). I'm talking about things written by people who have actual degrees in journalism, politics, economics from well respected universities whose names are recognized internationally. Journalism that wins Pulitzer prizes.
Then we have a whole other category of "news" which has been fabricated out of whole cloth for the purpose of selling even more advertising to a vast demographic of people who are never, or very rarely going to sit down to read the Süddeutsche Zeitung, Globe and Mail, Los Angeles Times or similar on a daily basis.
I have a theory that the aggregate advertising revenue from the latter class of "news" is rapidly eclipsing the first type.
For several weeks it was almost impossible to escape the endless firehose of "news" from the Depp / Heard trial. I think it is a very clear example of this.
You think the trial was cooked up by the media so they could report on it? Like, the media convinced Heard to have that article written up in the first place?
I mean, assuming the whole thing wasn't made up (and I doubt it was), I think it's an instance where the news was more than just random celebrity gossip. That case touched on some important issues about domestic violence (especially against men) and freedom of speech which I think would have made it newsworthy enough on its own. From Depp's perspective at least, it was also important to have the case play out very publicly since he was trying to use it as an opportunity to clear his name.
That said, the media sure did exploit it for all it was worth. I'm still seeing articles about it and expect there will be plenty more.
No I'm not claiming anything is made up. And it certainly is newsworthy in that it should've spawned a couple articles here and there, and maybe a couple covering its conclusion. What we got instead was completely out of proportion for any journalistic measure of 'newsworthiness'.
What's the connection between TMZ and UK tabloids? It's based and founded in the US where we have our own supermarket checkout trash, plus ample TV trash that likely provided much of the inspiration for it.
Neil Postman's book "Amusing Ourselves to Death" discusses this tension in detail. It was written in 1985 as an analysis of the effect of television on our attention span but his conclusions are even more applicable to digital media.
That was a depressing read, knowing where things went afterwards.
//EDIT: Decent Roger Waters album, though. I should hunt it down on vinyl.
"The Shallows" by Carr - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shallows_(book) - was even worse. Published in 2010, based on research dating up to about 2008, it said, "Huh. Reading stuff on a screen is weird. We need to be really, really careful about what we do with that going forward."
And it was entirely ignored as we launched into the smartphone, attention-vampire model of personal electronics.
Do you happen to know if there’s been any research into whether e-ink (thinking of my Kindle here) is any better than reading off of a traditional screen?
I'm not sure. I've moved most of my reading and reference material to e-ink (Kobo, I avoid Amazon in every way possible and de-DRM anything I can only find on them), and I think it's better than a LCD from a distraction perspective, but it lacks some of the "concrete physical location cues" of a real book.
The Shallows talked about how hyperlinks and such were a major distraction point in reading web articles, so I'd imagine e-ink is better for book form, but... no, I don't know for sure. Sorry.
I will say that people look at me funny when I tell them, after sending me an hour YouTube video on some topic, that I'd rather they send me the titles of three comprehensive books on it. If it's interesting to me, I'll read the books, and have a far better grasp on the topic than someone's biased, attention-focused video, though.
For me, it depends. There are good videos, and there are not so good books.
Problem is, you can't know which is which before having seen/read them.
Regarding Youtube, if you have an account there you can curate your experience. Any video you didn't like? Erase it from your history. Any channel whose producer kills your nerves with over-dramatizing, grimacing, adverts? Block it.
Any channel which produces vapid fluff which you find uninformative, boring, etc.? Block it. Any channel which trends on the homepage, which you see when you go there without cookies, and logged out? Block them.
That gives a vastly different experience, with much less trash. I guess I have a few hundred blocks now, and almost no subscriptions to any channels. Much better discoverability of new stuff that way, and no spam from subscribed channels either.
Btw., who is saying that books aren't biased? ;->
Furthermore different people have different 'neuroarchitectures', habits, training, resulting in different 'learning experiences' and preferences.
I think there are topics which profit from hyperlinking. Especially when complex and interlinked with other complex topics.
But... it needs to be produced with 'readability' in mind, otherwise it's a mess. Think of it as a Mind- or Concept-map, maybe with something like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explorable_explanation embedded , for getting an overview into something new.
OTOH there are videos on YT where people just present something with a few slides, sometimes short animations which are excellent, no matter if hobbyist, some technical conference, or academic context.
No comparison to something from History Channel, Disney, National Geographic, or such. While National Geographic has excellent 'production values', WTF they need to spoil that with background music? (This is the one thing that is aggravating me so much in documentaries.)
Long story short: There are many things which can profit from animations, short video clips, or full documentary style. Also talented and competent speakers.
See it as a thing where countless words, and maybe formulas and illustrations have been compressed into a 'flip-book', thereby reaching an information density which enables you to get into it fast, or even to understand it at all because it is so vast, needing that density to even try to get all that stuff across.
Of course, if you're already deep into something, then most of what's available will only make you yawn. But still, I've been surprised by some things which I've thought I'd knew very well, but didn't :-)
IMO hypermedia is the way to tackle the ever growing complexity of interdisciplinary science in general, and also for the sciences themselves.
Linear books don't cut it anymore.
Problem is we lack good tools/software/systems for authoring and combining it.
> Btw., who is saying that books aren't biased? ;->
And that's why I specifically said three. If I read one, I won't have enough grasp of the subject to be able to identify any biases. If I read three, I probably will be able to sort out when one of the three is out in left field on something in particular.
As for your assertions about video, Amusing Ourselves to Death and The Shallows make well researched arguments that are exactly opposite what you're trying to argue here. You might read them.
The morality of the medium used to be something up for debate until the wild wild internet won everyone over. The old critiques of TV fit alarmingly well with our present media landscape, what's sadder is they are rarely brought up even in digital minimalist topics.
A few of the other sub-commentors here are talking about a good bookshelf as a solution to Herb's problem.
I think it's a great idea. But, as always, determining what is on that bookshelf is a tough one.
The Harvard Classics was a great attempt about a century ago [0]. 'Dr. Elliot's 5 foot shelf of books' was what an undergraduate degree at Harvard in 1909 included. Harvard University President Charles W. Eliot put together about all of the great books that those Gilded Age scions were supposed to digest.
Personally speaking, the greatest thing about the Harvard Classics was the 15-minute-a-day Reading Guide to the corpus. I went through it all a few years ago, and man, that was a really good idea. Like, I like Shakespeare now; he's really good! And I read through that philosophy finally, and that was really good too! And, lord, the poetry; I never really liked poems, but now I really love them. Most days were like that for me. I'll fully admit though, there were some real stinkers in there. But only once in a while.
Vol. 2, pp. 31-43 : Plato's Crito -- Socrates unceasingly strove for beauty, truth, and perfection. Sentenced to death on a false charge, he refused to escape from the death cell, even when opportunity was offered.
As an aside, I'd love for an updated version of the Harvard Classics complete with 15-minute-a-day type readings or other media. I really did look forward to that dose of mind-training every day when I went through it. Does anyone know of a good place for daily mind training that is like this?
I'll try my level best to post the daily reading every day for the next year. Let's use those posts as a place to discuss the readings. Join me on this 15-minute-a-day quest to bettering ourselves.
This is why, in practice, you'd still probably come out way better, intellectually and perhaps in terms of happiness, spending a few years with a well-curated bookcase—or even just a library card—and some notebooks, rather than unfettered access to the Web, despite what a lot of us thought about it'd bring to the world, years ago.
A good bookcase still wins. Turns out I don't have time for "everything" anyway (and it's not really got everything, anyway, though The Web is very good at delivering 'everything' when it comes to cheap trivia)
One of my startup ideas is to create this "bookcase" for the web. A curated list of really solid "books" and other information sources.
My kids are constantly bringing home all kinds of interesting things from the library, and I remember how much cool stuff there is on the shelves from my youth. That stuff is just missing from the web.
I'm surprised traditional publishers, the folks that actually print books, don't start working back through their catalogs building some kind of online library. I suspect that its because of the way contracts are written that don't leave anybody owning the complete book. I suspect you would have to go back to authors, photographers, and illustrators and renegotiate use of assets again.
The idea of a well curated bookcase beating access to the World Wide Web is not one I’m so sure about. Permissionless access to a massive consortium of information, even if most of it is low quality, has empowered communities to learn concepts that they normally would not be able to (Khan Academy, Wikipedia, YouTube). Id agree that sitting with a bookcase for a long time would lend itself well to analysis because there is such limited information, whereas the way most people use the internet is by consuming in abundance. But the ease of use and accessibility of the web beats books.
I think what they are getting at is if you want to actually learn some deep fundamental knowledge on a topic, its still going to be best found in a book today over a youtube video or a medium post. I agree with this. There is a lot of noise on the internet, and all of it is optimized for short form consumption that leaves out a lot of detail. Relevant blog posts you struggle to find due to SEO spam can't compare to a couple hundred page encyclopediac handbook on a given topic. If you want to change your oil maybe you can get by with a youtube video, but if you want to one day cultivate actual expertise you better buy that haynes manual that covers every little system in your car in one place you can easily reference that isn't prone to link rot. You are right that its hard to get good books for certain communities, but the internet comes in handy here, and plenty of good books are available freely online through means of varying legitimacy. If you want to really get a handle on physics, maybe finding a PDF of a good textbook in addition to those youtube videos would go further.
Those are examples of relatively well curated internet resources compared to a typical blog post or medium article. Khan Academy has allowed students the opportunity that underfunded schools miss—-for instance, the ability to advance their math skills, without the need of an expensive tutor.
I think part of the difference is if you're on a quest for particular knowledge (how to repair your car, how to rebuild a M35A2 winch) vs just browsing aimlessly.
In the first, the internet wins hands down most of the time (there are specialized areas where nothing has been digitized); but the second it's not clear that browsing the library is worse than doomscrolling, even if you're doomstrolling HN or something relatively "high quality".
To add on to the second point, when browsing the internet, you can skim dozens of articles on a certain subject like EU politics need without getting a clear picture of it, whereas all it takes is one we’ll crafted analytical book to get that overview.
If he actually said this in 1971, hats off to him. That's an amazing prediction. Internet and the personal computer (information-rich) became popular after 1970s, so predicting attention scarcity before that is very prescient.
The cynic in me says that hundreds of people guessed about computer's future in 1970s that some of them are bound to be right. But Simon's prediction seems genuinely amazing.
I want to mention that not 100% of our time needs to be spent on something "useful". While it's something everyone needs to define for themselves, recovery and enjoying life outside of what is deemed "productive" is also very much important. I am writing this because I have personally been affected (as bystander) if people don't take this seriously.
For Germany, I can say that in recent years, health insurances are reporting a very significant increase in burn-out cases which easily take months of recovery and are a very significant problem in the economy with high financial impact on both society and individual lives.
Maybe it has to do with the type of work we do nowadays, or it has simply become more acceptable to openly tackle this issue instead of hiding or dismissing it. I don't know. But I have personally witnessed several people (!) go through this and it's terrible. Hiding it doesn't mean it isn't there and ruining lives behind the scenes.
The 1800s was a different situation altogether and time-wise probably one of the worst periods to be alive as working class. 10-16 hour workdays, repetitive and physically demanding work, no rights and barely any medical attention. I am very certain that people didn't just "toughen" that out, it had to come at a very high cost.
Herbert Simon was of unbelievable intelligence. Everything I have read from him has been directly on point but yet literally decades ahead of its time.
I'd corrupt the quote slightly to factor informational effects of propaganda:
"a wealth of [conflicting] information creates [an apathy] of attention and a need to [withdraw] that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it."
In this way, information sources can destroy attention rather than foster efficient allocation (which is hard work).
Well if attention is all you need, we have bert now. so we will be able to sort through more information now. But the arms race between spam and attention is definitely going to language wars 2.
It seems like there's something darker and more perverse at play here. I'm not saying it's necessarily organized, but it's a dangerous dynamic.
It like everything is done to prevent people's mind to be at peace and to relax. The constant noise and audio/visual pollution we see everywhere is deeply troubling.
You cannot go to a simple store without some music being played, often very loudly for no reason.
I went to my parent's house the other day and the TV was on. I had to turn it off so we could have a normal conversation like normal people do. The TV was constantly pulling our attention on some stupid crap like ads or some garbage program that tries to polarize people.
There is another weird effect I found. When I cut this stuff out of my life. It was as if I could suddenly notice a lot more of it. But oddly I notice when I am being drawn in. Was I that bad before? Am I just noticing it now? I find myself tuning out everything around me to look at 'that thing'.
My parents are amused that I have cable tv but have not even plugged the boxes in. It was part of the rental I currently have. There is most certainly more commercials there no today too. Average length of show has over the past 30 years dropped by at least 5 mins per 30 mins. They even squash out the credits to get more commercials in, with overlays for more.
But recently I have started to think of these people as thieves of my time. They are monetizing my time, my location, my browsing habits. All so they can sell a square of internet to someone else to sell me shoes. Done in milliseconds. With the hope that I will click on it and buy something.
There are times I want to be advertised to. When I am looking for something. I used to buy computer shopper just for that very reason. But at all other times it is like they have leached on to us and are always vying for that small splinter of time. But there are so many they consume more than I like.
> You cannot go to a simple store without some music being played, often very loudly for no reason.
I swear certain stores in Japan are the worst in this regard. I’ve never come across anything near this bad in any other countries I’ve been to. My wife refuses to go into certain chains and I can’t blame her.
Bright lights, loud music, signages literally everywhere and random yelling of announcements over crackling speaker.
Of course not all stores are like this but I’ve never really cared about noise in shops until I started living in Japan recently.
It’s probably on purpose: when you have trouble thinking critically, and are fighting multiple distractions, you’re going to have a harder time not grabbing the potato chips or doing the mental math to see that “Super Deal!!!” is not actually a super deal.
I’ve found that my shopping is more impulsive when I have to deal with that background racket plus a toddler trying to grab bright, shiny packages.
My solution: do what I can to avoid bringing toddler grocery shopping, wear earbuds with my music playing just loud enough to overcome store sound system.
Do you find your own music to be better for preserving attention than the store music? The collection I curated over the years consists 100% of music that caught my attention. I'd prefer wearing ear plugs but haven't found good ones for daily use.
My own music is familiar, which removes a source of distraction. Plus, doesn’t come with either news or marketing announcements in a language I mostly understand, but automatically raises my attention when I hear it.
>It seems like there's something darker and more perverse at play here.
For me, the more distracted I am, the more shit I can tolerate. I'm sure many work the same. I believe that this is the "circus" part of the ancient "bread and circuses" phrase.
My personal biggest gripe: music being played in-between points in tennis and volleyball matches (and I'm sure other sports, but I used to watch those). It's not just that the type of music being played offends my sensibilities, but the entire idea that people can't even be trusted to have ten seconds to themselves deeply saddens me.
For me, it's one of the reasons why I no longer go to such events.
They all just instantly pull out their phones and zombiescroll every time the action lulls for more than three seconds whether the facility blasts music or not. I think the loss of boredom tolerance is a huge issue in our culture.
> I went to my parent's house the other day and the TV was on. I had to turn it off so we could have a normal conversation like normal people do. The TV was constantly pulling our attention on some stupid crap like ads or some garbage program that tries to polarize people.
It's like that at my (Boomer) parents' house too: If it wasn't for me consciously and constantly (re-)turning it off, the TV would be blaring during all waking hours--sometimes two TVs in two different rooms, working our anxiety up with two different BREAKING NEWS updates simultaneously!
But before I get all high and mighty, I look at my own generation which has their smartphones dinging and buzzing at them constantly, feeding them that same steady drip. I remember pre-COVID sitting at a restaurant and watching this couple that seemed to be on a date, except their phones were vibrating and dinging every 5 seconds, interrupting whatever it was they were talking about, and they just couldn't ignore them. They couldn't just let their minds be at peace and relax, as you put it. They ended up not even talking to each other--just constantly checking and swiping, then checking again, then tapping, then swiping, then checking, then swiping, then checking and checking again OMG it must be exhausting! Like the Las Vegas Strip in your brain for hours straight!
> It like everything is done to prevent people's mind to be at peace and to relax.
I think that our human nature is the source of this. Having spare time often means being bored (initially an unpleasant sensation) and potentially coming to terms with your own life, behavior and intentions. Only after a while of discomfort do you get the gains: creativity and growth.
I have introduced people around me to meditation, and some just cannot bear to be idle. They start to ruminate and feel like they can handle it.
I have seen a particular flavor of it mentioned a few times. There are people who like having noise in the background. Typically in older generations and lower classes it's not music or intentionally selected podcasts. Instead, they keep their TV on at all times. I'll not be surprised if it turns out to be a major vector for government propaganda.
There's always a cost when it's our attention. We've been in a war for our attention for many years. What I don't understand is why everyone puts emphasis on social media and not digital media in general? Television held the crown for many years and still does.
Read Jerry Mander and his thoughts about advertisements. You'll never think about them the same when you realize they are implanting into your head and you can never get them out.
With machine learning and digital breadcrumbs, "adtech" has evolved into a beast akin to WMD. It's devastatingly effective paired against radio, TV ads, billboards and other forms of non-interactive media. The deep surveillance that adtech deploys gives unparalleled information on consumers.
This is why tech companies have become the wealthiest corporations in human history, and radio station conglomerates have not.
Adtech as WMDs is a quite good analogy. It bothers me when people just brush off concerns with "it's just the same as before" without considering the different scales.
Comparing valuations across the years never really works. Of course they were worth more. The East India basically owned the Indian subcontinent, which today or then was incalculable wealth.
Parent is referring to the Dutch VOC, not the British East India Company.
The entity that eventually "owned" the Indian Subcontinent was the British East India Company. The VOC ended up with Indonesia, swaths of land in South America, South Africa, Sri Lanka, and so on.
Ok. They all owned huge chunks of the globe, in as much as ownership was allowed by their European masters. Their worth cannot be translated into modern money. Interestingly, one of these companies is still around. The Hudson's Bay company once owned the entire middle of canada. Now they sell jeans.
I would be more interested in knowing we’re the wealth of the Hudson’s Bay Company actually ended up. Presumably someone’s great-great-granddad was a big muckety-muck at the HBC and that’s why today the family owns two skyscrapers in Toronto, yea?
Well, I believe Radio had a GREAT opportunity during the 80's.
What radio did was look for ways to eliminate dependencies on "the talent." And what they should have done is get more talent and put the incentives on interactions.
Radio was super compelling. Audio only material still is. Being able to listen while doing other stuff, like driving, software, all sorts of partial attention consuming tasks makes for an audio only market that is consistent and demanding.
And it was, and still is going nowhere!
Radio got this horribly wrong, and they got it wrong because they did not understand what compelling means and why that matters.[0]
And they got it wrong because of raw greed and a failure to respect their listeners, who form the heart of what was otherwise a government protected magic money machine![1]
So, what they did was research the tunes, sort them into buckets and blast those out as cheaply as they could, and at the same time water down the talent by having them record all sorts of stuff for many cities thinking recordings are almost as good as real people are.
And what that did was nationalize radio making it bland and soul less. And then rise of the Internet and the phones being portable radios, among many other things, completely dominated.
Radio divides right along Internet / pre Internet lines. Older people mostly, but not completely, like radio and can relate to it well enough to listen. Maybe during work, or a drive.
And there is talk radio. When it is done right, talk radio is very compelling! The divide here is mostly old vs. young, but also authoritarian vs more egalitarian. Talk radio plays extremely well to authoritarians! It can play well to others, but the industry is establishment aligned and that is hard to shake due to very large numbers of stations being owned by single entities.
It is a mess nowadays. But it could have been much better.
Podcasts have replaced this stuff for many, and there are plenty of tou tube people doing the work radio used to do.
Having video is nice, but totally optional.
-----
[0] Thought experiment:
Say you get two streams. Stations. One is great quality, but dull. The other is of dubious quality, but super compelling!
Which one do you listen to? Why?
Which one do you believe most others listen to and why?
What do you feel explains your answer being different?
[1] Fact is we are super good at detecting other minds through communications. It can be simple or complicated, and it does not matter much at all. We connect, identify and start to bond with and understand this other person well. This is daily relevance and once it is established, people crave it and will put up with a lot to keep their daily driver type person happy, healthy and able to entertain and inform us every day.
Small comment on your thoughtful post: I grew up when Art Bell was on overnight and it was always exciting for me to find someone else who listened to his show! We would have many things to talk about and it was a fun audience to be a part of. That kind of community-creation around a subject matter has moved to the internet, which is good in some ways, because the "community" grows more there and has farther reach, but is quite sad in many ways as well, because those spontaneous moments of running into someone else who was a fan and having a great conversation about it are largely gone now.
One AM Station where I lived actually did some stereo talk programs. Oh boy! That is probably the best voice in the car experience ever. The pre emphasis used for AM, coupled with a nice 8 to 10Khz bandwidth on better radios made people sound just great, but not tiring!
Ahhhhhh age gone by now, sadly.
Now, you are bang on about community and all that! Entities like Discord have shuttered forums and lists and we are losing so much!
Sorry, I did not finish the thought. A customer crisis came up! Let's just say my kind of fire, and I am good at quenching them without too much trouble.
Yes, bumping into people happens a lot less and differently than it did then.
It does still happen, but I think the big difference is in how more fragmented it all is now. And maybe that is the biggest change those of us missing out today tend to crave.
I think there are some parallels between your view of the wasted potential of radio and mine on the wasted potential of the internet. Your thesis could be restated: the potential of radio was never realized because of the choice to be greedy and optimize for low cost and high margins rather than value to listeners. These optimizers that prioritize growth of private wealth naturally gain an advantage over visionary types (the talent, you say) who might prefer to invest into creating universal value. (I.e. music or other audio content which can be shared in a way that makes everyone's lives better on average.) Optimizing their way to economic advantage leads to domination by those optimizers, they continue to optimize even if the audience is worse off for it, and so we all are.
Greedy optimizers have pretty clearly come to dominate the IT space as well, and like in radio, they disrespect the audience. They don't aim to create shared value except in order to have more of the pie. Visionary types that gave us a lot of the foundational ideas which made the internet so great (anywhere to anywhere communications, open protocols allowing global interoperability, www, chat, email, e-commerce) are forced to work within and are stifled by the frameworks now enforced by the dominant, greedy actors.
I suppose it may sound to some like I'm complaining about capitalism, but I don't take issue with money and liberty. I take issue with people's choices within the system. It's their choice to make accumulating power their goal over using what power they have for more utopian goals. (E.g. a higher "net quality of life", or furthering civilization somehow.) I'll concede that self-interest is somewhat indispensable, as it is in nature. However, for us big-brained, civilized humans, there's a balance to be struck against shared interest, and the balance, in many contexts, is off to a degree that is harmful to everyone.
Yes, that resonates with me strongly. Makes a ton of sense.
Your restatement is accurate, in my view. Easy, predictable money seems to be higher value money, or maybe they feel they can do the same thing a ton of others did and that is load up the station with even more future value paid out today as debt, coupled with an even more aggressive and lean cost model.
Probably will happen.
"The Talent" has two bodies of people: One, you identified as the visionaries. Yes. Agreed. In my comment above, I was also talking about the people behind the mic. That talent is the mind people find compelling, entertaining and informative. They gutted those people, while the ones you talk about just left seeing the mess to come!
Whoever is there now I would bet, expecting low odds, on them believing some AI / Machine learning thing can push out the last of the people, leaving the whole thing as some sort of passive medium others can push content through.
I think the reason why they focus on social media is because it is so much more effective at capturing our attention. This is because social media giants know to a high degree of accuracy the profile of their users. Besides basic demographics, stats such as the amount of time spent looking at a entertainment video can give away more information about the user’s interest than they know themselves.
Regarding television being king, According to statistica, the number of social media users in the US is 294 million (https://www.statista.com/statistics/201182/forecast-of-smart...). Whereas the number of television users is about 305 million (https://www.statista.com/statistics/243789/number-of-tv-hous...). Even though these numbers are comparable now, the increased effectiveness of social media and its popularity among younger populations makes it a more effective means of mining our attention than television in general.
In UI design, the user's attention is limited and valuable. I'm always doing things to minimize distractions and emphasize key information. The common problem is that there's so much information/data/content to offer that most people want to show everything.
However, revealing everything spreads the user's attention in every little area. There is no concentrated focus on any one thing. As a result, the user doesn't really absorb what they're reading deeply. They don't absorb information in a detailed way because there's something else they have to click around the corner.
To improve human attention designers have to say no to displaying certain things and focus on the few that's essential. This is easier said than done, but needs to be done.
I find the arguments under "But how is this different from traditional advertising?" very unconvincing. They provide examples as to what is different about social media advertising, but no convincing reason why traditional advertising wasn't also treating attention as a commodity.
I strongly agree, in addition statements like "Before social media advertising would have to hitch a ride with some content produced for something else. Billboards, newspapers, television shows, and magazines all tried to provide a use value to their customers and audiences" are pretty incorrect. As bad as many people agree Facebook is for mental health, it was clearly created for and does provide value. The author does a fairly poor job of carrying out the argument without form-fitting irrelevant details to their desired narrative.
> three seconds of the time of a 25- to 28-year-old male with a Bachelors degree in a STEM subject from a state college, an interest in travel to the Baltic countries, centre-right political leanings, and a credit score between 650-720. Facebook can also ensure that those three seconds are sandwiched between a message from his mom and a holiday photo from a potential love interest
Haven't there been a number of studies/articles written about how Facebook/Google sometimes really suck at delivering ads to the correct people that ad-buyer's ask for? Anecdotally, I've gotten ads for burger shops in Chicago while living in California.
The above fear mongering, worst case claim, makes it real hard for me to take this guys philosophical /ethical break down seriously.
Yeah when I read that sentence, it's a big red flag that the author has no idea what they're talking about. They're likely just rehashing something a friend told them after watching a TED Talk.
If you set an advertising campaign that specific, you're going to get no impressions. Researchers keep using these examples of "disturbing levels of specificity" of Facebook targeting. No advertisers actually do this. They're too lazy and they want volume. They do plenty of other disturbing things but this is not one of them.
You may not be the sort of person who fills out their Facebook profile with details like age, marital status, what high school you went to, hometown, but there are hundreds of millions who do.
just be correlating details like IP space geolocation, nevermind GPS/location API permission on a phone, with what pages a person likes, their biographical details, their friend network and the location data from those friends, advertising can get extremely targeted.
The Marxist definition of "commodity" is a useful one, but doesn't do full justice to the nature of the problem. Attention is a commodity in the same way that corn and other raw materials are commodities: it's subdivided into abstract units for sale (and speculation), entirely divorced from the underlying asset (Joe Schmoe on Facebook) until the moment of redemption.
Commoditization is (arguably) a very good thing: it allows the market to make stable pricing decisions (at various risk levels) without having to worry about the exact load of corn (or human attention units) showing up right when needed. But it's also a fundamentally obfuscative force: the commoditizing party is incentivized to lie about the underlying asset's value. Advertising exemplifies this to a greater extent than agriculture: we don't really know what attention is, and so it's much easier (and more profitable) to misrepresent to buyers.
Subprime Attention Crisis[1] is a really fantastic analysis of the attention market, this specific sort of commoditization, and its latent risks.
The theoretical basis of alienation is that the worker invariably loses the ability to determine life and destiny when deprived of the right to think (conceive) of themselves as the director of their own actions; to determine the character of said actions; to define relationships with other people; and to own those items of value from goods and services, produced by their own labour. Although the worker is an autonomous, self-realized human being, as an economic entity this worker is directed to goals and diverted to activities that are dictated by the bourgeoisie—who own the means of production—in order to extract from the worker the maximum amount of surplus value in the course of business competition among industrialists.
that sure sounds like a paycheck-to-paycheck, permanent renter class person that's become trapped in a debt-laden advertising-driven consumer lifestyle to me.
Marxist thinkers spent an inordinate amount of time and effort trying to explain away the myriads of ways in which actual Communist revolutions didn't happen in the way he predicted.
I am thankfully not a "Marxist thinker," and thus will not spend even a merely ordinate amount of time trying to defend this particular tangent. Marx's prescience in economics and sociology is not meaningfully altered by his academic descendants.
Well, you can read my longer comment downthread but 'nobody accused Marx of non-prescience' just isn't true. Marxists did! Pretty much right off the bat.
Whether or not various communist revolutions ultimately succeeded is a sideline topic from the general concept that workers in our modern era increasingly are treated as a commodity, and alienated from their product.
There's various ways to attempt to ameliorate this sort of situation through regulatory means without having an October Revolution. I'm talking about more basic things like European countries' vacation time granted for every full time employee, companies moving to a 4-day work week or 32 hour schedule, maternity leave written into law, workplace safety regulations (Marx probably would have loved the general concept of OSHA), etc.
It's not whether they succeeded, they simply didn't happen where he thought they would, the way he thought they would nor developed the way he thought they would. This was a real, well-recorded problem - after all, his work aspired to be a scientific theory, if the theory predicts things but they don't happen, you have a problem. Dealing with this problem is a pretty big part of the development Marxism, it's simply inaccurate to say nobody thought he wasn't prescient. Marxists had to account for his non-prescience and went at it with great energy. Here's one historical example of many:
Marx, not unlike another famous historical figure, has had many wars fought in (and against) his name. That doesn't change the material facts about him, which is that he was a somewhat-broke academic economist in Prussia.
The more interesting thought (and equally as unoriginal) is 'The Internet' has effectively commoditized human attention. The commoditization happens because most knowledge easily accessible. This changes your attentive value from raw ability to gather information, the old regime, to the ability to create and synthesize across domains.
I'm interested to see if this means we see fewer 'great entrepreneurs' and more bootstrapped businesses in the $10-500m revenue range built by people who can learn to be a solo-developer/mercenary leader with ruthless business sense.
>I'm interested to see if this means we see fewer 'great entrepreneurs'
It is really interesting to see that you specify "enterpreneurs", instead of concerned about losing potential great artists, scientists, philosophers.
I mean, where would we be, if the past Shakespeare, Einstien and Newtons were perpetually distracted and preventing them from making works of art and discoveries we now value most?
Shakespeare and Einstein both benefitted greatly from synthesizing existing work; if they'd had more and easier access to what others were writing that seems likely to improve rather than diminish what they produced.
While I agree with the authors sentiment, I do not think there is a difference in kind between TV advertising and social media advertising. I think it is a difference in scale. With the amount of data points a program can collect on user behaviour and identity, it becomes much easier to tune advertisements. This happens in TV as well (polling, viewership stats, demographics, focus groups) but obviously nowhere near to the same level of breadth and depth someone like Facebook can achieve.
I was about to engage with this article seriously... Until I read 'metal health crisis'. Really hope Polyphia and Jamie Christopherson make it out OK. Thoughts and prayers.
Any Renascence courtesan (or tribal leader) could have told you that human attention is valuable. The difference now is that attention is quite nearby fungible, and near-readily exchangeable for dollars and cents. Just wait until eye-tracked advertising takes off.
For those who are downvoting him without having read the article, he is suggesting the title update because that is what the actual title of the article says. Either the submitter edited the title to remove "Marxist" when they submitted, or for some reason "Marxist" is one of the words HN automatically removes from titles.
The submitter took the word 'Marxist' out of the title when submitting it, but I think this was a good move, in keeping with the site guidelines: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The problem is that you can't say "Marx" without instantly triggering some people into ideological flamewar. That's boring and we don't need that.
The current title seems like a fair balance because it doesn't fundamentally change the point, and when you go to the article itself you can learn that it means "commodity in the Marxist sense", or something along those lines.
Or the article's author just changed the title. Happens often with big news outlets where the HTML title tag is different than the title displayed on the webpage.
Which is why one block yourself from most MSM and social media which is the primary harvesting system. Just say no to all of it! Ration it if you must use it at all - like having a brandy from time to time but never every day.
Not just theft... Mind rape. They violate the sanctity of our minds by implanting information whether we want it or not. We didn't ask for it, we didn't consent to it. If we complain about it, they act as if they were entitled to our attention, as if it was "payment" for free stuff.
>The existence of social media companies has made two changes to society's ethics here: first, they have convinced people that connections with people “they otherwise wouldn’t be able to connect with” is a product that can only be produced by for-profit corporations.
I'd donate to a non-profit (or benefit corp) version of facecrook. Without paying their industrial psychologists to figure out how to steal more of my attention, the costs to run would be reasonably affordable for a world that is getting sick of FB.
"Has become"? It has been a commodity ever since we became tribal. It's just we've gone from a 1:1 "give your attention to my idea and work together with me and you'll benefit in these ways" to a 1:10-50 "I am the tribe's leader" to 1:* "I am a megacorporate entity"
As has been the case since the first tribe had that first fateful discussion about the best methods for hunting or fire making or whatever, in a cave, many moons ago
I think the idea of attention being commodity is mostly looked at through a pejorative lens but I wonder if it's the beginning of the next stage of human evolution were boredom no longer has value and maybe thats a good thing?
I haven't thought about this alot and I'm very curious shat other on here might think about this idea.
We were just discussing this at work. Attention and time are worth more than money. Just ask all of us who are running the daily operations while execs are too busy to talk to us. If you want to send an email that is longer than a tweet, then it's not going to be read.
my old take is that money as such is a long-tailed weighted average between physical energy & mental energy (energy needed to modify belief structure & spring action). Attention is just the 'write head' to direct that energy. The interesting thing is that if physical energy becomes cheap as in we went from animals->wood->coal->petroleum->(maybe)solar->(possibly)fusion then its reasonable that money as a representation of change/energy only leans heavier on the human side.
I dont see this as inherently bad but actually a sign of progress. the things I detest are basically perversions of attention related to some hack in our attention mechanism, for instance businesses that exploit peoples gambling addiction (or addiction of any kind).
human attention has always been a commodity. Look at historical FM, AM, broadcast TV advertising.
companies like nielsen made attempts to quantify and measure actual viewership, hard to do in the 1-way-analog-broadcast era.
Big difference now is that every social media thing has its own app that can specifically track ever click, every scroll, every like, viewing time per image and page, on an extremely granular basis.
Look at why reddit is trying so hard to steer people into using their app rather than use it through a browser.
ultimately the revenue stream for these app based social media things comes from the company selling advertising to you, of course. it's just much more targeted now than in the analog broadcast era.
> No one asked for or choose those changes. There wasn’t a town hall meeting where Mark Zuckerburg asked people if they wanted to know what their 3rd grade friends now think of Donald Trump; no one took a vote and decided "yeah, that’d be neat!". These changes were thrust upon society by new technologies and economic forces without anyone’s consent or forethought.
They weren't thrust on us, and we did choose those changes. The information and the implications of that information were available to everyone from the beginning. I quit Facebook and Twitter in 2007ish because it was obvious where social media was going, and I'm not particularly smart, prescient, or well-informed. Nor was I alone in coming to that conclusion: many people were saying and writing this from the beginning. People didn't listen, because they liked it at the time. Even now, when so much has happened, billions of people still continue to choose to use social media, claiming they don't have a choice in the matter. I'm not saying they're bad for making a different choice than me, but it is obviously a choice.
It's funny how the comment section here is already prime example of people having v̵e̵r̵y̵ ̵p̵o̵o̵r̵ no attention management skill. How about we stop lamenting the obvious and start thinking about how we could solve the problem? Theoretically it should be a non-issue since (in theory) every disturbance can be overcome by applying adequate willpower (and abundance of information is probably much harder to create then abundance of willpower - or so I think but i don't see any obvious reason for why it would be any other way; took us about 5000 years to create the internet, but the will to do something great clearly came first - otherwise there wouldn't be a internet, duh!). I see a general conflict here with how our society functions as a whole. Our institutions, everything per default is already designed around stealing our attention. Other than eastern religions, abrahamism is less concerned with letting it's adherent find balance and inner peace in a tumultuous world, it's more concerned with keeping you entangled in a constant struggle within, with yourself, and with god or something. With corporations it's the same, except it's about consuming products now. If we delete this, we will probably revert back into the stone age and if we let it be and add too much willpower there is a chance that our civilisation becomes uncontrollable.
Psychology knows these concepts: Volition and executive functions.
To fix the lack of the former Wikipedia suggests: Nothing, and for the lack of the latter it suggests CBT ( cock and b.., I mean cognitive behavior therapy) a.k.a nothing again, since cognitive behaviour therapy is a pseudoscientific scam that does not work. Also: "More research is required to develop interventions that can improve executive functions and help people generalize those skills to daily activities and settings." Wow, yeah, that is totally the reason for why there are no solutions for this! We just haven't done enough SCIENCE-ing, that's it folks! S C I E N C E!
So, I'm pretty open for new ideas here. Maybe an actual neuroscientist could chime in and lecture us about how our neuronal circuits work together to create attention, how the SAS works or something and how we could improve it. But I suspect my attention span is to short and I wouldn't be able to follow along anyway. Welp...
Marxist here; I wrote a book about this in 2018 after having written essays about it for years. In my book Custom Reality and You, I asserted that "attention is currency," and that it exists in a sort of abstract market (which has gradually become more formalized through the years as social metrics become more standard). Marx also posited money as "the ultimate commodity," and I very much agree with this article.
For the unfamiliar, dialectical materialism tends to do this a lot (that is, understand and explain exploitative facets of our economy long before mainstream press gives the particular problem in question any notice).
there's a lot of pieces like this but one thing that always stands out to me is the sort of 'half-Marxist' nature of the critique
"But this business model is not inevitable, nor is Marx correct about there being one and only one ethical system that results from a given mode of production. If we, as a society, made a conscious decision on how we wanted to live, in particular, if we decided that we valued new and more interpersonal connections without our local communities, then we could use those same market forces to encourage lots of such connections to happen"
If you're already starting with Marx you ought to take him seriously. The author owes us an explanation as to why Marx is wrong when he recognized that our values are the product of our material relations, and that we do not just wish them into existence as we please. You can't go pre social media any more than you can go pre-industrial. In Marxist analysis, the market forces use you.
If you're going to keep one aspect of Marxism stick with the materialism, not his theory of value.
""" In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it. (Simon 1971.) """