Sugary Media
by Antonio on 26/11/09 at 7:08 pm
(Pic by Uwe Hermann)
Danah Boyd:
In a harsh, competitive media landscape, people will often consume content that is most stimulating, and that triggers a strong reaction, rather than that which is best or most informative.
In a food context, this is a bit like eating sugary and fatty food. When these were limited resources, we learned to eat them as much as we could. Now they’re ubiquitous, we start to see problems.
If we’re not careful we’re going to develop the psychological equivalent of obesity.
Definitely one of the down-sides of all this choice I think.
I sometimes feel like writing a series of posts dispelling some of myths which surrounding the endless utopian talk about social media and how it’s going to save us all – this might be a good starting point.
The quote’s from this video BTW (I’m paraphrasing):
Si Hammond
Nov 27th, 2009
Fascinating talk that rang a lot of bells for me – thanks!
Infobesity is a known problem but the parasocial side of social media is a new phenomena. How far does Facebook/Twitter personalise celebrities and how far does it encourage people to frame themselves as micro-celebrity brands?
Likewise, the option of homophiliy has never been so available but flocks make me fundamentally uneasy. I always jump at the chance to debate a christian or tory.
Naysaying aside, the possibilities of models that naturally support attention flow with contextualised, pertinant and novel content are hugely exciting. My guess is that when this works well, adverts will actually be welcome commercial content.
Antonio Gould
Nov 30th, 2009
Hi Si,
Glad you enjoyed it! Really recommend checking out more of Danah’s work – she’s really good on this stuff.
A