Few people would disagree that as more brands & memes vie for our attention, the simple act of communicating has become an accelerating arms race.
We shouldn’t necessarily complain.
Not more than a decade ago it would have been impossible for most of us to get any kind of public attention for our products or our ideas. Everyone pretty much had to pony up to the gatekeepers at big media companies.
Now we have more access via social media but the means of actually being effective have already become quite sophisticated — and evolving with every passing week.
Meanwhile, the age-old practice of yelling is still an option resorted to by some, as we saw Monday on Parliament Hill.
That’s the kind of reaction Canadian politics invites.
It’s all theatre. The protest was a perfectly natural extension of Question Period. The interruption was just one orchestrated stunt in an atmosphere that seems to consist entirely of orchestrated stunts (albeit more subtle ones, usually).
As Glen Pearson put it,
Things have become inverted. Very serious minded young hecklers in the House were tossed out, while the “professional” hecklers occupying the main seats maintain their honourable spots. We’re all in collusion … and delusion.
In Parliament’s defence (as well as the protesters’) at least there’s some substance to what they say and do. These political spectacles at least have some real bearing on important concerns. Which is more than I can say for the rest of the nightly news.
The increasing political spectacle should be seen in the context of our increasingly spectacle-driven culture.
Frank Rich noted (via Mediabistro) that cable news diverted coverage from a public policy discussion — Obama’s townhall meeting in New Orleans — to follow the balloon boy story. Rich also fairly condemned the news anchors for hyping the story (their job is really about selling the story — like carnival barkers — to remote-wielding viewers) and the audience is no less guilty for buying this garbage so willingly.
The distinctions (i.e. legalities) are merely technical — like the difference between the hecklers in the parliamentary gallery vs hecklers we hear of every day on the parliamentary floor.
Everyone’s on the same playing field now, chasing the same goal. Call it “fame” if you like; “attention” seems like a more accurate (and less attention-seeking) term.
Richard Heene is the inevitable product of this reigning culture, where “news,” “reality” television and reality itself are hopelessly scrambled and the warp-speed imperatives of cable-Internet competition allow no time for fact checking. Norman Lear, about the only prominent American to express any empathy for little Falcon’s father, vented on The Huffington Post, calling out CNN, MSNBC, Fox, NBC, ABC and CBS alike for their role in “creating a climate that mistakes entertainment for news.”…
None of this absolves Heene of blame for the damage he may have inflicted on the children he grotesquely used as a supporting cast in his schemes. But stupid he’s not. He knew how easy it would be to float “balloon boy” when the demarcation between truth and fiction has been obliterated. [Rich, NYTtimes.com]
Remember that word, “collusion”…
Meanwhile on Twitter — the flagship of citizen journalism and user-generated content — the balloon boy story was ubiquitous. I noticed someone tweet that at one point the entire list of trending words related bubble boy.
If a brand accomplished that we’d be celebrating…
So should we think of it as a massive media debacle or is it also a social media success story? How fine is that line? How different is the Heene family’s quest for attention from that of a major consumer brand?
How different is it from all the public disruption and attention consumed by, say, U2′s super-hyped Rose Bowl show? Here’s Bob Lefsetz on that:
The U2 tour opened across the pond, and has been slowly working its way west across America. Tonight it lands in Pasadena, California. And if you think the most important story in the Los Angeles Basin is the proposed football stadium, or gang warfare, or anything with substance, you’d be wrong. Because the entire mainstream media has been hoodwinked by Paul McGuinness and Live Nation. The biggest story in L.A. this weekend is the U2 concert.
Fewer than 100,000 of the nearly 13 million residents will attend, but the hype would have you believe that every resident is focused, that U2’s show is akin to last fall’s Presidential election.
And even more ridiculously,
… the story is not the music… The story is the STAGE!
Then you had to know this was coming –
It’s almost balloon-boy redux. Hell, like little Falcon said, THEY’RE DOING IT FOR THE SHOW!
And I’m afraid the more time and energy we spend on attention and persuasion the less we have for meaningful public dialog. We’re conditioning ourselves to be comfortable with a cacophony that makes genuine conversation difficult.
If you’ve read this far I’d wager you’re not entirely sold on that culture either. I’d also guess (if I may digress) you’re the kind of person who complains that music is too loud in many bars — too loud to really talk to anyone. Bar and club owners know that people tend to drink more when the music is loud.
Similarly, many readers will be well aware that when you’re designing a website or developing a social media strategy, there are certain practices and features that generate more unique visitors & pageviews — and, like turning the music up, these standard practices do not correlate with quality & substance, and are often antithetical.
For example, you won’t likely see blogging tips like this:
- consider all sides of an argument and work out a balanced & objective position; the ideal is to articulate a position that nobody can disagree with
- the world is complex, so sometimes our ideas will be too; don’t be afraid to write a series of 2000-word posts with lots of scholarly citations if necessary
- you don’t have to be consistent: if you don’t have anything to write for a week (or a month) then maybe you can use the extra time to fix things around the house or enjoy the company of family and friends
- also, sometimes you might need a week or even a month for big, fast-breaking events to sink in: take however long it takes to write something rational, informed, and original
- make content and subscriptions visible but don’t actively promote yourself; this way your statistics will accurately reflect whether people naturally recognize value in your work
You get the idea.
That approach would likely be better for society as a whole, but it has proven to be miserably unsuccessful on a micro level.
But this medium is still young, the technology is still developing and previously unexplored practices are emerging with those.
Paradoxically, we can use the web to escalate the quantity of verbiage, but we can also use it to elevate the quality of dialog… via the capacity to build dynamic & robust networks — of information and of people we trust, across many diverse domains.
The hardcore Luddites and old-school press protectionists don’t recognize this opportunity though. They only see the bad.
So part of our responsibility is to show them…
It isn’t enough just to show them the good that has already been done. The web is still evolving and the best stuff hasn’t even happened yet. We have a responsibility to make it better — not just better than it is now, but a better medium for discourse and deliberation than any society has had before.
Just think, could this conversation have occurred at any other time in history?
If we don’t use our comparative advantage, it’s reasonable to assume we’ll lose it.