Pinboard: bookmarks for adamcrowe tagged 'attention'

RSS

adamcrowe + attention 275

« earlier

[close]

select: none ‧ this page ‧ all pages no items selected

mark as read ‧ unread ‧ private ‧ public ‧ add stars ‧ remove stars ‧ delete

tag: add or remove tag

THIS IS BOILERPLATE confirm ‧ cancel

HIPSTER RUNOFF -- Lana & Me: Our Dark, Abusive, Co-Dependent Relationship on the Content Farm

'My goal as a website is to ‘be the ass hole who pointlessly interjects himself into the conversation’ without being as overtly annoying as ‘the ass hole who always pointless interjects himself into the conversation.’ Lana Del Rey is the perfect buzz topic, and I’ll never forget the times we shared in late 2k11 and early 2k12. I honestly do wish the best for her career, not because I have a rooting interest in her/care about her as a person, but because Lana Del Rey is an important search term to refer viewers to my website. I am not a writer. I am not a blogger. I am a content farmer. These words mean more to the Google robot than they do 2 u. There is nothing exciting about writing, tweeting, or sharing opinions. I do not want to inspire any one to follow me into this dark prison, surrounded by a pile of memes, while I must sort thru them and spin them as ‘meaningful’, ‘interesting’, or whatever else will generate a pageview.'

HipsterRunoff memetics seo attention kipple satire
january 2012 by adamcrowe

copy to mine

The Narcissist's Addiction to Fame and Celebrity by Dr. Sam Vaknin

'As far as their fans are concerned, celebrities fulfil two emotional functions: they provide a mythical narrative (a story that the fan can follow and identify with) and they function as blank screens onto which the fans project their dreams, hopes, fears, plans, values, and desires (wish fulfilment). The slightest deviation from these prescribed roles provokes enormous rage and makes us want to punish (humiliate) the "deviant" celebrities. But why? When the human foibles, vulnerabilities, and frailties of a celebrity are revealed, the fan feels humiliated, "cheated", hopeless, and "empty". To reassert his self-worth, the fan must establish his or her moral superiority over the erring and "sinful" celebrity. The fan must "teach the celebrity a lesson" and show the celebrity "who's boss". It is a primitive defense mechanism – narcissistic grandiosity. It puts the fan on equal footing with the exposed and "naked" celebrity.'

psychology narcissism attention fame falseself displacement poisoncontainer idealization devaluation levelling sadism humiliation schadenfreude defencemechanisms from delicious
september 2011 by adamcrowe

copy to mine

Ribbonfarm -- A Brief History of the Corporation: 1600 to 2100

'...energy and ideas could be used to shrink autonomously-owned individual time and grow a space of corporate-owned time, to be divided between production and consumption. Two phrases were invented to name the phenomenon: productivity meant shrinking autonomously-owned time. Increased standard of living through time-saving devices became code for the fact that the “freed up” time through “labor saving” devices was actually the de facto property of corporations. It was a Faustian bargain. Many people misunderstood the fundamental nature of Schumpeterian growth as being fueled by ideas rather than time. Ideas fueled by energy can free up time which can then partly be used to create more ideas to free up more time. It is a positive feedback cycle, but with a limit. The fundamental scarce resource is time. The point isn’t that we are running out of attention. We are running out of high-energy-concentration pockets of easily mined fuel. Each new pocket of attention is harder to find...'

history economics time attention internet themediumisthemessage disintermediation retribalization panarchy from delicious
june 2011 by adamcrowe

copy to mine

Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog -- Situational overload and ambient overload

'Information overload actually takes two forms, which I'll call situational overload and ambient overload, and they need to be treated separately. Situational overload is the needle-in-the-haystack problem: You need a particular piece of information - in order to answer a question of one sort or another - and that piece of information is buried in a bunch of other pieces of information. Filters have always been pretty effective at solving the problem of situational overload. When we complain about information overload, what we're usually complaining about is ambient overload. Ambient overload doesn't involve needles in haystacks. It involves haystack-sized piles of needles. We experience ambient overload when we're surrounded by so much information that is of immediate interest to us that we feel overwhelmed by the neverending pressure of trying to keep up with it all. The cause of situational overload is too much noise. The cause of ambient overload is too much signal.'

kipple information informationoverload ambientoverload ambientimmediacy signalvsnoise attention from delicious
march 2011 by adamcrowe

copy to mine

msnbc.com -- Want to be popular on the Internet? Be a jerk!

'According to a study by UK research group Statistical Cybermetrics, cyberspace citizens are overwhelmingly attracted to the negative. (Gasp!) "Long conversation threads are overwhelmingly more emotionally negative than short ones, with happiness scores decreasing logarithmically with the number of messages," writes New Scientist. "What's more, long conversations almost always start with negative comments." "If you want a long chat, don't start by saying 'I love this!', at least not online," says Mike Thelwall, head of the research group. Nothing brings people together like low happiness scores, the study found. An avalanche of posts containing negative keywords, emoticons and misspellings will generate a social group from nowhere... "There is evidence that group cohesiveness may be related to negative feelings about others." "Members of an online community might unite around a perceived attack on them or some aspect of their identity."'

internet immunesystem nearfar groups groupthink moralfag attention vigilantism psychology blame from delicious
december 2010 by adamcrowe

copy to mine

danah boyd | apophenia -- Digital Self-Harm and Other Acts of Self-Harassment

'...teens are attacking themselves in a public forum while making it look like they’re being attacked by someone else. I can’t tell you how many teens I’ve met who’ve been bullied by people at school who then turn to tell me about how their parents are absent – physically, mentally, or emotionally. And how often I hear teens complain about their parents trying to “fix” things by getting involved in all the wrong ways. Ways that make the dynamics around bullying so much worse. And it breaks my heart when I see teens respond to their parents’ helicoptering by engaging in self-harm practices through eating disorders or self-injury (“cutting”) as an attempt to gain some form of control over their lives. And it scares me to think that a digital equivalent is brewing, a form of digital self-harm where words can be as sharp as knives and are directed at oneself.'

internet bullying selfattack attention narcissism parenting psychology from delicious
december 2010 by adamcrowe

copy to mine

Seth's Blog -- The inevitable decline due to clutter

'As digital marketers seek to increase profits, they almost always make the same mistake. They continue to add more clutter, messaging and offers, because, hey, it's free. Economics tells us that the right thing to do is run the factory until the last item produced is being sold at marginal cost. In other words, keep adding until it doesn't work any more. In fact, human behavior tells us that this is a more permanent effect than we realize. Once you overload the user, you train them not to pay attention. More clutter isn't free. In fact, more clutter is a permanent shift, a desensitization to all the information, not just the last bit. And it's hard to go backward. More is not always better. In fact, more is almost never better.' -- Kipple drives out non-kipple

kipple digital free informationoverload diminishingmarginalutility attention marketing from delicious
december 2010 by adamcrowe

copy to mine

danah boyd | apophenia -- “Bullying” Has Little Resonance with Teenagers

'When I look at how teens hurt each other, I can’t help but also see how they’re developing training wheels for future relationships and reflecting normative behaviors that they see around them. I hear teens’ dramas reflected in their stories about how their parents fight – with each other, with their friends and family and colleagues, and with them. What teens are doing is more coarse, more direct, and more explicit. But they’re witnessing adult dramas all around them and what they tend to see isn’t pretty. Parents talking smack about work colleagues or bosses. Parents fighting with each other or ostracizing their family members over disagreements. And it’s not just parents... Celebrity fights and dramas aren’t just in their face; they’re glorified! Teens are seeing drama everywhere – they’re seeing it as a legitimate part of adult society that can often lead to notoriety. And here’s where we run into another major component of bullying… attention.'

parenting bullying abuse culture status levelling attention narcissism from delicious
november 2010 by adamcrowe

copy to mine

Tweetage Wasteland -- Dude, I’m Totally Wasted on the Internet

'The multitaskers of Generation TMI are consumed by an always-on internet twitch that keeps them connected to news, friends, data, entertainment, academics, gaming and more; all of which is never farther than the palm of their hand. Not being able to read a book, watch a movie or interact with a friend without texting or opening Facebook is the drug-state of this era. One in three teens sends more than 100 text messages a day. I heard from one parent whose kid broke ten thousand text messages in a month. Think he views a little downtime listening to white noise as a threatening scenario? If i-dosing means putting on your headphones and being alone in your head for a few minutes at a time, then it sounds more like a cure than a disease. Here’s my message to kids: If you think narrowing things down to one incoming signal gets you high, wait until you try zero. The only thing better than being totally out of your mind is being totally in it.'

internet attention distraction feedback addiction from delicious
august 2010 by adamcrowe

copy to mine

PeerIndex

'Who are the authorities on the web? PeerIndex helps you discover the authorities and opinion formers on a given topic.'

opinion attention markets whuffie reputation
july 2010 by adamcrowe

copy to mine

Computerworld -- Wikileaks plans to make the Web a leakier place

'The embargo period is a key part of the plan, Assange said. When Wikileaks releases material without writing its own story or finding people who will, it gains little attention. "It's counterintuitive," he said. "You'd think the bigger and more important the document is, the more likely it will be reported on but that's absolutely not true. It's about supply and demand. Zero supply equals high demand, it has value. As soon as we release the material, the supply goes to infinity, so the perceived value goes to zero."'

leaky wikileaks journalism information attention economics #ubiquity from delicious
july 2010 by adamcrowe

copy to mine

apophenia -- “for the lolz”: 4chan is hacking the attention economy

'I would argue that 4chan is ground zero of a new generation of hackers – those who are bent on hacking the attention economy. While the security hackers were attacking the security economy at the center of power and authority in the pre-web days, these attention hackers are highlighting how manipulatable information flows are. They are showing that Top 100 lists can be gamed and that entertaining content can reach mass popularity without having any commercial intentions (regardless of whether or not someone decided to commercialize it on the other side). Their antics force people to think about status and power and they encourage folks to laugh at anything that takes itself too seriously. In a mediated environment where marketers are taking over, there’s something subversively entertaining about betting on the anarchist subculture.'

4chan hackersvsvectoralists attention panarchy darknets
june 2010 by adamcrowe

copy to mine

Wired -- Author Nicholas Carr: The Web Shatters Focus, Rewires Brains

'The Internet is an interruption system. We want to be interrupted, because each interruption brings us a valuable piece of information. To turn off these alerts is to risk feeling out of touch or even socially isolated. The stream of new information also plays to our natural tendency to overemphasize the immediate. We crave the new even when we know it’s trivial. -- We know that the human brain is highly plastic; neurons and synapses change as circumstances change. When we adapt to a new cultural phenomenon, including the use of a new medium, we end up with a different brain, says Michael Merzenich, a pioneer of the field of neuroplasticity. That means our online habits continue to reverberate in the workings of our brain cells even when we’re not at a computer. We’re exercising the neural circuits devoted to skimming and multitasking while ignoring those used for reading and thinking deeply. ...we are “training our brains to pay attention to the crap."' -- Or filter it (like so).

behaviours web media themediumisthemassage synaptics feedback attention continuouspartialattention intermittentvariablerewards
may 2010 by adamcrowe

copy to mine

Broader Perspective -- The preference economy

'The internet is already doing a good job of serving as a clearing exchange and means of valuation for the currencies of reputation, social graph, intention, and attention. Blippy broadcasts purchasing activity and serves as a leading indicator for public company quarterly sales; a real-time economy feed. Hunch goes a step further with the grand vision of mapping and predicting the affinity of all people for all objects. ...what is any individual’s preference for Nike, TikTok, Slaughterhouse-Five, Ulan Bator, existentialism, or any other noun, brand, product, item, object or idea. Social feed “likes” are already being mined for preference, affinity, and revenue.'

datamining selfobjects objects attention intention circumscription
may 2010 by adamcrowe

copy to mine

Thom Hartmann -- Hunter and Farmer Approach to ADD/ADHD

'Thom Hartmann's approach showing the differences between "Hunters" and "Farmers". -- Hunter: #Constantly monitoring their environment. Farmer: #Nurturing; creates and supports community values; attuned to whether something will last.'

psychology attention distraction ADHD psychographics huntergatherer nurturance work
april 2010 by adamcrowe

copy to mine

Spark -- Full Interview: Jesse Schell on Game Design

Shame in nurturing games within social environments eg. Farmville: "If you know your friends are visiting your farm everyday you'll spend more time and money to keep it tidy." -- Thoughts/gists: Gameification is inevitable in an attention economy. Once offered, people like maximising reward/loyalty points. New real-time tracking/feedback technology will enable more compelling collecting/optimising/completion experiences. Companies are going to be trying to figure out ways to give you points for doing things. They want to own data you care about. "As a game designer you better figure out what side you're on: 4 groups: #persuaders: motivated by money, #fulfillers: create deep experiences, #artists: advance the medium, #humanitarians: motivate 'better' behaviours"

facebook farmville socialgraph socialdesign gamemechanics nurturance shame feedback attention quantifiedself thegamingofeverydaylife advertising marketing ethics JesseSchell
april 2010 by adamcrowe

copy to mine

Marketing Pilgrim -- Unvarnished Launches: A RipOff Report for Individuals?

Comment: HichamD: "this guy is crazy, I am going to create a profile about the site’s owner and claim how unethical he is LOL" -- Reply Comment: Mike: "His profile already exists, and you are free to put up whatever review you like. But, you will just be hurting your own reputation as a reviewer, when everyone who finds the site useful, trashes your review. Get it?" -- Ponzi

socialmedia attention socialcapital whuffie ponzi
march 2010 by adamcrowe

copy to mine

Umair Haque -- Unvarnished and the Economics of Antisocial Media

'Unvarnished is a social Ponzi scheme - borrowing reputation from another, to amp up one's own (until one's own gets trashed). Those economics are so 20th century, it hurts. Unvarnished is the endgame of the "social web". I'm going to mark it as the day the "social web" became antisocial. Increasingly, today's "social web" doesn't empower people. It empowers hate, exclusion, and polarization, to put it bluntly. That's as lame and brain-dead as what went on on Wall St a few years back: hurting others to extract value from them. Except, of course, Wall St actually made billions. Social media's as bankrupt financially as it is ethically and economically: a trifecta of lameness.'

criticism socialmedia surveillance anonequiveillance narcissism attention snark griefing rating socialcapital whuffie ponzi internet immunesystem autoimmunity equiveillance
march 2010 by adamcrowe

copy to mine

Umair Haque -- The Social Media Bubble

'Thin relationships are the illusion of real relationships. Real relationships are patterns of mutual investment. I invest in you, you invest in me. The "relationships" at the heart of the social bubble aren't real because they're not marked by mutual investment. At most, they're marked by a tiny chunk of information or attention here or there. #Trust. If we take social media at face value, the number of friends in the world has gone up a hundredfold. But have we seen an accompanying rise in trust? ...social isn't about beauty contests and popularity contests. They're a distortion, a caricature of the real thing. It's about trust, connection, and community.' -- Attention economy is a ponzi?

criticism internet web socialmedia socialnetworking attention sharecropping UmairHaque
march 2010 by adamcrowe

copy to mine

O'Reilly Radar -- Skinner Box? There's an App for That

'This brave new inter-networked, socially-mediated, post-industrial, cybernetically-interwoven world is an integrated web of Pavlovian stimulus and response and I'm barking at the bell. Turns out, this isn't a Skinner Box. No, "box" is too confining for this metaphor. This is a fully networked, digitally rendered, voluntarily joined Skinner Borg. It doesn't embed itself in us, we embed ourselves in it. It's Clockwork Orange, self served. The singularity is here, and it's us... also it's dumb, snarky, and in love with itself. Age of spiritual machines? Whatever. Show me spiritual people.'

behaviorism feedback addiction distraction continuouspartialattention attention narcissism tethered hivemind psychology
march 2010 by adamcrowe

copy to mine

G4tv.com -- DICE 2010: "Design Outside the Box" Presentation Videos

"We live in a bubble of fake bullshit." -- Ergo we must build an even bigger bubble of authentic bullshit.

* thegamingofeverydaylife hyperreality gaming psychology collecting loyalty performance incentives achievements rewards experiencepoints numbers nudge surveillance sousveillance socialengineering ludotopianism ludocapitalism conformity bravenewworld idiocracy attention advertising grinding subsistenceclicking theadvertisedlife
february 2010 by adamcrowe

copy to mine

BBC -- The Virtual Revolution: The Cost of Free

'Aleks gives the lowdown on how, for better and for worse, commerce has colonised the web - and reveals how web users are paying for what appear to be 'free' sites and services in hidden ways. Aleks explores how web advertising is evolving further to become more targeted and relevant to individual consumers. Recommendation engines, pioneered by retailers such as Amazon, are also breaking down the barriers between commerce and consumer by marketing future purchases to us based on our previous choices. On the surface, the web appears to have brought about a revolution in convenience. But, as companies start to build up databases on our online habits and preferences, Aleks questions what this may mean for our notions of privacy and personal space in the 21st century.'

internet web advertising datamining businessmodels google intention attention identity sharecropping free surveillance panopticon privacy documentaries AlexKrotoski
february 2010 by adamcrowe

copy to mine

Linux Journal -- EOF - The Google Exposure By Doc Searls

'Advertising is a bubble. If that's a true statement, Google is a bubble too. And if that's true, many of the goods we take for granted on the Web are at risk. [Advertising is] what pays for all the infrastructure Google is giving to the rest of us. As our dependency on Google verges on the absolute, this should be a concern. Think of advertising as oil and Google as one big emirate. What happens when the oil runs out? Maybe it already is. The free rides won't go on forever. There are better ways than advertising for demand and supply to find each other (including search, which is free), and more will be found. Google will be in the middle of that discovery process, no doubt. But it's an open question whether Google will make the same kind of money in a post-advertising marketplace. I'm betting they won't.' -- Click numbers down, attention limited, population limited, obvious ponzi is obvious, post-tech-deflation monopoly internet: all ur websitez are a tollbooth belong to us, etc

economics internet web google advertising attention ponzi businessmodels monopoly rentseeking rent
february 2010 by adamcrowe

copy to mine

PBS FRONTLINE -- Digital Nation

Know that whoever celebrates distractions had better see that it does not turn them into a distraction. And if you gaze into the internet, know that the internet also gazes into you.

cyberspyschology internet web digital technology behaviours ambientimmediacy multitasking distraction attention continuouspartialattention intermittentvariablerewards contextswitching gluttony informationoverload synaptics virtualworlds ludotopianism puppetry militaryentertainmentcomplex documentaries
february 2010 by adamcrowe

copy to mine

NYTimes.com -- Jaron Lanier’s ‘You Are Not a Gadget’

'“Comments about TV shows, major movies, commercial music releases, and video games must be responsible for almost as much bit traffic as porn,” Mr. Lanier observes. “There is certainly nothing wrong with that, but since the Web is killing the old media, we face a situation in which culture is effectively eating its own seed stock.” -- “pop culture has entered into a nostalgic malaise.” -- “online culture is dominated by trivial mashups of the culture that existed before the onset of mashups, and by fandom responding to the dwindling outposts of centralized mass media.” -- Online culture “is a culture of reaction without action” and rationalizations that “we were entering a transitional lull before a creative storm” are just that — rationalizations. “The sad truth,” he concludes, “is that we were not passing through a momentary lull before a storm. We had instead entered a persistent somnolence, and I have come to believe that we will only escape it when we kill the hive.”'

criticism web culture popculture derivatives meta coprophagia attention ponzi technoutopianism hivemind JaronLanier
january 2010 by adamcrowe

copy to mine

The Economist -- Media: A world of hits

'...not quite popular content that occupies the middle ground between blockbusters and niches [has been losing out]. The stuff that people used to watch or listen to largely because there was little else on is increasingly being ignored. -- Although you might expect people who seek out obscure products to derive more pleasure from their discoveries than those who simply trudge off to see the occasional blockbuster, the opposite is true. William McPhee noted that a disproportionate share of the audience for a hit was made up of people who consumed few products of that type. A lot of the people who read a bestselling novel, for example, do not read much other fiction. By contrast, the audience for an obscure novel is largely composed of people who read a lot. That means the least popular books are judged by people who have the highest standards, while the most popular are judged by people who literally do not know any better. The hit is carried along by a wave of ill-informed goodwill.'

economics longtail attention populism herd mimicry feedback #specialization
january 2010 by adamcrowe

copy to mine

The American Prospect -- The Ruse of the Creative Class

'Cities that shelled out big bucks to learn Richard Florida's prescription for vibrant urbanism are now hearing they may be beyond help. -- "There was a tremendous money-generating aspect to Richard's work," Frantz [Florida's former tour manager] says. "We did it in a grand way. We traveled in style. We stayed in boutique hotels in most of the places we were working." But it is wrong, he says, to see any conflict in Florida's dire pronouncements on the places that bankrolled this success, because he hadn't promised prosperity in the first place. "He wasn't really making prescriptions," Frantz says. "This wasn't Jesus Christ throwing the money men out of the temple; this was an academic. He was a fucking college professor, and you're hoping to resurrect Canton, Ohio? Yeah, good luck with that."' -- Land/real estate pump and dumping 'dressed up' as sustainable/"creative" economic redevelopment.

america deindustrialization immateriallabour attention realestate ponzi happytalk cool hipsters socialengineering gentrification theadvertisedlife bubble
january 2010 by adamcrowe

copy to mine

BLOG365: A Cutting Edge Web Project by Carles of HIPSTER RUNOFF

'A never-before experienced web trend performed by one human website.'

HipsterRunoff blogging oversharing informationoverload lifestreaming attention kipple lulz satire
january 2010 by adamcrowe

copy to mine

Marginal Utility Annex -- Pleasure as productive force

'Our assumption of the market-based ethics of turning things to account, of consuming efficiently, means we want to make our enjoyment of goods count, or matter, beyond the pleasure itself -- we experience the productivity of it as pleasure, and without that sense that our enjoyment will be in some larger sense useful, setting an example, reinforcing cool, etc., we no longer actually enjoy things.'

quantifiedself attention subjectivity immaterallabour usevaluevssignvalue signalling selfobjects socialobjects objects
december 2009 by adamcrowe

copy to mine

Marginal Utility Annex -- Costs of consuming information goods

'...the "release" of informational goods produced and distributed in social networks is not free; there is a cost to the user in stress, in insecurity, in the fear of exclusion, of not knowing, not keeping up, being hopelessly out of style, being obscure. The self -- the individual subject -- within systems of social production is fundamentally insecure and unstable, and is compelled to continue to produce information by consuming other information and goods in a social forum under conditions the require the consumption to be competitive, signifying. -- The value of social production is that can exploit that source of emotional motivation without having to provide any wage compensation.'

socialnetworking socialedia attention status signalling immateriallabour selfobjects socialobjects objects
december 2009 by adamcrowe

copy to mine

Boing Boing -- Apple patents anti-user attention-complianceware

'Apple's filed a patent on a design for a device that won't let its owner use it unless that person demonstrates that she has complied with an advertiser's demands by paying attention to an ad and taking some action indicating her dutiful attention. "Because this technology would be embedded in the innermost core of the device, the ads could appear on the screen at any time, no matter what one is doing."'

technology apple advertising attention telescreen 1984
december 2009 by adamcrowe

copy to mine

Wired -- Spew: Are you on the trail of the next unexploited market niche - or just on a nookie hunt? by Neal Stephenson

'...although the Demosphere belongs to General Communications Inc., it is the schmos of the world who make it - every time a schmo surfs to a different channel, the Demosphere notes that he is bored with program A and more interested, at the moment, in program B. When a schmo's paycheck is delivered over the I-way, the number on the bottom line is plotted in his Profile, and if that schmo got it by telecommuting we know about that too - the length of his coffee breaks and the size of his bladder are an open book to us. When a schmo buys something on the I-way it goes into his Profile, and if it happens to be something that he recently saw advertised there, we call that interesting, and when he uses the I-way to phone his friends and family, we Profile Auditors can navigate his social web out to a gazillion fractal iterations, the friends of his friends of his friends of his friends, what they buy and what they watch and if there's a correlation.'

internet cyberspace cyberpunk socialmedia socialgraph attention datamining realitymining surveillance equiveillance voyeurism stalking trendspotting identitytheft theadvertisedlife NealStephenson
december 2009 by adamcrowe

copy to mine

Wired -- Twitter To Make Money In 2010 With ‘Non-Traditional’ Ads: Biz Stone

How about a 'multi-level', brand-sponsored hashtag, RT pyramid scheme?

socialmedia twitter attention advertising ponzi
december 2009 by adamcrowe

copy to mine

Max Keiser & Stacy Herbert -- [1083] The Truth About Markets – 28 November 2009

Max's Casino Gulag / Subsistence Clicking Model: predicts Facebook will become a casino; will give heavy users the ability to buy shares in its IPO whilst regular users play 'social gulag' games for FB's virtual gulag currency, spending it on real world survival items, always dreaming of earning enough to buy shares in 'the house'.

economics socialmedia thegamingofeverydaylife virtualworlds virtualmoney facebook attention markets ponzi whuffie grinding subsistenceclicking casinogulag
november 2009 by adamcrowe

copy to mine

The Onion -- December Named National Awareness Month

'"All across the country, millions of men and women are dangerously unaware," AFPAT spokesperson Karen Teeling said during a press conference Monday. "What's worse, the vast majority of those suffering from this debilitating state of mind don't even know it."'

TheOnion attention idiocracy
november 2009 by adamcrowe

copy to mine

SFGate -- Attention loss feared as high-tech rewires brain

"It's just part of society that we're multitasking all the time. We can't stop to think, and if we have to stop and consider something, we get frustrated." -- "Look at language. People are writing the way that they text. Anything complex that takes several paragraphs to develop is information overload at this point." -- "I think of it as regressive. I don't think of it as progressive. It's becoming so normalized in our culture, it becomes hard to catch while it's happening."

technology feedback ADHD attention continuouspartialattention intermittentvariablerewards ambientimmediacy distraction addiction extensionsofman centralnervoussystem tethered cyberbrain literaryculturevsoralculture
november 2009 by adamcrowe

copy to mine

Sorta wish I worked 4 Twitter, Inc.

'Could imagine walking into Twitter every day, being inspired by people who I also inspire, just by existing, being full of life, and wanting to make the world a better place [via social technology]. Should I move to ‘Silicon Valley’ and start a microblogging community/real-time search pyramid scheme?' -- JAJA

HipsterRunoff twitter socialmedia attention ponzi lulz satire
november 2009 by adamcrowe

copy to mine

YouTube -- Bird and Fortune: New Media, Internet, Blogs, Twitter and Fame

"If you wrote in twitter 'I'm ... ' everyone would know and act accordingly."

internet socialmedia twitter attention narcissism fame technoutopianism lulz
november 2009 by adamcrowe

copy to mine

danah boyd -- "Streams of Content, Limited Attention: The Flow of Information through Social Media"

'#2. Stimulation. People consume content that stimulates their mind and senses. That which angers, excites, energizes, entertains, or otherwise creates an emotional response. This is not always the "best" or most informative content, but that which triggers a reaction. #3. Homophily. In a networked world, people connect to people like themselves. Prejudice, intolerance, bigotry, and power are all baked into our networks. In a world of networked media, it's easy to not get access to views from people who think from a different perspective. In an era of networked media, we need to recognize that networks are homophilous and operate accordingly. Technology does not inherently disintegrate social divisions. In fact, more often then not, in reinforces them. Only a small percentage of people are inclined to seek out opinions and ideas from cultures other than their own. These people are and should be highly valued in society...'

* internet web socialmedia behaviours attention continuouspartialattention synaptics emotionalism homophily groupthink information discourse DanahBoyd retribalization
november 2009 by adamcrowe

copy to mine

Ryeberg Curated Video -- Me, The Vlogger, and I

“I’m searching for who the fuck I am.” -- I. Know. You're. From The Twat Farm.

narcissism attention authenticity existentialism
november 2009 by adamcrowe

copy to mine

Ryeberg Curated Video -- “I’m Unique! Woooooooo!”

"You wanna know why?" -- Unwarranted self-importance, perhaps?

narcissism attention fame selfesteem entitlement
november 2009 by adamcrowe

copy to mine

YouTube -- Rima Laibow & Albert Stubblebine Return on Alex Jones TV 2/4: A Scientific Dictatorship!

Why psychopaths leave clues to the evil they're about to do: Rima Laibow: "There's a need to be recognized that's very deep in the human psyche no matter how evil and perverted... Police Detectives know perfectly well that criminals get caught because they leave clues saying, 'recognize me, recognize me,' even though they might not consciously want to be caught. [Leaving clues] may be the last remnant of their humanity." -- And if you don't react to their warnings and defend yourself, then you've proven yourself as deserving of their contempt.

psychology criminology attention confession psychopathy ponerology evil pathocracy conspiracy AlexJones
november 2009 by adamcrowe

copy to mine

TechCrunch -- NSFW: After Fort Hood, another example of how ‘citizen journalists’ can’t handle the truth

Rubbernecking 2.0 -- 'Moore’s [tweeted] coverage was quickly picked up by bloggers and mainstream media outlets alike, something that she actively encouraged so she could tell them the truth, rather than the speculative bullshit that was hitting the wires. There was just one problem: Moore’s information was bullshit too. -- ... the ‘real time web’ is turning all of us into inhuman egotists. Her behaviour had nothing to do with getting the word out; it wasn’t about preventing harm to others, but rather a simple case of – “look at me looking at this.” I’m sure she genuinely believed she was helping get the real truth out, and making an actual difference. And that’s precisely the problem: none of us think we’re being selfish or egotistic when we tweet something...' -- On Neda Agha Soltan's death: '...the last thing that terrified girl saw before she closed her eyes for the final time was some guy pointing a cameraphone at her. “Look at me, looking at her, looking back at me.”'

criticism socialmedia twitter behaviours journalism voyeurism attention narcissism surveillance sousveillance paparazzi rubbernecking lifecasting ambientimmediacy privacy dignity empathy ethics
november 2009 by adamcrowe

copy to mine

Atomic Tango -- Hypocritical Mass: The Big Lie About Twitter

'...just because one can make money or promote a cause on Twitter doesn’t make it “social”; it makes it just another marketing platform, as the spammers who infest Twitter would readily agree. -- Despite all the bluster, Web 2.0 simply introduced different ways for businesses and customers to interact. Indeed, I would argue that social media has made communicating with corporations more difficult than ever since it’s created “just too much noise to sift through.” ...thanks to social media, corporations have to either hire several (or even hundreds) of customer service/social media reps, or they have to avoid customer contact as much as possible. -- Those most successful at using Twitter to promote themselves have learned that the “social” part is unwieldy. Because it’s impossible to track or respond to the tweets of thousands of people, the emerging “best practice” is to treat Twitter as a traditional mass medium.' -- web2.0 is a ponzi scheme, it is vitally important we realise this...

socialmedia twitter attention ponzi hype
november 2009 by adamcrowe

copy to mine

The Whuffie Bank - Reputation is Wealth

'The value of your Whuffie is obtained from your online reputation by tracking your interactions with social networks and the feedback from your contacts.' -- Ponzi rises to the top. All gladhands on deck. Cult of reciprocity. Or is that just me being needlessly cynical?

socialnetworking socialmedia economics reputation whuffie influence attention markets reciprocity socialcapital currency ponzi cults
november 2009 by adamcrowe

copy to mine

Marginal Utility -- Where Nobody Knows Your Name and They Never Know You Came

'...what happens when markets become non-anonymous is that we become reliant on consumption more than ever to mediate our relations with others, so that friendships happen only within the context of brand communities and branded social networks and shared affinities for the same products. “Social networking, blogging, etc. have created a huge incentive for people to put themselves on display, when previously they may have just kept their opinions mostly to themselves.” It is that incentivizing that worries me ... its conflation with commercialized self-display and personal branding. Social networks keep score of attention in measurable ways, heightening the stakes, and our physical isolation erodes the traditional mitigating forces of courtesy (which is where the stigma against performing, of hogging attention, arose from in the first place). The danger is that performance as a gift, a carefree act of self-forgetting, instead becomes an ongoing requisite act of self-definition.'

* socialnetworking behaviours attention whuffie reputation consumerism consumering identity selfservers performance signalling masks status sharing socialcapital culturalcapital cults immateriallabour theadvertisedlife
november 2009 by adamcrowe

copy to mine

Marginal Utility Annex -- More on "Consumer Emancipation"

'One must invent a community, an adoring audience, in order to imagine that self-expression is a gift. and things like Facebook serve to make that fantasy easier to sustain, by making positive feedback thoughtlessly implementable. The ordinary impersonal markets ... are suspended to force participants to sell their own "radical self-expression" instead as a self-conscious product, for approval and attention and status and a stable position in an emerging social hierarchy. This is allowing identity-driven consumerism to supplant capitalist consumption. -- The market is an atavistic structure that works against the sort of self consumerism exalts -- markets prefer anonymous subjects engaging in exchanges ruled entirely by rationality rather than the vagaries of social relations and social/cultural capital. -- ...social networks seize upon the mechanisms Burning Man evinces for creating a community built on coercive sharing, but tosses out the impermanence that excuses the coercion.'

* socialnetworking attention whuffie reputation consumerism consumering identity selfservers performance signalling masks status sharing socialcapital culturalcapital cults immateriallabour theadvertisedlife
november 2009 by adamcrowe

copy to mine

Generation Bubble -- Public Image Unlimited: Consumerism and Anonymity’s End (3)

'The main purpose of social networks ... is to guarantee us a place to display our consumption. The point is to discourage online anonymity, to get us invested in the notion of reputational capital. We begin to publicize every purchase, to authenticate every choice by broadcasting it. We strengthen our communal ties with every singularized transaction. We will have reason to believe that everything we buy has an impact on our reputation, on how we are seen, on who we really are. We will respond accordingly, stylizing and designing the most mundane commodities so that they can elucidate some aspect of personality. If we share, we contribute information, we add value to the network and we know that our voice has been aggregated. Our drop was added to the demographic data pool, but more important, our own personal archive has been enriched. We become more findable. We can begin to keep score of how often we’re found, how real we are to the world.'

socialnetworking attention whuffie reputation consumerism consumering identity selfservers performance signalling masks status sharing socialcapital culturalcapital cults immateriallabour theadvertisedlife
november 2009 by adamcrowe

copy to mine

Generation Bubble -- Public Image Unlimited: Consumerism and Anonymity’s End (2)

'Rather than entering into an exchange with a stable identity, we become ourselves through the public transaction, which provides us with a self only for as long as it is approved in the interaction process. The exchange is “singularized,” its uniqueness supplants that of the people involved. They fade into the communal backdrop, waiting to emerge again in another dramatic moment of “sharing.” And every effort at sharing will be judged, fixing our place within a status hierarchy. We can fantasize about finding the status hierarchy we could dominate — maximizing our “subcultural capital.” But this involves doubling down on personalized exchange, moving further away from the capital that circulates with no questions asked (money) and reinforcing the value of contingent capital that has worth only in particularly circumstances. So at that point, we would be dealing in an even more obscure personal currency, begging for people to accept it, exchange it into acceptance and attention.'

attention whuffie reputation consumerism consumering identity selfservers performance signalling masks status sharing socialcapital culturalcapital cults immateriallabour theadvertisedlife
november 2009 by adamcrowe

copy to mine

The New Republic -- Against Transparency: The perils of openness in government by Lawrence Lessig

'This is the problem of attention-span. To understand something—an essay, an argument, a proof of innocence—requires a certain amount of attention. But on many issues, the average, or even rational, amount of attention given to understand many of these correlations, and their defamatory implications, is almost always less than the amount of time required. The result is a systemic misunderstanding—at least if the story is reported in a context, or in a manner, that does not neutralize such misunderstanding. The listing and correlating of data hardly qualifies as such a context. Understanding how and why some stories will be understood, or not understood, provides the key to grasping what is wrong with the tyranny of transparency. The public is too smart to waste its time focusing on matters that are not important for it to understand. The ignorance here is rational, not pathological.'

internet information data transparency context attention falsepositives cynicism LawrenceLessig
october 2009 by adamcrowe

copy to mine

Marginal Utility -- Authentic Listening: Are We Selling Out Our Tastes?

'If I put a bunch of tracks on an MP3 blog ... I’ve crossed the line into being a freelance marketer, a wannabe A&R person. I want strangers to applaud my taste under the auspices of “sharing.” -- It’s no better if I talk about my musical tastes on a social network—the context changes the relevance of what I am saying and my opinions can be aggregated and sold as demographic data, or could lead to my friends being hit with certain sorts of targeted ads. By the terms of service, my opinions become part of a commercial public record. Our intentions in listening will be harder and harder to keep pure; the temptations to sell our tastes out by blogging/tweeting/social network posting about them will continue to increase.'

consumption behaviours consumering authenticity taste signalling attention content selfobjects objects music
october 2009 by adamcrowe

copy to mine

Psychology Today -- Understanding the Psychology of Twitter

'I twitter, therefore I am. I matter. -- Dr David Lewis, a cognitive neuropsychologist: "Using Twitter suggests a level of insecurity whereby, unless people recognize you, you cease to exist. It may stave off insecurity in the short term, but it won't cure it." -- Twitter's software designers were clever enough to program in tenacious intermittent reward systems, so you end up like a loser in Vegas, behaviorally trapped at the slot machines of life. -- Perhaps a more enlightened way to look at it is that you're really just enjoying a cyber-zen moment of mindfulness to be present and tweet thyself. We're all interconnected now - each of us acting like a single neuron in humanity's brain, firing bits of electricity at one another, slowly coadunating and collectively struggling toward a great awakening. That awakening could turn out to be the next stage in our evolution, and a single tweet the butterfly's wings that eventually leads to a big bang of global meta-consciousness.' -- OM...

psychology internet web behaviours twitter socialnetworking attention lifecasting celebrity narcissism masks existentialism statusupdates status intermittentvariablerewards addiction themediumisthemassage extensionsofman centralnervoussystem immunesystem hivemind one fame media
october 2009 by adamcrowe

copy to mine

Twitter / chad scoville: Twitter is a ponzi scheme

"Twitter is a ponzi scheme of reputational cache, measured by formative collectability of nonsense and nothing by no one." -- CAN HAS WHUFFIE FLAKES PLOX?

twitter attention ponzi socialmedia whuffie
october 2009 by adamcrowe

copy to mine

Salon Life -- Why we can't stop looking

'Peep culture involves watching and being watched, snooping and spying, gawking and gossiping; it means exposing our intimacies with an eye toward bonding with others and growing comfortable with the increasingly common slippage between public and private. Peep culture, like pop culture, informs the atmosphere — it is the atmosphere — in which we live. Writes Niedzviecki, “It’s like that famous line about pornography: you know it when you see it. And you do see it. All the time, everyday, everywhere. -- ...people like Twitter because it's connection with low expectations. And that's a phrase that has stuck with me and has become almost an overarching explanation for the whole peep culture phenomenon. ...we want the feeling of connection without the weight of being expected to do something.”

psychology internet web behaviours ambientintimacy panopticon voyeurism sousveillance equiveillance lifecasting selfservers oversharing performance masks attention narcissism celebrity transparency privacy leaky socialnetworking weakties feedback #socialization fame
september 2009 by adamcrowe

copy to mine

It takes a socially transcendent moment to remind us what makes life worth living.

'...twitter is an instant window into the lives’ of people. A chance to track the distractions that are filling up people’s lives’, momentarily taking over their brains. An impact significant enough to process a lil thought/meme about it. Whether it is a human, a product, a political scandal ... or a celeb death, the twitter’s portal into a generalized human psyche is priceless. We must embrace the power of this tool. We must embrace all tools that allow us to reflect/share/digitally mourn. We are growing up, learning how to use social networks to experience life together. We are learning how to mourn, celebrate, and crucify miscellaneous celebrities. We are learning that death memes are the memes that unite us. The internet/internet meme is a coping mechanism/opportunity. While events happen in ‘reality’ our opportunity to reflect upon them in a ’sillie lil online world’ helps us to cope with how deeply rattled we are by the underlying themes of highly bloggable events.''

HipsterRunoff internet socialmedia twitter attention celebrity gossip boredom lulz memes hivemind globalvillage one #bandwidth #socialization #ubiquity fame satire
september 2009 by adamcrowe

copy to mine

I work in marketing. I work on the streets. I represent a brand. This is my job.

'I would avoid hiring young people, since they tend to ‘look ashamed’/'disinterested’ in holding up the sign, since they unintentionally outsourced their brand. It seems better to have a ’serious old person’ who thinks they have a real job, or possibly a ‘crazy old man’ who will wave to people and be a jovial extension of your brand. It is important not to hire a krazy homeless man, since he might scare customers away, even if he has tons of experience in professional sign holding. -- Always remember that you have to ‘go to the streets’ to reach real people. While internet advertising ‘looks kewl’, sometimes u have to reach low-end consumers with your low-end product. I believe in the power of holding up signs on the side of the road.'

HipsterRunoff theamericandream consumerism advertising marketing work attention brandmodels affectivelabour recession poverty theadvertisedlife
september 2009 by adamcrowe

copy to mine

Seth's Blog -- Flipping abundance and scarcity

'We spent a generation believing certain parts of our business needed to be scarce and that advertising and other interruption should be abundant. Part of the pitch of free is that when advertising goes away, you need to make something else abundant in order to gain attention. Then, and only then, will you be able to sell something that's naturally scarce. This is an uncomfortable flip to make, because the stuff you've been charging for feels like it should be charged for, and the new scarcity is often difficult to find. But, especially in the digital world, this is happening, and faster than ever.' -- A good reminder to re-read KK's 'better than free': http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2008/01/better_than_fre.php

economics free abundance scarcity marketing attention
september 2009 by adamcrowe

copy to mine

A Smart Bear -- If Kindergarten were like Social Media Marketing

'#Rachel Davis, the most popular girl in class, writes an eBook explaining how other kids can get popular too. It's well received from pre-K through third grade, but although it contains clear examples and actionable advice, somehow the unpopular kids still never get invited to the cool kids' slumber parties. #Little enterprising Genevieve Morrow puts Google ads on her fingerpaintings, but they don't generate enough cash even to cover her candy necklace habit. She finally starts making real money when she converts her afternoon lemonade stand to resell Thesis WordPress themes to second graders looking to enhance their personal brand. #Teachers explain that "What I did on summer vacation" doesn't grab attention. Better is something actionable ("Five ways to have fun on summer vacation") or provocative ("Why waterparks are more dangerous than you think") or something personally relatable ("What Dora the Explora won't tell you about summer vacation").'

socialmedia behaviours popularity attention marketing satire lulz theadvertisedlife
september 2009 by adamcrowe

copy to mine

Wired -- Not Enough Facebook ‘Friends?’ Buy Them

'An Australian online marketing company is selling friends and fans to Facebook members after offering a similar service to Twitter users.“The simple fact is that with a large following on Facebook, you have an instant and targeted group of people you can contact and promote whatever it is you want to promote,” he added. “The only problem is that it can be extremely difficult to achieve such a following, which is where we come in.” The company offers packages for Facebook, the world’s number one social networking site, that start at 1,000 friends up to 10,000 friends at costs ranging from $177 to $1,167. “All we do is send them a welcome message or friend request from the client. If they decide to go ahead and add that person as a friend or a fan then they will; if not, then they won’t." -- Surely someone can write a friend bot to do that.

socialnetworking socialmedia twitter facebook socialgraph attention marketing spam
september 2009 by adamcrowe

copy to mine

37signals -- The bar for success in our industry is too low

'It still blows me away that David’s talk at Startup School 2008 was met with such enthusiasm (I know David was surprised too). The talk was simple. Come up with a product, charge money for it, make more money than it costs to run it, and you turn a profit! This is the formula that’s been in place since business began. Yet in front of a group of new tech entrepreneurs it seemed like a revelation, a brand new story never told before. David said people were coming up to him in droves after the speech thanking him for opening their eyes. Who closed them?' -- CAN HAZ MUNETIZASHUN L8R PLOX?

economics web bubble credit malinvestment business entrepreneurship businessmodels attrition free attention ponzi greaterfool
september 2009 by adamcrowe

copy to mine

Marginal Utility -- Nanostories, etc.

'Online, the action is the tracing of trends and our own statistically determined significance. Twittering, and then seeing what sort of response it provokes, etc. We are never at a loss for an opportunity to try to garner attention, and these efforts are archived, deepening our potential self, even if it is all noise. The internet has given us means to sell ourselves the way products have long been sold to us, and we’ve embraced them, adopting advertising measuring tools as markers of moral value. ...we manage our public meaning like a brand manager, and perfect the art of culture monitoring—meta consumption of media. We begin to consume the buzz about buzz, or pure buzz, with no concern with what it’s about, only whether we can exploit it for self-promotion. ...nanostories, not suprisingly, preserve the status quo, reinforcing our own vanity and self-centeredness along with the market as timeless, unquestionable norm.'

* psychology socialmedia lifecasting statusupdates behaviours attention addiction intermittentvariablerewards popularity status advertising marketing simulacra popculture meta sentiment self narcissism hype quantifiedself analytics boredom ideology reflexivity circumscription theadvertisedlife culture
september 2009 by adamcrowe

copy to mine

BBC -- The end of clicks for free

'... writer Matt Penniman thinks eventually people will do fun jobs for nothing: "Now, in the previous economic paradigm, it was possible to do work that you would have done for less or for free and still be paid well for it, because it was too much trouble for your employers/clients to find someone who could do the work as well and for free. But the internet drastically reduces that barrier. Imagine trying to find people to write a computer operating system and all the associated applications without expecting payment before the internet - now look at Linux. I wonder if we're heading toward an economy where, to put it bluntly, people don't get paid for doing fun things. If something is fun - for someone in the world who finds it fun enough to become good at it, and to do it without expecting pay - it will no longer pay."' -- 'Twas ever thus

economics free attention disintermediation hackersvsvectoralists via:diemkay
september 2009 by adamcrowe

copy to mine

Deep Dive Marketing -- The New Music Business Model: Imogen Heap

Not so much a business model, more an attention model where people enjoy the shared chaos of production and collaborative 'tidy up' towards a finished product. Mess is lore, as some folk say. -- '#Chapter 4: Building it Together: Heap has more than 735,000 followers on Twitter, each of whom feels invested in the making of Ellipse and is eagerly awaiting its release. They’ve been there every step of the way, offered their opinions and insights when asked for advice about songs, helped create Heap’s bio and album art, and were the friends who were always willing to lend an ear… and a hand. #Chapter 6: Heap TweetUps' -- And then the afterparty. -- '#Chapter 7: Cafe Heap' -- And then the product in its solid state is too opaque and so people start looking for the next 'production' to get involved in. #Chapter Z: The awkward second album where any remaining fans demand repeats of attentional gimmicks of which the artist has run out and can only plead, "But it was always about 'the music'."

popculture fandom socialmedia productnarratives engagement attention marketing sharing authenticty culture
august 2009 by adamcrowe

copy to mine

Seth's Blog -- The massive attention surplus

'When people talk about the problem with free online, they're missing the point. Free is creating lots of attention, but marketers haven't gotten smart enough to do something profitable with that attention. -- Big companies, non-profits and even candidates will discover hyperlocal, hyperspecialized, hyperrelevant... this is where we are going, and it turns out that this time, the media is way ahead of the marketers.'

cognitivesurplus attention localism #specialization retribalization
august 2009 by adamcrowe

copy to mine

WSJ.com -- A Manifesto for Slow Communication

'The boundlessness of the Internet always runs into the hard fact of our animal nature, our physical limits, the dimensions of our cognitive present, the overheated capacity of our minds. -- #1. Speed matters. Speed used to convey urgency; now we somehow think it means efficiency. The Internet has provided us with an almost unlimited amount of information, but the speed at which it works—and we work through it—has deprived us of its benefits. We might work at a higher rate, but this is not working. -- #2. The Physical World matters. A butcher can tell you which cuts of meat are the freshest; an online grocer may not. That same butcher, if he is good, might not just remember your preferences—which an online retailer can do frighteningly well—but ask you how your mother has been doing, whether you caught the latest football game. These interactions remind us that we are more than consumers; they remind us that we are part of the world in a way no amount of online shopping ever will.'

psychology temes internet speed communication attention continuouspartialattention ambientintimacy context experience theadvertisedlife #socialization #specialization
august 2009 by adamcrowe

copy to mine

Rough Type -- Slanted and enchanted

'The problem with the Web, as I see it, is that it imposes, with its imperialistic iron fist, the "ecstatic surfing" behavior on everything and to the exclusion of other modes of experience (not just for how we listen to music, but for how we interact with all media once they've been digitized). Today, we're quick to dismiss ... ancient days of "scarcity" and to celebrate our current "abundance," but scarcity had something going for it: it encouraged a deep engagement in listening to a particular piece of music, across the expanse of an album, and it also encouraged, in the artist, an interest in rewarding that engagement. It's the deep, attentive engagement that the Web is draining away, as we fill our iTunes library with tens of thousands of "tracks" at little or no cost. What the Web tells us, over and over again, is that breadth destroys depth. Whether it's news stories or pop songs, we're skimmers now. It's a one-hit-wonder world.' -- Nah. Rhizomic depth. See last.fm

web popculture unbundling abundance scarcity continuouspartialattention attention culture
august 2009 by adamcrowe

copy to mine

NoahBrier.com -- The Model is Message

'My two favorite quotes from the article: "The Attention Economy is (mostly) a sorry excuse for a (predictable, rational) economy." I have been waiting for so long for someone to agree with me on this one. While I get the theory and used to subscribe to the attention ideology, at this point I don't understand how it's any different. Quote number two is under the heading "the model is what matters" and says, "Our meta-analyses of culture (tipping points, long tails, crossing the chasms, ideaviruses) have come to seem more relevant and vital than the content of culture itself." That one made my head spin a little. It's so true. As a culture we've become more obsessed with understanding how things spread than the things themselves. The model itself is the content. (Or, as McLuhan would say, the medium is the message.)'

meta themediumisthemessage propagation popculture temes attention ideology media culture
august 2009 by adamcrowe

copy to mine

PopMatters -- Your Brain is the New Factory Floor

'Let them eat Facebook profiles. -- We won’t put a price tag on ourselves or our friends or our pleasures, but Facebook will happily do that behind our backs, in economic exchanges that don’t include us. ...we have become the stuff being exchanged, both in what we are and what we do online. ...no matter how much we might love attention, we can’t use it to meet our basic needs. Ultimately, we all have to participate in the cash economy. -- In order to reclaim the fruits of our labor and stop working on the digital plantation, we may be forced to become self-consciously mercenary about what heretofore we have been content to share out of a spirit of convivial sociality. We will need to start viewing our social behavior as our intellectual property, our various selves as proprietary content to which we retain the broadcasting rights and which we have no intention of licensing for reuse without our express written consent.' -- Awesome reveal of 'free'

* economics digital free abundance technoutopianism feudalism socialmedia sousveillance lifecasting numbers quantifiedself reputation identity self attention ideology sharecropping exploitation surplusvalue theadvertisedlife
august 2009 by adamcrowe

copy to mine

MaxKeiser -- Dr. Blankfein or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying & Love Goldman Sachs

'High Frequency Trading (HFT) aka ‘flash trading’ will continue to grow exponentially. Trading will become so fast, time itself will have a public offering after Microsoft secures a patent on it and trading time futures will catapult traders backwards and forwards through time until they need bailouts on debts they have not yet incurred.' -- 'People will start taking themselves public on new Citizen Exchanges created by Obama; commit public sex acts to boost their stock price then short themselves before committing suicide to cash in out-of-the-money puts they bought on themselves. As a result, the porn industry will need a bailout.' -- 'Facebook and Twitter will go public... The more you look in the mirror the more you get paid. Narcissism will get monetized by the Feds with some help by Nassim Taleb. -- Thanks Lloyd Blankfein, current CEO of Goldman Sachs and future President of the United States. We are eternally in your debt.' -- HERDAQ

economics financialization attention herd socialmedia twitter facebook statusupdates sentiment markets manipulation futures predictions celebrity narcissism nihilism hype theadvertisedlife lulz fame "capitalism"
august 2009 by adamcrowe

copy to mine

Times Online -- The rules for balancing technology and relationships

“As soon as I saw his iPhone on the table, I felt resentful,” she says. '“He’s on Twitter, for work he says.” They’d barely got beyond their aperitif when a row started. “I refuse to have a three-way conversation. If you talk to me, I expect eye contact. Meanwhile, you are typing some meaningless observation into the ether.” -- “People feel they’re not being shown enough consideration, that they’re being excluded if their partner is spending a lot of time using phones for socialising, playing games or working. It’s the fact that these devices are so mobile that makes the problem more widespread.” -- “Sometimes it’s an almost tragic scene. The couple are on holiday with their children and dad’s eyes are are glued to a bit of electronic gadgetry. He’s present but he’s absent at the same time. The very technology that is meant to bring people together is increasingly separating us from those we need to attend to most.”'

technology behaviours telepresence ambientimmediacy intermittentvariablerewards addiction continuouspartialattention attention distraction ADHD attentiondeficithyperactivedisorder etiquette relationships relationalobjects objects #bandwidth #socialization
july 2009 by adamcrowe

copy to mine

Channel 4 -- Test Tube Telly

'Test Tube Telly lets Facebook friends watch, talk about, rate and recommend their favourite TV from 4oD and YouTube. It's an experimental prototype from Channel 4's digital innovation fund, 4iP.' -- Conversational content @tomwatts

socialmedia tv sharing experience conversation channel4 attention data television
july 2009 by adamcrowe

copy to mine

Boing Boing -- Collecting dead souls in social media

'Driven by a desire to enhance his social standing, Chichikov develops an ingenious scheme. He goes around Russian villages buying up records of dead serfs. It's a brilliant idea that capitalized on a unique and grotesque feature of the feudal Russian society – ownership by landlords of the people who lived and worked on their land. Papers certifying Chichikov's ownership of 400 "souls" rapidly elevated Chichikov's status: landed gentry opened their homes to him, tried to give away their daughters in marriage, and celebrated him at town functions. And all it took was a record of ownership of hundreds of "souls." -- So every time I see another article or an ad about how to acquire more followers on twitter, friends on Facebook, or otherwise collect more "souls" for money, fame, or reputattion, I start thinking about Chichikov. He did come to an ignominous end, finally fleeing town. Makes me wonder.'

economics socialmedia attention collecting ponzi russia history feudalism
july 2009 by adamcrowe

copy to mine

xkcd -- Troll Slayer

Nothing cleanses like daylight.

attention trolling 4chan anonymous secrecy antilulz lulz
june 2009 by adamcrowe

copy to mine

The Atlantic -- Get Smarter

'...powerful tools for simulation and visualization that are jump-starting new scientific disciplines, and in the development of drugs that some people (myself included) have discovered let them study harder, focus better, and stay awake longer with full clarity. So far, these augmentations have largely been outside of our bodies, but they’re very much part of who we are today: they’re physically separate from us, but we and they are becoming cognitively inseparable. And advances over the next few decades, driven by breakthroughs in genetic engineering and artificial intelligence, will make today’s technologies seem primitive. The nascent jargon of the field describes this as “ intelligence augmentation.” I prefer to think of it as “You+.” We can call it the Nöocene epoch, from Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s concept of the Nöosphere, a collective consciousness created by the deepening interaction of human minds.' -- Last page: On the pharma-co-logic of the casino-capitalism model. Grim.

* technology temes evolution symbiosis cyborg objects selfobjects extensionsofman centralnervoussystem brain cyberbrain cognition intelligence tethered transhumanism #processing #complexity attention filters ADHD continuouspartialattention informationoverload ambientimmediacy collectiveintelligence hivemind conformity groupthink herd competition drugs pharmaceuticals thegamingofeverydaylife
june 2009 by adamcrowe

copy to mine

Bokardo -- Behavior First, Design Second

"Some behaviors that drive us nuts are core to the human experience: #1. We want attention. #2. We collect things. #3. We want status. #4. We are vain. #5. We make judgments accordingly."

design socialdesign collecting attention behaviours
june 2009 by adamcrowe

copy to mine

Michael Graham Richard -- Curiosity: Good Friend, Bad Master

Comment: jocey: "#Someone with an ADD brain pattern has trouble prioritizing among all the available options due to neurotransmitter differences. They can over-signify many things at once and tag them as equally salient. An intense curiosity and hunger for knowledge on many topics can be the result. #It is hard for an ADDer to force themselves to do any task if they have no interest in it. #They often feel undisciplined and incompetent because they watch “regular” people around them being more consistent, efficient, and able to do normal daily tasks without being bored silly. #The creative ADDer can be interdisciplinary— they see endless connections and branches across topics and subtopics. Narrowing one’s interests down may be difficult, but they may be natural synthesizers and can flourish by creating thoughtful contextual models and conceptual frameworks. Critical thinking skills are key, because they can have great imaginations and need to avoid being seen as “flakey.” -- *gulps*

attentiondeficithyperactivedisorder ADHD attention concentration distraction curiousity
june 2009 by adamcrowe

copy to mine

Times Online -- Warning: brain overload

'Linda Stone warns: “We have stretched our attention bandwidth to its upper limits. We think that if technology has a lot of bandwidth then we do, too.” -- Comment: Tim Brown: 'It just goes to show that the Biblical Commandment No.4 of "Honour the Sabbath Day and keep it Holy" is not just a good idea, but a psychological necessity.'

psychology information gluttony selfcontrol distraction continuouspartialattention attention amputation
june 2009 by adamcrowe

copy to mine

Fast Company -- Social Networking and the Brain: Continuous Partial Empathy?

"...the human brain evolved to very quickly recognize and empathize with physical pain and fear in others, but is much slower to recognize and empathize with emotional pain, or to acknowledge and celebrate virtue or skill. What this means is that, in a media environment where our social encounters happen very quickly, we may not be giving our brains a chance to generate appropriate compassion or admiration. This is especially problematic with regards to compassion, as we may find ourselves building insufficient bonds of empathy, critical to communities undergoing stress (and we're seeing a lot of stressed-out communities right now!). ...rapid-fire messaging overwhelms the brain's capacity to see consequences. ...there's a point where an insufficient amount of attention given to a potentially moving encounter means that little or no empathy--compassion or admiration--will result. And while paying attention to another person is important, offering empathy is much more critical."

psychology socialmedia attention continuouspartialattention ambientimmediacy realtime distraction empathy emotionalintelligence behaviours #bandwidth #socialization
june 2009 by adamcrowe

copy to mine

n+1 -- Lingering

"...this tendency toward distraction and desublimation is for real. It naturally begs to be deplored by literary people. A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than for others; what has been written without effort is generally read without pleasure; and so on. But if jabbering semiotic promiscuity entails some familiar costs of social or sexual promiscuity—shallow and ephemeral relationships supplant deeper and more lasting ones—there can be no honest account of online and digitally interconnected life that denies the attractions of novelty, variety, excitement. -- The internet, as its proponents rightly remind us, makes for variety and convenience; it does not force anything on you. Only it turns out it doesn't feel like that at all. The experience of being online has at least as much to do with compulsiveness as with liberty ...it seems unlikely there is any more widespread compulsion among the professional middle-class and their children than lingering online."

internet web technology media literaryculturevsoralculture acoustic space attention distraction ADHD attentiondeficithyperactivedisorder addiction intermittentvariablerewards boredom behaviours via:charlesfrith psychology
june 2009 by adamcrowe

copy to mine

Mail Online -- How the Twitter age of rolling information has 'robbed fans of compassion'

"A constant stream of electronic 'junk' is damaging people's ability to think compassionately, scientists say. The deluge of information from 24-hour news, mobile phones, emails and social networking sites such as Twitter moves too fast for the brain's 'moral compass' to process, two studies suggest. If brains become numbed by the stream of digital information, then people could lose the ability to feel altruism or sympathy for others, researchers claim. 'Our brains' attention levels are finite. When everything is screaming at us, we start withdrawing so that normally nice people become unempathetic. The two studies suggest information overload can trigger the brain's 'fight or flight' response - and sideline more compassionate, thoughtful responses to news and information. It also suggests that heavy Twitter and Facebook users could become 'indifferent to human suffering' because they never get time to reflect and fully experience emotions about other people's feelings."

psychology information twitter attention continuouspartialattention emotionalintelligence
june 2009 by adamcrowe

copy to mine

« earlier

Copy this bookmark: