Attention as a managed achievement
Being Australian, there was a time in my life when I understood attention seeking behaviour to have a negative connotation. In some intrinsic way related to the good old Aussie ‘tall poppy syndrome’, I was conditioned or brought up to believe that attention seekers were in some way unhappy about themselves, hence their relentless lust for attention to somehow receive the love they never got. Or something like that.
Fast forward to 2016 and I can’t imagine a world where EVERYBODY isn’t seeking EVERYBODY'S attention. And when I say everybody, I mean everybody they know. Or want to know. And if their behaviour in fact improves their ability of getting the attention of more people, the better things are.
Social media now occupies the space between us and everybody else. It owns it. It feeds off it. And it capitalises on it. Lange (2014) in his study of YouTubers videos goes so far as analyse the way that YouTubers build their audience by creating “video’s of affinity”, designed to “maintain feelings of potential others who identify or interpellate themselves as intended viewers of the video”.
Of course, when discussing information made public by those who are essentially private individuals, the issue of privacy is never far from the centre of discourse. Evan Speigel (2014), CEO of social media network Snapchat, has spoken of the importance of “ephemerality” or transience in the production of media. In other words, the ability for messages or media to disappear after a period of time.
In Speigel’s mind, the online world should and will eventually parallel the real world - “the world separated into an online and an offline space is no longer relevant.” (Herman, J 2014) Just as the words we speak are gone once they are spoken, so to, according to Speigel, will the media we produce disappear, fostering an online space more akin to the reality it desperately attempts to mimic.
According to Vivienne and Burgess (2013), this next phase of social media would not make video or photography less culturally significant, but more, for “the meanings and material practices…have changed without decentring it as a dominant cultural form”. In some ways this is theory is borne out by the birth of growing new social media networks Periscope and Meerkat, networks which rely on live streams which are then deleted after 24 hours of airing.
Of course all of these points are moot if media fails to engage. Would this new media landscape see more failed attempts at gaining an audience because of its transience, or a more ‘music-industry like’ space where artists are given a chance because people are looking to give different things a try?
Only time will tell.
We just might not know because it might have already been deleted.
References
Herrman, J 2014, ‘Meet the Man Who Got Inside Snapchat’s Head’, BuzzFeed, 28 January, viewed 24 September 2015, <http://www.buzzfeed.com/jwherrman/meet-the-unlikely-academic-behind-snapchats-new-pitch#3dlvjg2>.
Lange, P 2009, ‘Videos of Affinity on YouTube’, in P, Snickars & P, Vonderau (eds), The YouTube Reader, National Library of Sweden, Stockholm, pp 70-88.
Spiegel, E 2014, Partner Summit Keynote, AXS Partner Summit 25 January 2014, viewed 28 January 2015, <http://blog.snapchat.com/page/3>
Vivienne, S & Burgess, J 2013, ‘The Remediation of the Personal Photograph’, Journal of Material Culture, vol. 18, no. 3, pp. 279-98.