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First draft of the /purpose page for my baby, This.cm. 

Obviously very related to things I'm pondering here. Thoughts?

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Is the high brow business model legacy media's salvation?

My colleague Derek Thompson has a great piece that came out of some of our conversations (and some of the ideas I've been playing with on this blog). In essence: if you want to produce high brow content build a subscription model that monetizes your user's aspiration to consume the media you produce, not the fact of whether they do:

This idea runs bigger than television and subscriptions. When you see a tower of unread New Yorker magazines spilling out of a bathroom wicker basket—or when you look at the November calendar page and realize you haven't been back to the gym you've paid since January—you are witnessing the virtues of a business model that charges us for our ambition rather than our behavior.

Framed in the way I've been talking about it here: a subscription model is an appeal to the rider, the conscious self that is making choices about who we would like to be, not the wild elephant that is responding in real time to stimuli (summary of the elephant and the rider metaphor here). 

Derek notes that there's a new subscription non-fiction longform startup called Latterly that is hoping to make use of this model. Get users bought into the idea of what they'll be consuming and have them pay up front, rather than winning them over with each piece and selling their attention to advertisers.

The challenge Latterly has is an interesting one, though, that undermines some of our assumptions about who will easily succeed in the long run in digital media. Brand.

Or, put in a less cliched marketing way, reputation. Why are we willing to pay for HBO or The New Yorker as a bundle without knowing what shows they'll put on the air next year or what stories they'll run next month? Because they've earned a reputation for quality by delivering it consistently over time regardless of whether any given writer or showrunner is working with them at any given time. 

In that sense, high brow legacy media companies may have a huge "brand" advantage that is more concrete than some abstract public awareness. They don't have to painstakingly prove that what they do will be worth it. Latterly, on the other hand, will.

And proving that out will be expensive because work of this quality costs money and building that rep will take a long time. That fact may make the high brow media landscape much harder to "disrupt" than that fast-paced, ad-based mass media.

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Interesting convo with Anthony De Rosa, Dan Shanoff, Tony Haile and Jay Rosen about aggregated attention over time.

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[Columbia psychology professor Walter Mischel] explains that there are two warring parts of the brain: a hot part demanding immediate gratification (the limbic system), and a cool, goal-oriented part (the prefrontal cortex). The secret of self-control, he says, is to train the prefrontal cortex to kick in first. To do this, use specific if-then plans, like “If it’s before noon, I won’t check email” or “If I feel angry, I will count backward from 10.” Done repeatedly, this buys a few seconds to at least consider your options. The point isn’t to be robotic and never eat chocolate mousse again. It’s to summon self-control when you want it, and be able to carry out long-term plans. “We don’t need to be victims of our emotions,” Mr. Mischel says. “We have a prefrontal cortex that allows us to evaluate whether or not we like the emotions that are running us.” This is harder for children exposed to chronic stress, because their limbic systems go into overdrive. But crucially, if their environment changes, their self-control abilities can improve, he says.

Learning How to Exert Self-Control - NYTimes.com (bolding added by me)

You’ll know Mischel as the guy famous for popularizing the marshmallow test, where children’s ability to delay gratification is tested by having them not eat 1 marshmallow now in order to get 2 marshmallows later. It’s really just the elephant and the rider all over again, though, isn’t it? This entire literature of habits and self-control applies just as much to attention as it does to eating or any other experience where we choose to do the cognitively hard thing.

What I love most about this, and again this goes back to Shirky’s point, is that one of the keys is changing the environment. Rather than beating ourselves up about our lack of impulse control, remove the temptations. Shirky has his students put away their laptops and phones. A new safety device literally disables a driver’s ability to text in their car. In the marshmallow test “[t]he children who succeed turn their backs on the cookie, push it away, pretend it’s something nonedible like a piece of wood, or invent a song. Instead of staring down the cookie, they transform it into something with less of a throbbing pull on them.”

It reminds me of something I’ve started to hear from fellow travelers in the digital media space: no social apps on your phone. I took the Twitter and Facebook apps off of my phone 6 months ago and never looked back. David Roberts mentions doing the same thing in his digital detox. Shani Hilton, the Executive Editor of BuzzFeed, told The Wire early this year:

I find that, compared to maybe a year ago, I pay a lot less attention to Twitter than I did. I find it more of a distraction that I checked compulsively. So I ended up taking the app off of my phone actually. Which makes my time away from my computer a lot more peaceful.

If the environment changes, self-control abilities can improve. At some level, we’re all doing something ridiculously obvious: don’t beat yourself up about it, just remove the temptation. But it’s something we’re only now realizing we need to do as we come to terms the dominance of these new platforms in our lives.

A next step would be for hardware and software to support us in this. I have a Chrome browser extension that, when turned on, blocks almost anything social: email, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, etc etc. It allows me to turn on what is essentially a “focus mode” on my computer when I need to read or write something long. There is also, of course, Freedom, the app that locks you away from the Internet altogether for a given amount of time.

But why do these have to be hacks? Shouldn’t attention management be a key part of any OS? I want an operating system on my phone and laptop that has thought this through, and gives me the ability to toggle between modes as a regular part of my use. I want apps to understand how it plugs into those modes, and mold themselves to my attention needs rather than prey upon my attention for its own. The notification center and "Do Not Disturb" setting in iOS are a start, but barely. 

If the environment changes, self-control abilities can improve.

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(via How social media is reshaping news | Pew Research Center) In advance of ONA last week, Pew pulled together some of its old data about social media and news. Thomas Baekdal rants against how they frame a lot of their analysis, although I think he's a little over the top. One thing that I'm continually struck by in the conversation about "time spent" and social media referrals is the fixation on averages. We see in the chart above that, for example, readers arriving from social back in 2013 were on average spending only about 1/3 the amount of time with the content they clicked as readers going direct. But what does that really tell us? Maybe social is sending both deeply engaged consumers and lightly engaged consumers, depending on the user and the content. What I want to see is a distribution of engagement, along with a sense of scale that can be compared to readers who "go direct." John Borthwick, for example, offers the "hill of Wow" with data that suggests that it's not that social media referred consumers are disengaged, but that they bifurcate. All of which is to say that we should beware of averages. They can oversimplify much more interesting truths in the data.

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Last night, prompted by a conversation with Josh Kalven that resulted from my post about "read it later" apps, I flipped my Pocket account to show the oldest unread items first. The result:

It goes on like that.

Is this the digital equivalent of unread print copies of The New Yorker piling up next to our bedsides? Do we want to want to read it and things like it more than we actually want to read things like it?

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CNN has a new web streaming channel called CNNgo. 

I have no idea what to look at.

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Instapaper, Pocket, Readability, Longform—the apps that take links and make them into clean little ad-free phone pamphlets that you can read on a plane—have been criticized, celebrated, but mostly tolerated. They help people read your work, which is encouraging; they also, at some point in the copy/clean process, at least give you a click, which is what you, or your editor, or your publisher, ultimately needs.

Time Spent - The Awl

Do they help people read your work?

I’m a big fan of Pocket and Instapaper (have toggled back and forth over the years). Which is to say, like the idea of shifting stuff that’s really valuable outside of The Stream to come back to when I actually want to consume it.

But I wonder sometimes if they have the effect of allowing me to satisfy my guilt about things I know I should read without actually reading them. If I didn’t have a “read it later” button (which may be a lie I'm telling myself), would I be more likely to just read it now?

Really truly don’t know. You?

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what am I doing?

Keeping this as simple as possible: I’ve started this little blog to catalogue the reading/watching/listening/experiencing I’m doing around digital attention. It’s a topic that has long been an obsession of mine, but is now at the center of my work at This. (a social site in private beta you can read more about here). 

Attention feels like a subject that cuts across everything today. Obviously the new ways (devices and services) we spend it are transforming the media business. But those new ways are also changing us: how we learn, how we drive, how we organize, how we sex, etc.. This won’t be an attempt to catalogue all of that, but a narrower attempt simply to organize my own research and thinking.

Why? Because one of the things a lot of research tells us is that we learn when we’re forced to use, not just absorb, information. And I’m a social learner. Put me in a cabin by myself with books and I’ll get dumb. Surround me with my friends and I get smarter. 

I’m going to do 3 things: collect links I want to get to, blog when I do (maybe a block quote, maybe a longer essay), collect the links I’ve consumed with links to my blog posts for later reflection. Maybe some of that will be useful to other people, but I’m primarily doing it for myself.

Email me if you’ve got ideas for things to put on my “next” list. Email me if you’ve got thoughts on my “done” list.

An important note: I’m trying to view this little blog in an amateur publishing way. I want to write fast, think out loud, etc. It won’t work if I start agonizing over every word. So please forgive typos and half-formed thoughts.

Here are 3 posts that will probably be representative: 1, 2, 3.

Let’s see if this is fun.

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When asked about the kind of journalistic ideals motivating designers working on these types of products, a senior AOL designer said: “I don’t think that the people in this space who are doing this are familiar with these ideas of journalism that you’re talking about, except in the most cursory way. And even there, I don’t think that they believe they’re important. I think essentially, zero. I think there are no ideals being pursued.” His colleague agreed saying “You know, I’m building an entertainment product. I don’t even consider all the things that you guys are talking about.”

Designer or journalist: Who shapes the news you read in your favorite apps? » Nieman Journalism Lab This is such a vital part of any conversation about digital attention. One of the most important roles of an editor in old fashion broadcast media was/is attention management. We get as consumers that the story on the front of a newspaper is what the editor things we should read, and that the first story in a nightly TV broadcast is the most "important." Setting aside the complex (and problematic) criteria for how those decisions are being made, they are being made. Our trust in a media organization in that model is wrapped up in our willingness to let it direct our attention. The rise of social (or in the case of the people being interviewed for this Nieman piece, "content apps") erases that. And typically the way we've discussed that as a culture is that we've delegated our attention to "the crowd" or our "friend graph" or our "interest graph" or "curators." But those people are using tools, and those tools drive the incentives for the "crowd" or "friends" or "curators." They may not make those decisions, but they motivate them. And, for better and worse, those motivations are being created by people who may or may not feel any sense of responsibility about the social impact of what they're doing.

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People know they shouldn’t text and drive. Overwhelmingly, they tell pollsters that doing so is unacceptable and dangerous, and yet they do it anyway. They can’t resist. So safety advocates and public officials have called for a technological solution that does an end run around free will and prevents people from texting in the first place.

Trying to Hit the Brake on Texting While Driving - NYTimes.com

Such a perfect example of the rider and elephant problem. The rider knows that texting while driving is dangerous. The elephant can’t help himself.

The solution in this case isn’t dissimilar from Shirky telling his students to turn off their laptops: turn off the thing tempting the elephant: literally a little black box that blocks incoming and outgoing texts.

The rider can’t control the elephant in the moment. But she can anticipate the problematic (or even dangerous) possibilities and prevent the moment from ever arising.

The ability to anticipate and create contexts may be the rider's key advantages.

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Jonathan Haidt’s metaphor of the elephant and the rider is useful here. In Haidt’s telling, the mind is like an elephant (the emotions) with a rider (the intellect) on top. The rider can see and plan ahead, but the elephant is far more powerful. Sometimes the rider and the elephant work together (the ideal in classroom settings), but if they conflict, the elephant usually wins. After reading Haidt, I’ve stopped thinking of students as people who simply make choices about whether to pay attention, and started thinking of them as people trying to pay attention but having to compete with various influences, the largest of which is their own propensity towards involuntary and emotional reaction. (This is even harder for young people, the elephant so strong, the rider still a novice.) Regarding teaching as a shared struggle changes the nature of the classroom. It’s not me demanding that they focus — its me and them working together to help defend their precious focus against outside distractions. I have a classroom full of riders and elephants, but I’m trying to teach the riders.

Why I Just Asked My Students To Put Their Laptops Away — Clay Shirky on Medium

This metaphor has become a fixture in the way I think about attention.

It’s replaced a wonkier (and fuzzier) frame that I remember from a philosophy or ethics class I took years and years ago. In that way of describing the problem, we have first order desires and second order desires. Which is to say, we have things we want and we have things we want to want. For example: a smoker may badly want a cigarette (first order), but also may want to not want a cigarette (second order).

It’s a way of framing self-control that acknowledges our divided selves and the way in which a more considered thought may struggle to override something more impulsive.

The elephant and the rider metaphor establishes the same division and relationship, but gives the thought more texture (and makes it way less boring).

Of course, Shirky’s point in calling up the metaphor is that as a teacher he is trying to communicate with the rider, while the hardware and software that’s been built to attract his students’ attention is finely tuned to excite the elephant.

Shirky’s solution is to have his students put away the digital devices. To remove the elephant’s temptation. Which is logical enough.

But it begs the question: is disconnecting our only option? Must digital devices and services be built for the elephant? Or might it be possible to build tools that help the rider tame it?