“Making content work in a networked era is going to be about living in the streams” - @zephoria
This clip - from the transcribed version of danah boyd's Web2.0 Conference talk "Streams of Content, Limited Attention: The Flow of Information through Social Media" - is a spot on assessment of the change upending media. So often we get caught up in the idea that this change is about shifting output modes and substrates and never quite get that the real change is actually more social than technological. Ultimately any effort that simply grafts new technologies onto the same old social worldview - any effort that ignores the shift from broadcast to network, from bound to undbound, from pages to flow - will fail.
Making content work in a networked era is going to be about living in the streams, consuming and producing alongside "customers." Consuming to understand, producing to be relevant. Content creators are not going to get to dictate the cultural norms just because they can make their content available; they are still accountable to those who are trafficking content.
Finally, we need to rethink our business plans. I doubt this cultural shift will be paid for by better advertising models. Advertising is based on capturing attention, typically by interrupting the broadcast message or by being inserted into the content itself. Trying to reach information flow is not about being interrupted. Advertising does work when it's part of the flow itself. Ads are great when they provide a desirable answer to a search query or when they appear at the moment of purchase. But when the information being shared is social in nature, advertising is fundamentally a disruption.
Read more at www.danah.org
3 Comments
Leave a comment