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Your Attention

2018-01-09 · letter vlog · John · 3:24 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Internet & YouTube · mode: Personal essay

John says everyone agrees the internet sucks, notes that it always has and that any golden age of online discourse is misremembered, yet refuses to accept it: platforms like Twitter are built to capture attention, as a zookeeper paid per roar would keep a lion scared, so our power lies in choosing where our attention goes.

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — Everyone agrees the internet sucks: Ashworth on Twitter, unreliable news, divisive voices, backlash to the backlash

  • ★ John says it's hard to get people online to agree on anything, from how to pay for health care to whether to say gif or jif. (playful) — 00:00:00 · GIF pronunciation
  • ★★ John says the one thing everybody online seems to agree on right now is that the internet kind of sucks. (hedged) — 00:00:13
  • ★★ Samuel Ashworth (quoted): Samuel Ashworth wrote that no Twitter user needs telling why it is the worst: it is an endlessly self-renewing bonfire of outrage and confusion. — 00:00:18 · Twitter
  • ★★ John thinks that is true not only of Twitter but of YouTube, Facebook, Reddit and so on. (hedged) — 00:00:28 · Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, Reddit
  • ★★ John says reliable news is hard to find online and the news cycle moves too fast to follow complicated stories over time. — 00:00:33
  • ★★ John says the architecture of the social internet often seems to lift the loudest, most divisive voices over cautious, nuanced ones. (hedged) — 00:00:38
  • ★★ John says many undeserving creators and creations reach large audiences, and the backlash is so intense it sets off backlashes to the backlash ad infinitum. — 00:00:44

00:00:58 — It isn't new: John's 1995 website joke, a misremembered golden age, Yahoo Answers and YouTube comments

  • ★★ John thinks much of this isn't new: the internet has always sucked, or at least always felt like it did. (hedged) — 00:01:00
  • ★ In 1995 the very first joke on John's very first website was that the internet was made of narcissism, cat pictures and pornography. (playful) — 00:01:06
  • ★★★ John says whatever golden age of internet discourse people look back to is inevitably misremembered. — 00:01:16
  • ★★ John dislikes a lot about today's YouTube, but that was also true in 2007, 2010 and 2012. — 00:01:21 · YouTube
  • ★ John recalls the running joke online that the only place worse than Yahoo Answers was YouTube comments. (playful) — 00:01:26 · YouTube
  • ★ John admits it sometimes feels as if YouTube comments never got better so much as the rest of the internet got worse. (playful, hedged) — 00:01:32 · YouTube
  • ★★ John says we shouldn't idealize the past: there have always been powerful people misusing power and powerless, vengeful people attacking others from behind anonymity. — 00:01:37

00:01:47 — We need not accept it; compare our goals as a species with the goals of the companies hosting our discourse

  • ★★★ John says none of that means we should have to accept an internet that sucks. — 00:01:47
  • ★★★ John thinks we need to look at the differences between our goals as a species and those of the private companies that host so much of our public discourse. (hedged) — 00:01:53

00:02:03 — The zoo analogy: paid per roar, you would keep the lion surprised and threatened

  • ★★ John imagines a zookeeper paid a thousand dollars per roar, who first rewards the lion with food, then notices it roars at anything weird and shows it lots of surprising information. (hypothetical) — 00:02:03
  • ★★ Since lions roar when threatened but learn threats are empty, the keeper would need a million ways to make them feel their lives, families or territory were in danger. (hypothetical) — 00:02:16
  • ★★★ John says Twitter is structured not to make us better informed or happier but to keep us on Twitter, and the same is true of Facebook, Netflix, Hulu, YouTube and cable news. — 00:02:30 · Twitter, Facebook, YouTube

00:02:35 — Platforms are built to keep our attention; if we refuse to roar on cue they will change; your attention is yours

  • ★★★ John says all these companies want as much of our attention as they can get because that is how they make money, which is what they exist to do. — 00:02:40 · attention economy
  • ★★ John doesn't buy the argument that this makes corporations or the people who work at them evil. — 00:02:49
  • ★★ John thinks we need to understand what corporations want so we know how best to tell them what we want. (hedged) — 00:02:53
  • ★★ John says they want our attention, and it is very hard to turn down the feasts they lay before us. — 00:02:58 · attention economy
  • ★★★ John says that if we refuse to roar on cue, the companies will notice and change. — 00:03:05
  • ★★★ John says algorithms and the companies that control them are big and powerful, but each of us still chooses what we watch, listen to and read. — 00:03:10 · recommender system
  • ★★★ John tells viewers their attention is powerful and is theirs. — 00:03:20

Threads in this video

Mentioned

Central: attention economy · operant conditioning · Twitter

Also: People: Samuel Ashworth

Organizations: Facebook · Hulu · Netflix · Reddit · YouTube

Concepts: Cable news · online disinhibition effect · recommender system · rosy retrospection

Products: Yahoo Answers · YouTube comments

Memes: GIF pronunciation

Only in the description or credits: Rosianna Halse Rojas

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