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| OMG a child is crying!!! photo credit. |
2. How much do the short attention spans and proclivity for
counting impact the creation and consumption of truly exceptional content? Is
the modern day Charles Dickens sitting at his Mac Book scouring the web for
alarming yet shareable images to go with his post entitled “Eleven shocking
facts about London street
3. When we’re not busy listing and counting, often times
we’re sensationalizing through bright lights and gimmicks as well as a
hyper-focus on the emotional. Sure, there’s your traditional who, what, when,
where, and why’s, but there’s also the ever popular how do you feel?
A bunch of people were shot? Hey survivors: how do you feel?
(Spoiler alert: they feel pretty awful.) Post-housing market collapse America
Sure we could be writing and reading about the overall
demographic impact, the nuts and bolts of exactly what happened and how, and
the probable underlying causes along with the critiques and potential
preventative measures they suggest. But mainly we’re going to spend a lot of
time consuming in depth depictions of how sad that one guy must feel. Wouldn’t
it be great if a heart wrenching personal interview about living with addiction
to emotional porn went viral?
4. What did people do with their time pre-Internet? Was it
personal betterment, community support, and intellectual growth? Or was it just
gossiping about the neighborhood’s very own version of Snooki and yelling about
football to not-Twitter? To what extent does the internet aggregate stuff we would
do anyway?
5. Posts that come as part of a series tend to do well. Is
that to do with our love of cliff hangers?
STAY TUNED: This will be continued in a series of
incredibly short posts that mold creativity to suit share-ability. I’ll bare my
soul about my personal experience in list form and include a Vlog of me crying.
Once again, you've written an articulate post that really speaks to me. Why are we always trying to get the next tear jerker, heart warming moment out there?
ReplyDeleteI attempt to be funny in my posts - often laughing at the little things that made me smile through the day. I have no desire to wring tears from people who read what I write - unless it's tears of laughter.
I try to be funny and lighthearted too.
DeleteWhat really irks me is when the "news" is all, "How do you feel, victim of terrible violence?" And then some clip of some poor soul who's just lost everything goes viral and everyone's focusing on that as opposed to talking about how cut down on violence. Like collectively gaping at sadness somehow addresses the larger issue.
I think pre-Internet people were busy reading magazines such as Cosmo, that tout the 5 Best Ways to Pleasure Your Man! And other crap like that.
ReplyDeleteAnd yeah, a heartfelt post is one thing, but a full-on tear jerker is another. There's a fine line and lately a lot of posts I've been reading are on the wrong side.
Sorry for the rant.
I love me some heart felt posts especially when it's a personal story where the writer is exploring some really strong, life changing feelings. But I get irked when it gets all straw man like, "I am going to write about thing X and base my opinion on this one thing I heard happen to this one guy once. And if you disagree with me I'm going to be like, "Wow. Are you pro-dead puppies too?! You heartless bastard. That guy was crying on YouTube and you disagreeing with me means want that guy to be sad!" It irks me even more when actual news blogs are like "guy who lost home is sad" and that's what goes viral as opposed to an article about why and how people are losing their homes.
DeleteYes. The why's are always good to have with the what's.
DeleteI'm sick as a dog, with about two live brain cells kicking around right now, but this had me laughing (ok, laughing is misleading. I'd laugh and dissolve into a coughing fit.), so hard my husband got curious and came to read over my shoulder. You even had him chuckling.
ReplyDeleteYou summed up so many of my thoughts lately in regards to all of this. I have found myself veering away from ppl or organizations I've followed for awhile, because I've gotten tired of reading lists of "Twenty things you should be doing if you're in your 20's", "The 7 friends you have after you have kids". etc etc...I don't know what the obsession is with those things. I was so upset the other day when I picked up a paper and 4 of the main articles were about celebrities, their career ups and downs, their lost or gained baby weight and a whole bunch of other useless stuff. The celebrity articles had full 2 page spreads, massive color photographs, and yet the actual news, something that will affect the majority of the public's daily lives, got one quarter of a column on a part of one page. This was an actual newspaper and not supposedly a gossip rag. It really got to me. When did people become so disinterested in stuff that's actually going to affect their livelihoods; to the point news agencies don't feel like they have to report actual stuff anymore? So disappointing.
I'm so with you. It really is disappointing. The overall low-brow nature of news makes me wonder about the whole "which came first, the chicken or the egg" thing. Is the news schmaltzy and sensationalistic because otherwise people wouldn't read it? Or do people read dumb-downed news because that's all they're offered? It's a head scratcher. A really, really depressing head-scratcher.
DeleteHonestly, as much as I love to be able to google any fact immediately, I think our attention span and creativity are suffering big time. As an adult I have a hard time disciplining myself to focus on important tasks -- rather than hopping online to email someone and be sucked in by some headline. I can't help but think this can't be good for the younger adults much less teens and preteens. Brains need to rest. I can take my 11 year old's phone away at night -- but my 19 yo away at college? Not so much.
ReplyDeleteI agree. We're training ourselves to have the attention span on gnats and that's got to have some unpleasant side effects.
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