A quick note on the transcripts for the already-released episodes. These have all been completed, and are attached to the respective episodes, available at the https://www.implausipod.com/ website. (Or on the buzzsprout links; those should still work too.)
I’ll be posting those over the next few days here, in order to ensure there’s a consistent repository of the material. Once that’s up to date, we’ll continue with the ongoing podcasts as they come out. (The workflow behind the scenes here for publication and transcription has mostly been sorted out).
A few of the first ‘batch’ of episodes deal with material that was produced by studios that are currently struck by the WGA and SAG-AFTRA guilds. We’ll hold off on posting that material so as not to inadvertently promote it, but will publish that information with the resolution of the current work action.
Finally, regular (ie non-Implausipod, non-Youtube) content should be resuming here shortly as well. Some of what would have been posts for the month of August just ended up getting rolled into the podcast episodes. We’ll continue to break those apart going further.
This episode covers a number of short segments, starting with some thoughts on the WGA/SAG-AFTRA strike actions and what that means for Media Consumption (and commentary), as well as a dive into feedback and mail that the channel has received over the last year, addressing questions from the most important part of this show: the listeners.
Welcome to the ImplausiPod, a podcast about the intersection of art, technology, and popular culture. I’m your host, Dr. Implausible, and in this episode number 11, we’re gonna dive into the mailbag a little bit and discuss some questions that have been asked since we’ve launched the channel, including media, and how to discuss it in 2023, and future directions that we might be taking here on the channel.
So are you sitting comfortably? Then let’s begin. See, I wanted to start with a riddle here. If movie A makes a billion dollars in the first three weeks of its release, and movie B makes half a billion dollars, then how much longer are the studios, which take 50% plus of the profits of those films able to at the strike?
It’s an interesting question, and I kind of want to know because outside of a full media boycott, I don’t see the strike ending anytime soon since SAG-AFTRA joined the Writer’s Guild in the middle of July 2023. There’s been a lot of work stopped, obviously, but a lot of that’s for future production, stuff that won’t be showing up for months or even years.
And we as humans can be collectively very bad at delayed gratification and also linking the consequences of current actions to future outcomes. I mean, not all of us and not all the time, but something-something climate change too, right? So we can see how this could drag on for quite some time. And while it’s dragging on, it’s going to impact a lot of individuals that are outside of the guilds that are striking; workers whose income is also tied to their labor in and around Hollywood, and currently have few options for meaningful employment. So in order to have solidarity with all those workers, haven’t been consuming any media.
As we hinted at in episode eight, in the era of the audience commodity. If every post is promotion, whether it’s on YouTube or in a blog, or here on a podcast, then talking about current or recent shows is still gonna drive business and engagement for those struck studio. So I’m not gonna talk about it now. The WGA and SAG after leadership is not calling for a general media boycott, but I can still not watch things if I don’t want to or don’t want to talk about ’em. So I’m not gonna, I mean, I kind of do, as we had discussed both Westworld and The Peripheral on the show before, and there’s a couple other series that we have that we’re taking a look at that we’d like to publish on once the strike is over. But that in any current or future media commentary is going to have to wait. And by current, I mean like the last five years or so. ’cause that’s directly involved with the struck studios.
So what does that mean for the podcast? Well, for the coverage of shows like the Peripheral in Westworld, they’ll just have to wait. I’ll record some episodes based on my notes, but as you’ll notice from listening to those episodes, we weren’t really doing a recap – that isn’t the goal of this show. There’s a challenge with doing the kind of analysis we’re doing and linking the themes of the episodes to the broader literature that’s out there on a live week-to-week basis. Now, I think the process has improved here, and we might be able to do that at some point in the future, but I’m not interested in doing recaps. There’s hundreds of places you can get those, and I think that is not the strength of what we can bring to the table here. I think for The Peripheral we’ll be able to get those up and get those out before a season two happens, ’cause by then the strike will obviously be over.
And for Westworld, I’ll admit, when it was announced that it would be canceled and there would be no season five, a lot of the air went out of my enthusiasm balloon for getting those episodes done. I was feeling pretty deflated, to be honest, and it took a little while to get back going again.
But the current events that have been happening with the advance of large language models and generative AI and their focus in the general public in the discussion. Right now, the linkages between Westworld and that are so strong that I do wanna still cover it and come back to it. I was looking at some of my old episode transcripts for stuff that had been recorded but not released yet, especially for episode four, which I had titled “Creativity”, and seeing the discussions around creativity and the AI, the generative tools we have and whether they’re creative or not, um, I, I think we need to talk about it. So we will focus on those themes of the episode, and we’ll come back to the episodes proper at some point in. Observant listeners will notice that I did say “current” media, so that’s one of our mailbag questions.
So why don’t we shift to that right now?
(Parents don’t let your kids have unsupervised access to ProTools.)
Question one: what exactly am I doing here? Is it media archeology or contemporary anthropology? And that’s a fantastic question, and the answer is yes. And if media archeology is understanding new and emerging media through close examination of the past (to use a Wikipedia definition), then that’s absolutely part of what I do, and that’s kind of where my practice is. It’s a lot of what I did in academia in grad school through my dissertation work that was done there. I was doing field work studying innovators and creators of new technologies and how they’re engaging with the media in their environment.
If contemporary anthropology is the study of the modern human condition and how we deal with modernity, then “also true”. So yes, it’s both. It’s the difference between the study of the artifacts or the study of the actors. And if we’re looking at it from like an ontological lens or a flat ontology, then we gotta be studying both. Then we’ll talk a little bit about that in some of the episodes that are more academically focused going forward.
So does that answer the question about what the channel is about? Well, maybe. I have an idea of where the channel is going in my mind’s eye, but it’s gonna take a little while to put together the pieces and all the various streams of it. So bear with me. It’s gonna be a fun ride. And I think that leads into :
question two, which is what path are you on? Where is this going?
Well, there’s a number of different paths that we have, a number of different streams. Some of them we’ve touched on like Appendix W and cyberspace, and the media review and the communications and theory discussions that we’ve been having in the last few episodes. Now, some of these overlap, some in more obvious ways than others, but they all converge in an interesting point, and my job is to bring those together for you.
Some of those paths, Appendix W and “Our Dystopian Present” are gonna be ongoing. The Lost Basics of Communication Theory will be coming up time and again as we need it. And other paths, the roads not yet taken, including about 95% of the stuff that I’ve written about academically, which includes innovation, makerspaces, game studies, and cultural archetypes will all be added into the mix where appropriate, and this will become apparent in the upcoming weeks and months.
So the follow up question to that, that I received, question two B, if you will (No pun intended): then why not organize it in a different manner? Why not do seasons or focus it on a specific niche? And the answer to be somewhat oblique is that the medium is the message; that history doesn’t quite work that way – it’s a little bit messy. It isn’t necessarily serial happening in distinct chunks, and it isn’t necessarily massively parallelizable either. (Sorry, that was a bit of a struggle to say, but I think we got it out.) The point being is that I can’t do six different podcasts on different things each with their own specific focus as just my time and energy isn’t finite, as is finite and it doesn’t really work that well.
So we’re gonna bounce around a bit. So if you’re interested in a wide variety of topics, then please stick around. I’ll do my best to untangle the threads and show how they line up on the blog, or on the YouTube channel and we’ll do periodic updates about where we’re at and what upcoming episodes on various streams are, but it’s just, it’s gonna be the way it is, and that’s just the way that I work.
All I can hope is that you find it interesting and informative and perhaps even entertaining. So the next question I got:
Question three is why am I doing this? What are my sources of inspiration? (There’s another question there, but I’ll leave that unanswered or unaddressed for now.) But I think sources of inspiration are really important. It can be a motivating factor, but it can speak to our underlying reasoning, ideology, and sometimes the goals that we have working on something and not just as a particular project or a particular person, but culturally and societally as well, which is why a lot of what I look at, whether it’s media archeology or cultural anthropology or communication studies, whatever you want to call it, is focussed on those sources of inspiration.
Because it’s a way to chart where we might be going, especially when we’re headed off into something unknown. And the future is always a bit of an unknown, right? It’s uncharted territory. There are “strange new worlds” out there. So in order to figure out where we’re going into the future, the one thing that we can do, the one thing that separates us from the animals and from the AIs is our imagination, and to use that to the fullest extent that we can.
So I think my sources of inspiration are fairly obvious. I wear them on my sleeve. I’m a Gen Xer. I grew up in the seventies and eighties with, you know, two and a half channels of TV and a library card and an active imagination. So the things I found inspiring in my youth, whether it was history or gaming, or sci-fi or, music or comic books, are still things that continue to inspire me in some way as I’ve grown older.
The challenge when looking back at those sources of inspiration is to not fall back into nostalgia, but to use that as a springboard for where you’re going future. And that’s really what we’re all about here. However, in the interest of fun, I thought I’d just recap what some of those sources of inspiration were.
In the seventies, it included pretty much any sci-fi TV show I could get my hands on, and again, this was on a couple channels of broadcast tv, so it wasn’t necessarily everything. It included some Star Trek, the original series, as well as some more obscure shows like Space 1999, the StarLost, and Six Million Dollar Man.
Granted, the last one wasn’t obscure, but I think collectively they all managed to freak out my impressionable little mind. I also recall reading Novelizations of the Star Trek series by James Blish and other authors, as well as whatever I could get my hands on in the local school library as I got a little older and started reading on my own and included a lot more comic books, including a treasure trove of Mad magazines that were donated and, uh, anything else that had some visual appeal. A lot of Asterisk books too. And the occasional Marvel comic too, though those are few and far between: often, just something to keep me occupied on a road trip.
Into the Eighties, I started playing Dungeons and Dragons, so I started reading a little bit of fantasy. But I wanna be clear here: a lot of the fantasy from the seventies and eighties was _not good_, so maybe we need to go into that here one time. But in any event, I still consumed a lot of sci-fi and the comics started getting better in the mid eighties. I was reading a lot more of it and buying stuff with my own money. I. So able to do that on a more consistent basis, even though there wasn’t that much in the way of sci-fi comic books, things like Micronauts and ROM, but you know, Heavy Metal and Epic Illustrated was out there as well. The saving grace was that there was some amazing science fiction being written. Not all of it cyberpunk, but uh, some great stuff there too.
Then into the nineties, we finally started hitting our stride with some decent video games and comic books, some amazing music, and the introduction of the “New Weird” on television, including shows like the XFiles. And gaming. Gaming had exploded: between the unholy constellation of doom and quake and magic. The gathering early MMOs like UL and EverQuest and Warhammer, gaming, both analog and digital, made up a significant portion of my entertainment, but always with a community, a friend group, or online with other individuals. It was never a solitary endeavor.
In 2005, I entered academia grad school, and the challenge now is to bring all these disparate threats together. And that leads into:
Question four. If I am doing that, if I’m bringing this all together, why am I making it so hard to find? Why is this podcast not available on iTunes or Spotify or Google Podcasts?
And for part of the answer, you can just check out episode eight. If we have issues with the business practices of some of those players, it would seem hypocritical to engage with for distribution of the product, and that’s especially true when. And how they have commodified music and how they basically pay out to the artists. When it comes to something like iTunes, the issue there is the Walled Garden of Apple’s podcasts to basically make me as a non-Apple user excluded from using it. And while the increased reach would be good, there’s still issues there, right? So maybe that one will get resolved. The Spotify one, most likely will not.
You’ll still be able to find the podcast on the carriers that do carry it, as well as through the Buzzsprout link or on the website once we get that linked to the Buzzsprout page. In addition, we’re trying to put as much of the information, including the transcripts available on the blog as well.
I’m a firm believer in the POSSE principle when it comes to content creators, and that’s, uh, short for “post on own site, syndicate everywhere”. Which is basically ensuring that the content creator has ownership of that material and it doesn’t get locked behind a walled garden or something that the creator doesn’t have access to. So to that end, we’ll keep doing it on a website that I’m have direct access to, even though it might be hosted somewhere. So the smaller excerpts of the content should be available on multiple sites. We’re not gonna be using a newsletter service like Substack because again, there’s some issues there. And Medium as a paywall is not necessarily great for content either, and I’m kind of opposed to it.
But the forums that we do have some control over, we’ll keep on putting out content on. Now, not every podcast is gonna end up being a YouTube video, but I would like to move some of the content there as well. We’ll keep on working on that. That’s a new skill to learn and we’ll, and I’m looking to get that up on a more regular basis as the audio production elements are starting to get more regular and comfortable.
And finally, contact, you can reach the show at Dr Implausible at implausi dot blog. The link should be in the show notes. We’d be happy to hear from you. If you have any questions or suggestions for topic ideas or something you’d like to hear about, by all means let us know. Reach out. Otherwise, if you see Dr. Implausible on a social media site, it’s probably me though. We’re not on any of the Facebook owned sites. And that brings us to our final question:
Question five, what’s next? And that is a fantastic question. As we’ve stated, we won’t be focusing on any of the current media during the W G A and SAG after job actions, but we may look at some of the older media, including Appendix W and the cyberpunk literature that have informed our dystopian present, as well as any number of the implausibilities, which have jumped from the pages of science fiction to be manifest in our reality.
But I know the three most recent episodes of each spun off a whole host of follow-up topics, so the snowball sample grows, but sometimes I just gotta follow my bliss and see what strikes my fancy. So I’ll dig into the big bag of topics and I’ll see you in a week or so. Until next time, have fun.
(Editor’s note: this is part 2 of the previous post on the audience commodity, which was drawn from a discussion thread on Mastodon. Much of that made it into the transcript of both the Youtube episode and the Podcast (both embedded below). This post will include the full transcript of the audio (and video), so there may be some duplication with the previous post, in the interest of completeness.
If this format of posting works out, then they should be better aligned in the future. Still working on the basics of the POSSE system. Better life through Additive Manufacturing though; iterate and improve. In the meantime, enjoy!)
Getting started with a brief rundown of an old article that details the rise of the Audience Commodity: Smythe (1977) “Communications: Blindspot of Western Marxism”, we use that to explain the recent events of the internet of the last month or so, including the Twitter-pocalypse, the Reddit Meltdown, the rise of ChatGPT, and some general media theory too.
Transcript
Welcome to the Implausipod, a podcast about the intersection of art, technology, and popular culture. I’m your host, Dr. Implausible, and as we return to a regular recording schedule, I’m going to introduce you to the audience commodity, an old idea from economics tat goes a long way to explain some of the current events we’re seeing in the social media spaces.
What exactly is the audience commodity? Well, that’s a fantastic question. With the recent introduction of Threads a little bit ahead of schedule because of the Twitter apocalypse, I thought it’d be worth going into the background of it because it’s really got some relevance for the current events that are happening today. Because it was published in a relatively obscure Canadian academic journal back in the seventies, it hasn’t seen that much adoption by mainstream economics, but we’ll get into it. If that the kind of thing is your bag, then by all means, stick around.
In short, the audience commodity is all about how you and I and all of us really are turned into products by the cultural industries, whether it’s media or advertisements or websites.
I’ll put the citation on the screen (see below) for those that are interested. The author, Dallas W. Smythe was writing it as a bit of a challenge to traditional Marxist economic thinking at the time in the seventies. He said they were getting it wrong when it came to the cultural industries and the impact that they actually had, what they were doing.
Now Dallas Smythe was a former economist at the FCC, and he was blacklisted due to McCarthyism. I mean, Hoover had a file on him, for reasons, and he is drawing heavily on a book called Monopoly Capital that was put out in the sixties by Baran and Sweezy. We should probably do a whole episode on that at some point in time, but we’ll see how this goes.
Now for Smythe, the main argument speaks directly to Facebook or Meta’s business model. This goes the same for like Google and everything else too. And what is their business model? Websites? No. Apps? No. Advertising? Close, but still not the whole picture. Their business model is the production of the audience commodity. Advertisers buy audiences and those audiences. Time is their labor. And how did Smythe come to this conclusion? Well, he’s asking a simple economic question. Basically, what economic functions for capital do mass communication systems serve? And in this case, both Google and Facebook, Meta and Alphabet, whatever, both fit in the same “mass” of mass communication. They have a huge reach. So in order to figure out the economic function, you need to figure out what the commodity those companies produce actually is. And you might think you know what this is, it’s the whole: “if you’re not paying, you’re the product” line. And this is a part of that, only in a lot more detail.
A part of Smythe’s argument is that traditional economics was getting it wrong. If you asked “what does the media produce?”, you might answer something like content or information or messages or entertainment or shows or something like that. And that’s understandable. It’s what it looks like they do. So you’d be forgiven if you thought That’s how it worked, because that was the traditional orthodox idealist point of view. It was held by everybody from Marx to Galbraith to Veblen to McCluhan. There’s a lot of academic writing on this idea and non-academic writing too. Everybody thought that’s what was going on. Smythe’s argument is that it misses the point. If the trad orthodox view of economics is getting it wrong, what do the media companies actually produce?
What is the commodity form of advertising sponsored communications under “late capitalism”, or “monopoly capitalism” as Baran and Sweezy would say? The answer is audiences and readerships, or just the audience. The audience commodity here, the labor power of the workers, is resold to the advertisers. This is normally in the parlance of the time called the Consciousness industry.
So remember this: TV stations and walled platforms on the internet are factories that produce audiences for advertisers. That’s what’s coming outta the end of the factory. So that’s a lot of the overarching stuff. Let’s get into some of the specifics. Smythe has eight main points, and we’re gonna cover these quickly and then move on to how it connects to the social media platforms: Threads, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, AOL, Reddit, whatever.
So Smythe’s questions are in order. Here we go. Question one, what did the advertisers buy with their money? Answer: the services of audiences in predictable numbers. It’s a service economy and we are the ones providing the service. We’re also ones being a served up, which is, I guess, ironic. The commodity is the collective.
Question two, how do advertisers know what they’re getting what they’re paid for? Well, various rating agencies back in the day, like the Nielsen’s and whatever, and the analysis, which has largely moved in-house for streaming and internet platforms. There’s a whole host of stuff that falls under the umbrella of market research.
Question three, what institutions produce the commodity that advertisers want? Well, we’ve hinted at this, but it’s principally and traditionally the owners of TV and radio stations and newspapers and magazine publishers, and we can add most web platforms to this nowadays ’cause they all work on the same model. Of course there’s a host of secondary producers in industries that provide content for the principal market, obviously, but this is the main outlet.
Question four, and what is the nature of that content in economic terms under monopoly capitalism or late capitalism? Well, it’s an inducement. It’s the free lunch that attracts the audience to the saloon. It gets ’em in the door and encourages them to stay. Now this speaks nothing to the cost, the quality, the format. In fact, the cheaper that this can be procured, the better. A free lunch isn’t free, obviously, but someone is providing the bread and the meat, and if the users bring their own, it’s the case of social media then even better. And what are those users doing?
Question five, what is the nature of the servers performed for the advertiser by members of the purchased audiences? Well, the audience commodity is in economic terms, a non-durable producer’s good bought and used in the marketing of the advertiser’s product. The work that the audience is doing is to learn to buy and consume various brands of products and spend their income accordingly.
If they can develop brand loyalty while doing this, then that’s fantastic. Now, there’s a whole lot of work that goes into that learning. It’s like the reproduction of ideology and Ian terms and a whole lot more going on. But we will again, delve into this and either later in this episode or in future episodes as we keep this going on, but for Smythe, question five is all about the management of demand.
And question six is the big one: How does the management of that demand relate to the notion of free or leisure time under the labor theory of value? And for Smythe the answer is: the goal under monopoly capitalism is for all non-sleeping time to be work time for most of the population. I’ll let you do the math on the missing percentage yourself, but basically free time and leisure time are all turned into work time and in the 21st century, even work time can do double duty as branded elements take place within work.
Now Smythe goes on for about four pages in answering number six. It’s this key point and there’s a lot to unpack there. So again, we’re gonna circle back, but in the interest of brevity:
question seven, does the audience commodity perform an essential economic function? Well, the answer there is “it’s complicated”. As noted above, Orthodox theories didn’t really go into this, and mass media and brands were before Marx’s time, so he didn’t have much to say about them either. Smythe turns to Marx’s Grundrisse to tease out an answer where production produces consumption, which is, I think page 91 and 92. There’s a whole paragraph on it. So yes, there’s an essential economic function that’s taking place, but again, it isn’t what we think it is.
Question eight addresses some of that, what we touched on earlier, which is why have the traditional Marxist economists been indifferent to the role of advertising? They were focused on content instead. Again, this is in the seventies, and it was obviously shiny things. The content was front and center, so people thought that that was what was going on. Remember, this is 1977, a full decade before authors Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky were publishing “Manufacturing Consent”, even though this was contemporaneous with some of Edward Herman’s earlier writings.
Now Smythe had actually published two versions of this paper. The peer reviewed article from 1977 that we’ve been using, and again, it came up as a chapter in 1981’s Dependency Road. These are again, foundational, critical for understanding what’s going on, but what does it mean for right now? Now as I’m recording this, on the evening of July 6th, 2023, Facebook has just launched Threads their Twitter competitor within the last 24 hours.
Earlier this week when I was writing it, I thought the main argument would be the Reddit implosion and Twitter’s issues, which were leading to a mass exodus of users looking for an alternative and heading towards the Fediverse, including Mastodon, which is an ActivityPub protocol tool that’s very similar in some ways to early Twitter.
Earlier, back in June or a thousand years ago, it seems, there was a lot of discussion on the Fediverse because there was news that Facebook was using the ActivityPub protocol for their Threads tools. All of this has gone by in like, you know, Lightspeed, where weeks, sometimes decades happen, right.
Anyways, when I started drafting this in response to those particular events and the general bad idea of engaging with Facebook on anything, (we’ll get into what Triple E means, probably in a future episode too), the online universe was vastly different. The Reddit moderator strike wasn’t even a thing that had happened yet, and even though there was problems at Twitter, it didn’t seem to be the mass expulsion that happened on July 1st.
So let’s tie it back to our main characters. Both Meta and Alphabet, Facebook and Google are well entrenched as advertising companies at this point. There’s no surprises going on there, and it’s also, it’s reasonably well known what’s going on when the auction service is used, being detailed in this explainer from the markup (see below). I’ll put the link up in the show notes here. I.
They also have a wonderful explainer article going into the breakdown of market segmentation that’s done by, in this case, Microsoft and their Xandr platform, but actually takes place behind the scenes by all of these major social media companies. And these major companies know exactly what they’re doing, or they get into troubles when they lose sight of exactly what their core business model is serving up an audience to their customers, the advertisers.
Often they get themselves distracted by thinking themselves of content providers, and really that’s not the case. The most famous example of this would be like AOL. When they bought Time Warner and moved into providing content on a more regular basis, they kind of lost track of what they’re doing. Their subsequent failure and being overtaken by like everything else on the internet really speaks to them losing sight of that fact and investing in areas where they shouldn’t have. If AOL had focused on either infrastructure or their core business model, the audience, they would’ve weathered the dot-com bust significantly better than all the other companies out there.
But they got distracted by the shininess of Hollywood and thought that they were in the content business. So too, for Reddit and Twitter is some of the problems that they’ve had or because of moves that they’ve made to protect that content. But they can be forgiven slightly because there’s something that changed, something that Smythe didn’t foresee back in 1977.
And that’s AI. See AI flipped the equation around a little bit and turned all that user generated content stuff provided by the labor of the audience for free into something useful data for their large language models. You can understand why Elon Musk and Steve Huffman are a little bit miffed. Imagine you had a lumber mill and someone came in and took a look around and said, “Hey, you’re doing anything with all that sawdust?” and he said “No, take it”. And then they took that useless byproduct and added a little bit of glue to it, and all of a sudden turned it into, I don’t know, designer Swedish furniture and made a mint. You’d be like, what’s going on here? And try and stop them from taking the sawdust and figure out how to use it yourself, because all of a sudden, that stuff’s gold.
Jerry Gold. Because they didn’t know it or didn’t understand the process, both read it and Twitter in the process of lighting a fire in their factory and burning it to the ground. And meanwhile, the users, the audience commodity that was driving their business are all exiting stage left. And that pretty much gets us up to now.
Now we haven’t even gone into some of the other events like TikTok and the proposed ban that seems to be continually ongoing or some of the other social media networks or television, broadcast tv, what’s happening over there. And we also haven’t really gone into Threads and their use of the ActivityPub protocol that we kind of hinted at it.
But we need to get into something else related to that. And that’s a philosophy called Triple E or Embrace Extend Extinguish, but I think that’s gonna be a whole other video. Things are moving pretty fast and I’m just one guy. So for now, we’ll just wrap this up and try and catch the next one. I’m Dr. Implausible. The audio will be available over on the Implausible Pod and the text of the show should be available on the blog or in the comments sometime soon. The whole show is produced under the Creative Comments Attribution Sharealike 4.0 International Public License. We’ll try and make this one look prettier as I figure out how this whole video thing works.
But in the meantime, the world’s moving pretty fast, so we’ll see what it looks like in a week or so. I’m Dr. Implausible. Have fun.
Other links and references:
Baran, P. A., & Sweezy, P. M. (1966). Monopoly Capital. Monthly Review Press.
Smythe, D. W. (1981). Dependency Road: Communications, Capitalism, Consciousness, and Canada (Revised ed. edition). Praeger.
Eastwood, J., Hongsdusit, G., & Keegan, J. (2023, June 23). How Your Attention Is Auctioned Off to Advertisers – The Markup. https://themarkup.org/privacy/2023/06/23/how-your-attention-is-auctioned-off-to-advertisers
Keegan, J., & Eastwood, J. (2023, June 8). From “Heavy Purchasers” of Pregnancy Tests to the Depression-Prone: We Found 650,000 Ways Advertisers Label You – The Markup. https://themarkup.org/privacy/2023/06/08/from-heavy-purchasers-of-pregnancy-tests-to-the-depression-prone-we-found-650000-ways-advertisers-label-you
When it comes to content, thinking in terms of building up from multiple small things.
Tweets/Toots/SMS -> Blog Post -> "Essay" - "Book" Vines/Shorts/TikToks/Reels -> YouTube -> Video Essay -> "Documentary Film" Riff -> Chorus -> Song -> Album
And how the skills developed in building the small things can accumulate into something much bigger, over time, or lead to building something more as well.
This can work in other realms too:
Take a step, jog around the block, run a mile, run a marathon, hike up a mountain.
Build a box, build a chair, build a garage, build a house.
Sometimes you’ll aim for the big thing at the outset. Often this can be due to need: I need a house, f’rex, preferably sooner rather than later, but more likely you’ll be making smaller steps along the way. Not everyone writes a full-length novel or films a feature length documentary on their first time out.*
There’s usually some baby steps involved.
There is a danger though, in following the reductive path.
Because at the end of the day, 1000 tweets*** is not the same as a novel, nor is 1000 15-second Tiktoks a feature film. The aggregate is not the same as the monolith, even though they are the same in “weight”. Sandstone is not granite, at the end of the day. And yet…
…and yet, the aggregate can be something more, something unique, something different. Witness the stitched fan film recreations of Raiders of the Lost Ark (Strompolos, 1989[2015]), The Princess Bride (Reitman, 2020), or the various Star Wars fan films. Each of these recreations brings something new to the material, an energy, an earnestness, an authenticity.
And, regardless of the outcome, it is in the making, the building – piece by piece – of the work, layer by layer through Additive Manufacturing, that the skills develop, and the project takes shape.
This “manufacturing” then, is really “content creation” writ large. The ‘E’ in the EFP. Short for Extruded (Mass Content) Production**. The material that drives the platforms that are Architects of our Attention. The production has been outsourced, or offloaded at least, to the millions of us engaged in making it. Each tiny element can be done quickly, or it can take as much time, energy, and resources that one wishes to devote to it.
The trick, I suspect, is knowing when each of those pieces are done. For now, this one will do…
Footnotes & References
*: and those that do often have some significant help, assistance, or a leg up. Don’t let that stop you from being amazing though.
**: EFP, Extruded Fantasy Product. A catch-all for those Fantasy series that seem to proliferate across bookshelves where the authors magically produce another doorstop on a regular, perhaps annual, basis. (see also: Creativity, and Sanderson, Brandon.
***: or Toots, or Xs, or whatever the microblog equivalent is at the time you read this. July 2023 is/was weird.
In relation to the previous post, it may well just be that I’m in an instance that is for lack of a better description, “locally boring“.*
This can obviously deadly to the growth of a social network, and it may be something fixable or perhaps endemic to the other ABNs** extant on the Internet of today.
Reflecting local or “desired” content back at the user can be useful for retention, as the user can see a lot of stuff they like, but it may not allow for much in the way of outside influence. It leads to filter bubbles and echo chambers and directional pipelines to more of the same.
And if it is the first experience for the user, if their first taste of the network (or universe, multiverse, or Fediverse) is “locally boring”, then they might not be inclined to stay.
There are steps that can be taken to ensure that a given (zone/verse/fed/clique/instance/field/dimension/whatever) doesn’t become locally boring, or at the very least stay that way for long. I think perhaps that TikTok managed to do that better than most, hence the popularity and stickyness. (The dual drivers of the feed and the semi-regular replacement of the hamsters powering the database helped too.) There are also some user-driven processes, practices, and protocols that can help as well.
In the interest of being helpful, here’s a quick folksonomy of tips, some useful heuristics that served well at least once:
follow lots
follow back
cultivate an empathetic view
like liking things
boost community participants
block toxicity
don’t dogpile
don’t boost negativity
mute content thieves and LVAs
remove the “I”‘s and give credit where due (- no profanity)*** (- no political commentary)***
This might not be everything, but it feels like a good start.
These are the practices I intentionally engaged in as a TikTok user. And that intentionality was key: I treated TikTok as a new forum and decided to change my practices around interaction to see if it led to a different experience.
(Pace the old Einstein quote about insanity being doing the same thing and expecting different results.)
So I didn’t have a full Costanza “opposite day” moment, but I did go into it with a change to my practices, and the results were impressive. So with a datapoint of one, based on the half-remembered folksonomy as listed above, I’ll treat Mastodon similarly.
Now, the affordances of the Mastodon are very different than those proffered by TikTok, and more in line with what Twitter had to offer on launch, so interacting with it may be difficult. There may be more “pull” or “gravity” or “inertia” or “cultural form” something acting as a drag on positive behaviour there.
We’ll see how it goes.
Stay tuned, and have fun.
* with luck, present location excluded.
**: Have I discussed this yet on live, or is still in drafts?
***: The rationale for both of these probably requires further explanation. Bookmarked for later, perhaps.