How Attention Was Destroyed By The Internet
Everyone talks about how the Internet is mucking up people’s ability to focus and pay attention. To whit:
- Attention: The Internet is Killing Yours
- The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains
- How the web affects your brain
I actually recently figured out the problem: Bad writing. I have blogged at length about the collapse of journalism in the face of new media aggregation.
However, I have realized that even scanning the RSS feed headlines of Alley Insider is no longer enough to keep me from giving them untoward attention. Essentially, virtually all of these organizations pay writers by the page view. The result is that writers are incented to reblog things left and right (Note the rreblogging of the Verge’s commentary on this unfunny ad that they prop up anyway) – in particular, reblogging their own stories with new headlines in a transparent attempt to drive additional traffic. This is something we are seeing more and more on alley insider and it does nothing but diminish the value proposition of the site.
Here are two clusters of alley insider articles. These articles came out, in most instances, within hours of each other:
- For a clear picture of Facebooks business, look at these charts
- Here’s the real problem for Facebooks stock valuation
- Well, Now We Know What Facebook’s Worth—And It’s Not $100 Billion
- Facebook’s Ad Business Isn’t Growing Fast Enough To Justify A $100 Billion Valuation
Or how about this:
- FINALLY: Facebook Will Put Ads On Your Mobile Phone
- Facebook Wants Mobile Ads To Go Live Before Stock Starts Trading
- Facebooks Biggest Weakness: Mobile
Why can’t we just have one well-written article with a link? Instead, these are all a paragraph, with two paragraphs of interlinking to the other articles driving them. This is woeful.
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