Precisely the problem. That’s great if I am a hunter, but I am not, so it needs to be repurposed.
That would be an emotional problem. The more pragmatic angle is that most things and relationships in the world are simply not visible. Trying to communicate concepts which aren’t visible through visual means is neither very efficient nor effective. That’s why I use language.
I have not encountered any sound arguments for a “marketplace of attention” at all. Anyway, no. It is socially irresponsible and harmful to exploit a flaw in people instead of repairing it. There is no objective reason why it matters that people follow your articles versus somebody elses. The “competition” is for its own sake, rather than improving the content or the readers.
Good luck with that; the only way I know to repurpose that tissue is to blind yourself. And if you somehow manage that, what are you going to use to, you know, read with? You need the sophisticated shape-recognition wetware to recognise letters. By the way, did you know that we can tell the difference between red and green just so that we can tell ripe fruit from unripe? Nothing to do with hunting.
If you’ve got a problem with being an ape, you should have a word with the GM and see if they’ll let you re-enter the game as something that can read without a visual cortex. Whatever that might be. An ant colony, maybe? Though perhaps then you’d have a problem with an ant internet heading all articles with chemical cues.
As a general rule, I believe we only commit to the relatively high cognitive investment of slowing down, focusing and reading something after doing a whole lot of skimming and skipping over the options doing a sort of rapid-fire “Don’t care, don’t care, seen it, don’t care, hey what is that” triage.
This browsing is a useful method to navigate the boatload of information presented to us all the time, but it’s also based enough on instinct that it becomes vulnerable to a bunch of cognitive tricks that wouldn’t work as well if we were actually thinking deeply. Clickbaity headlines for sure, clever design and typography if you’re that sophisticated, but mainly just using pictures. As the newspaper image above demonstrates, the oldest trick is still the most effective: Stick a big fat color picture of a human face in there and it’s hard not to look at it. Just look at it!
Since our current Internet is ad-driven and obsessed with metrics, I think we’re stuck with those tricks no matter how shallow or lowest-common-denominator they may seem. As should be obvious by how popular stock photography remains even as everyone agrees it’s patently shit, even a bad image gives better (short-term, short-sighted) results than no image at all. We need a different focus away from the hard count of views and clicks and such as the ultimate goal if things are to improve.
That said, all that cynical picture use is not completely useless in my opinion. When scrolling down a list of subjects in RSS or facebook or whatever I can instantly skip over sports or someone’s baby instead of having to, heavens forbid, find myself reading about sports or someone’s baby before knowing it’s a waste of time. There are only so many hours in a life after all.
So I have the choices of being primarily visual, or blind? This sounds like a false dichotomy to me. I know from my own experience that a person does not need to be blind to solve problems of complex social relationships with language instead of pictures.
What about the paradox of wanting to read without a functional visual system? As I said, with H. sapiens you’re stuck with the visual system you’ve got; presently you can’t hack the wetware to keep the reading but convert the recognition of objects and visual representations of objects into something else. It would be simpler, I think, to block all images in your browser, and far less likely to cause you problems with real world navigation and recognising loved ones.
#These ads took metrics to the extreme. You won’t believe what happened next.
Just realized I forgot to mention the chumbox in the previous post. I think it’s best example of the viscerally repugnant mess that can result from the “don’t blame us, the metrics say this is what people respond to” mentality. Trypophobia warning.
Also, that big ol’ block of text I wrote was kind of old-media boring, no? Maybe you scrolled right past it. Let’s see if a shorter one with a clickbaity headline and unrelated big face gets better engagement. Idris Elba says thanks for stopping by.
