ON BLOGS IN THE SOCIAL MEDIA AGE

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V21 2018 INDEX E-SYLUM ARCHIVE

The E-Sylum: Volume 21, Number 49, December 9, 2018, Article 9

The E-Sylum was a blog before the word or tools were invented. Facebook, Twitter and Instagram are great, but for the creation of high-quality content, the slower-paced human-edited blog still has a place.

Cal Newport is a computer science professor who writes about the intersection of technology and society. He's particularly focused on the impact of new technologies on people's ability to perform productive work and lead satisfying lives. I've been a fan for a while and really admire his work. His December 7, 2018 blog post examines what makes the now seemingly old-fashioned blog still relevant in today's faster paced social media world. -Editor

Earlier this week, Glenn Reynolds, known online as Instapundit, published an op-ed in USA Today about why he recently quit Twitter. He didn’t hold back, writing:

“[I]f you set out to design a platform that would poison America’s discourse and its politics, you’d be hard pressed to come up with something more destructive than Twitter.”

What really caught my attention, however, is when Reynolds begins discussing the advantages of the blogosphere as compared to walled garden social media platforms.

He notes that blogs represent a loosely coupled system, where the friction of posting and linking slows down the discourse enough to preserve context and prevent the runaway reactions that are possible in tightly coupled systems like Twitter, where a tweet can be retweeted, then retweeted again and again, forming an exponential explosion of pure reactive id.

As a longtime blogger myself, Reynolds’s op-ed got me thinking about other differences between social media and the blogosphere…

Attention Markets
One of these differences that has consistently caught my attention is the way in which social media reconstructed the market for online attention.

Blogs implement a capitalist attention market. If you want attention for your blog you have to earn it through a combination of quality, in the sense that you’re producing something valuable for your readers, and trust, in the sense that you’ve produced enough good stuff over time to establish a good reputation with the fellow bloggers whose links will help grow your audience.

Succeeding in this market, like succeeding with a business venture, can be ruthlessly difficult. There’s lots of competition for the attention you’re trying to attract, and even skilled writers often find that something about their voice, or the timing of their topic, fails to catch on.

Social media, by contrast, implements a collectivist attention market, where the benefits of receiving attention are redistributed more uniformly to all users.

A key dynamic driving the popularity of platforms like Facebook and Instagram, for example, is the following notion: if you like me, I’ll like you. As I noted in Deep Work, if you took the contents of the standard Facebook or Instagram feed and published it on a blog, it wouldn’t attract any readers, or comments, or links.

See Cal's complete post online for of his thoughts on the key dynamics of social media platforms and the tradeoffs with blogs. Sign up for his if you like - he's a deep thinker with a lot to say. Here's his summary. -Editor

Capitalist attention markets, on the other hand, offer one decidedly important advantage: better content. To state the obvious, there are plenty of bad blogs. But in the blogosphere it’s easy to filter these from the more serious contributors that, through the traits of quality and trust cited above, distinguish themselves as worthwhile.

As any serious blog consumer can attest, a carefully curated blog feed, covering niches that matter to your life, can provide substantially more value than the collectivist ping-ponging of likes and memes that make up so much of social media interaction.

In other words, Glenn Reynolds was on to something when he stepped away from Twitter and began to reminisce about what once made blogging seem so exciting.

Deleting your accounts as a user is extreme and not necessary as long as you're an aware consumer; but for good curated content be sure to seek out, consume and support quality blogs. For an example of how the blogs interact, see the exchange in a later article in this issue with new subscriber JP Koning, an economics blogger. -Editor

To read the complete article, see:
On Blogs in the Social Media Age (http://calnewport.com/blog/2018/12/07/on-blogs-in-the-social-media-age/)