How to successfully fail in the attention economy
We're living whether the whole world knows it or not.
Follow me. Like me. Subscribe to me. Vote for me. Watch me. Listen to me. Talk to me. Pay me. Learn from me. Share me. Love me. Spare me. Look at me.
Look at me.
LOOK AT ME.
LOOK AT ME!!!!
Annoying … right?
Yet, as artists making art in 2024, we are required expected deemed complete idiots not to at least ATTEMPT to grab a fraction of the collective consumer’s eternally shrinking attention span every single day. And we do that by incessantly consistently showing up on machine-driven social media sites, creating “content,” curating our personalities into bite-size, easy-to-consume morsels for the public, knowing the spoils are more likely to be left to rot or stolen and remade into something tastier than they are to be gorged upon and shared in their original form, as intended by the attention seeker.
But we must build a “platform,” a literal stage to rest upon the hungry eyes, ears, and scrolling fingertips of thousands of entities who MIGHT buy our book (if it ever gets published) and who DON’T actually give a flying fuck what happens to us because if we ever stop hand-feeding them chunks of our collective soul, they’ll just scroll on to the next husk of a human being that needs their validation.
Here’s what the attention economy makes us believe we should be doing every day to prove our credibility as creators and to improve our chances of appealing to gatekeepers:
We should be sharing every thought that pops into our heads. Heavily edited to be entertaining or inspiring.
We should be photographing our food, pets, garden, kids. Heavily edited to be entertaining or inspiring.
We should be filming ourselves talking about stuff or doing stuff. Heavily edited so we don’t look like we feel most of the time.
We should be monitoring the number of people following, liking, subscribing to, and sharing us.
We should be selling our expertise, secrets to success, promises of fulfilment, souls.
We should be promoting our work. But we haven’t done it yet because we had to do all that other shit first.
To be clear, I’m guilty of performing every time sucking machination in the above list. And I have no plans to stop sucking performing. But I would like to do that less. And by doing it less, maybe I’ll have more time and space to do the following:
Think my thoughts.
Savor my meals. Enjoy my pets. Work in my garden. Play with my kids.
Talk about stuff and do stuff with the people I love.
Connect with the handful of humans who follow, like, subscribe to, and share me who have also taken the time to get to know me. Unedited.
Get better at something I want to be great at.
Learn more about something that interests me.
Find meaning and fulfilment in my every day.
Follow my heart.
Feed my soul.
Sing. Dance. Read. Walk.
Look. Listen. Share. Laugh.
Love.
Work.
Live.
Write!!!
Inspiring … right?
Recipe for failure: mixing "attention" and "economy" in the same phrase. Might as well have a chocolate covered cockroach.
I pressed the “Like” button because there’s no “Uncomfortably Impacted” button.