While reading Davenport & Beck's and Iris' pieces on the attention economy and information surplus, I couldn't help but think about how those ideas squared with the resurgence of longform journalism online. On the surface, longform journalism's renaissance would seem to run completely counter to those concepts: If attention is becoming increasingly scarce and the amount of information exceeds what people could consume even at the price of zero, then long, deep, involved stories would be the worst kind of information to try to succeed with online.
Yet we're seeing the opposite of that -- we've seen example after example in the past few years of how thoughtful, long, time-consuming pieces are among the most popular in online information and journalism. Iris provides an example of Apple Daily's lowest-common-denominator style succeeding in an information surplus, but this seems to be the opposite. So what gives? Can the information surplus model explain this, too, or is it broken?
I think it can provide us some clues. Iris' model posits that at the information surplus level, there's more information than a consumer can possibly consume, even with all of it free and available. So at that point, quality in some cases may become more important to the consumer, not less, in determining whether to give some message their attention. If a consumer doesn't have time for anything, they may take conscious steps to limit their media consumption to only what they deem truly important, as opposed to frivolous content.
For me personally, consumption of frivolous, low-quality tends to go up as I have more attention free, not down. When I have to bear down and get projects done and limit my media intake, it's generally that low-quality content that will get cut out -- the pointless YouTube videos linked to my friends on Twitter, the endless blog-comment discussions, etc. What survives as my available attention dwindles is the good stuff, the stuff that takes more attention, not less. Not everyone's media consumption works this way, obviously, but it could help explain why we still have time for quality longform journalism during an information-surplus age.
Yet we're seeing the opposite of that -- we've seen example after example in the past few years of how thoughtful, long, time-consuming pieces are among the most popular in online information and journalism. Iris provides an example of Apple Daily's lowest-common-denominator style succeeding in an information surplus, but this seems to be the opposite. So what gives? Can the information surplus model explain this, too, or is it broken?
I think it can provide us some clues. Iris' model posits that at the information surplus level, there's more information than a consumer can possibly consume, even with all of it free and available. So at that point, quality in some cases may become more important to the consumer, not less, in determining whether to give some message their attention. If a consumer doesn't have time for anything, they may take conscious steps to limit their media consumption to only what they deem truly important, as opposed to frivolous content.
For me personally, consumption of frivolous, low-quality tends to go up as I have more attention free, not down. When I have to bear down and get projects done and limit my media intake, it's generally that low-quality content that will get cut out -- the pointless YouTube videos linked to my friends on Twitter, the endless blog-comment discussions, etc. What survives as my available attention dwindles is the good stuff, the stuff that takes more attention, not less. Not everyone's media consumption works this way, obviously, but it could help explain why we still have time for quality longform journalism during an information-surplus age.
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