Interesting piece from Michael Arrington at TechCrunch blog
"If I ever write another book it will probably be about one of three topics. The first is the truth about how the press and journalism really works – the sausage making – to show just how much of a beautiful, subjective and chaotic mess it all is. The second idea is to talk about how perfect blogging is, with its constant feedback loop, as a training ground for mass psychology and manipulation. The third idea I’m keeping to myself for now, but it’s more startup focused.
It’s the second one that’s been on my mind lately. Mostly because it’s become pretty clear to me that any blogger worth her salt could start, say, an extremely successful militant religious cult.
Any blogger will tell you how frustrating the early days are. Getting someone, anyone, to link to you. Your first comment! etc. And as your audience grows you are introduced to the first rule of anonymous human behavior – it’s dark and brutal, and reminds me how thin the veil of civilized behavior really is. If there is something nasty that can be said, someone will say it. Over and over.
A big part of blogging is simply keeping the peace. You set rules on whether or not you’ll allow anonymous commenting, or commenting at all. You decide if/how to moderate comments. You decide if/how to respond to opposing arguments and (more often) personal attacks. And you, involuntarily for the most part, evolve your writing in response to the feedback loop. Those are the days of innocence, simple joys and simple sadnesses.
But then you start to get really good at what you do. You write something and you get trashed. The next time you try it a little differently and it the commenters love you. You don’t even do it consciously – but over the years you just get better at it. To the point where you pretty much know exactly what the reaction will be to any given post, and how to tweak things to get the reaction you want.
Zynga talks about constant A/B testing in its games to maximize revenue, a huge competitive advantage for them. Bloggers go through the same thing every time they write a post.
Old media types don’t have quite the same experience because they generally have an editorial agenda, certain writing rules, and editors to please. There are too many layers between them and the direct feedback loop. so they evolve much more slowly. Bloggers have a direct line to the collective mind."
For the complete post:
http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/05/blogging-and-mass-psychomanipulation/
3 comments:
How the new press works
What Fox did is not just create a venue for alternative opinion. It created an alternate reality.
Charles Krauthammer
As it relates to the cartoon Summer of recovery shown here on As I see it
http://www.google.com/publicdata?ds=usunemployment&met=unemployment_rate&tdim=true&dl=en&hl=en&q=unemployment+rate
Pschomanipulation is the avoidence of facts when asked about your own record . Use words like liberal socialist Islamic facist and Nazi
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