🏀 If you are a basketball fan, college women’s basketball is incredibly fun to watch. Lots of elite teams all across the country — South Carolina, Stanford, LSU, UConn — constantly challenging and pushing each other.
🏀The #1 ranked South Carolina Women’s Basketball team came from behind to beat #2 Stanford in OT today. Such an impressive win on the road. Coach Staley has built an amazing program and they are so much fun to watch.
The balance between broadcast and engagement
Content is more important than commentary.
When the internet was becoming popular, I remember being told that traditional media was just broadcasting. The internet promised more than just broadcasting, it offered “engagement.”
Don’t let people fool you. Engagement happened before the internet. People read the newspaper and talked about stories with their family and friends. They watched the evening news and discussed it at the water cooler at work the next day. They wrote letters to the editor to express their agreement or disapproval. They called radio shows to ask questions. They bought classified ads to share a job listing or sell a car. People engaged with media before the internet.
Instead, what the internet offered was an instant, two-way feedback loop between publisher and audience. Comments on blogs and news sites led the way. Then, social media provided the ultimate in real time engagement with metrics that let you track everything.
Instant response. Maximum engagement. Integrated with the content.
And how has that worked out? Thoughtful comments on blogs were quickly drowned out with spam. News sites were filled with reactionary opinions. Social media offered both reactionary opinions and spam and as a bonus channeled hate and harassment. Managing commentary takes as much staff and resources as creating the content, but people love providing their opinion and arguing their point of view, which drives traffic. And that traffic was the most important thing to the companies like Facebook and Twitter that sell the advertising that surrounds the hate.
As Twitter implodes and some people look for what’s next, I think we need to reexamine the relationship between publishing and engagement. Creation and commentary. True engagement is what follows when we create high-quality, beneficial content. We need to restore a focus on publishing the content, not just on the commentary. And our new technologies need to support that balance.
P.S. One of the things I like about Micro.Blog is the absence of metrics. No follower counts. No likes. No retweets. If you are used to obsessively checking how many likes your last post got, the absence of metrics takes a little getting used to, but it resets the balance between publishing and engagement.
P.S.S. It occurs to me that the most profitable company in the world, Apple, creates a lot of content without maintaining a traditional social media presence.
Watching the highlights from last night’s Tennessee v. South Carolina game and I can’t believe that South Carolina scored 63 points. 🏈
Taking the rest of the day off to try and reset my work/life/Ph.D. balance. Always hard to balance everything at the end of a semester.
Our annual attempt at a Team Wertz Vista Lights selfie.
Studying with my daughters at Starbucks.
Liftoff! 🌎->🚀->🌛
Do I stay awake to see the first launch of Artemis and the SLS system…?
Six hours after the presale began, I was able to successfully to purchase Taylor Swift tickets.
There are “2000+ people” in line ahead of me, but at least I was finally about to get in the Taylor Swift presale queue. I wonder how long this will take… I’m guessing some time this afternoon?
As expected the Ticketmaster/Taylor Swift ticket purchasing process has been awful. I’m still not able to get in line.
This line on the Ticketmaster site concerns me: “Ticket prices may fluctuate, based on demand, at any time.”
I’ve been tasked by my daughter with getting Taylor Swift tickets at the presale today. Talk about pressure.
Time for another AIGA vision quest
“Re-envisioning AIGA Moving Forward Together”
Today, AIGA sent an email out to all members announcing the departure of their executive director and the beginning of a new attempt to reimagine AIGA. (If you don’t know, AIGA is the professional organization for design, formerly known as the American Institute of Graphic Arts.)
I’m been an AIGA member for much of my professional career. I was active at a chapter level for over a decade. Over that time, people repeatedly tried to reimagine the central organization, its chapter system and its funding mechanisms. No one was ever satisfied. They wanted to make it better, and then every designer would want to join and help change the world.
And yet, the organization got smaller.
AIGA has meant a lot to me and it definitely helped my career, but structurally, it’s been broken for a long time. It was built in a pre-Internet era. A time when the only way you got to see a legendary designer was to go to a conference or have them come to a local AIGA chapter. When networking was done primarily at the local bar. A time when being aligned with a large national organization gave you needed credibility and clout.
But now, YouTube means you can see all of your favorite designers deliver inspirational talks from the comfort of your own home. You can network with anyone, anywhere, anytime. The world changed, but the structure remained, and that was before the pandemic hit.
AIGA isn’t alone. Lots of member-based organizations are trying to figure out how to move forward. These organizations can bring value to their members, but they will need to embrace a different approach, building valuable online communities that may or may not be connected with local chapters.
In the end, we’ll see how AIGA’s latest re-envisioning works out. I’m optimistic, but time will tell if they are able to make the hard choices.
Just hit a (small) milestone for my long Ph.D. journey. My first solo IRB approval, and tomorrow, my web-based experiment goes live. Now fingers crossed that the students who are supposed to take the survey actually take the survey.
This line from Brent Simmons on Inessential feels particularly dead on:
The internet’s town square should never have been one specific website with its own specific rules and incentives. It should have been, and should be, the web itself.
I’m dusting off my CSS skills so I can customize my Micro.Blog blog. I’m having fun and I want to keep experimenting. That said, I’m terrible at it. 🤣
I just created a Link Out page on my Micro.Blog site that has all of my active (and less active) online accounts. Basically a DIY linktree page. I’m going to use it on all of my bios.
Showing his grandparents all the things he can play on his viola.
