Curation is calling
This is a call to really smart people who embrace challenge. Who are bored with how easy things are.
It’s about the attention economy, choice architecture, and designing algorithms that choose what to present and what to hide, all wrapped in a narrative that says don’t be this guy.
The Call
So much energy is placed on attention-getting techniques and technology and yet so little invested into the increasingly valuable attention-protecting industry. This needs to change.
We don’t have an infinitely expandable attention span. This is a bit of a problem, given the amount of ads, articles, and information we need to pay attention to is expanding exponentially. This growing problem drives a demand for tools that promise to give us more control over how we spend our attention.
Curation and recommendations are perfect examples of tools that can protect our attention. There is a huge need here and money to be made, and at the same time there is more than money at stake.
The upliftingly dismal bit of history that comes next illustrates the point.
If the next sections (Haber’s rule and personality tests) seem incongruous at the start, that’s because they are. The post doesn’t come together till the end.
Haber’s rule
That dapper gentleman sporting the less-than-robust eyeglasses at the start of the post was Jewish chemical engineer Fritz Haber. A brilliant guy, won a Nobel Prize for chemistry. As a thinker he was incredible. Which is interesting because Fritz Haber is remembered for 2 things.
He developed a process (the Haber-Bosch process) which allows us to enrich soil — currently used to provide food for about half the population of the world.
He also pioneered the development of chemical weapons and founded the company which produced Zyklon B, used in the gas chambers in WWII, where members of his own family were gassed to death.
Smart guy, studied the interaction between gas concentration and exposure time, to best predict what is required to be lethal. That interaction between concentration of gas and exposure time is still known as Haber’s rule.
He solved lots of problems, founded his own company. Innovative entrepreneur all the way.
On the other hand, his wife shot herself (about 2 weeks after he in person oversaw the first wide release of poison gas that resulted in 67000 casualties), he remarried, 2 of his kids committed suicide, and when he died he arranged to be buried beside the wife that had shot herself.
So all’s well that ends well.
Well, not really.
The point to that rather uninspiring story is that most of us probably don’t want to be like Fritz. Which makes the persona stuff below vitally relevant, especially if your work is based on directing peoples' attention and you rank anywhere close to ‘intellectually strong’.
What persona are you?
Personality tests used to be associated with those distinguished magazines that also help you figure out which Kardashian you are most likely to be in your next life. That was before the OCEAN framework (Openness, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism) was used to sway voters in Brexit and the Trump campaign.
Suddenly personality tests have a new cred.
Before we get too excited about OCEAN (and its serious cred), check out this off-putting bit of context.
The Original
The original personality framework, the one that served as a precursor to the Myers-Briggs personality test, had some interesting aspects. Myers-Briggs changed the original by moving the focus away from the individual and towards a corporate perspective.
A basic observation in the original theory was there were patterns of skill sets. If someone was strong in one area, they were often predictably bad at another. It was not was not so much that talents existed as opposites, but rather there were predictable trends of talent and lack.
The 4 categories in this framework broke down into:
1) people biased to sensation to tell them something is there. Practical, reality-focused, does it work now type of people. Investor types.
2) people biased to intellect (thinking) to tell them what that something is and what it can be used for. Brilliant, abstract problem–solvers, and solution-finders type of people. Entrepreneur types.
3) people biased to feeling to tell them whether that something is good or bad. Sensitive, aware of moral or ethical repercussions type of people. Often seen by others as prone to judging and worrying types.
4) people biased to intuition to tell them what that something will lead to. Futurist types, people who can see the long-term consequences of current trends. C.G. Jung (the guy who developed the framework we are talking about) said these types often kept quiet because others didn’t understand them.
Jung’s framework suggested people who were brilliant intellectually often really sucked at feeling.
Jung’s framework suggested people who were brilliant intellectually often really sucked at feeling.
They could excel at solving the problem, but be deeply out of their element as to whether their solution was net positive or net negative. The only metric they could see was efficiency.
Diving from Jung into OCEAN
Back to the OCEAN framework. Books like Captivate: the science of succeeding with people (named as one of Apples most anticipated books of 2017) are coming out on how to apply the OCEAN framework to drive online conversions.
Here is a snapshot from the author of the book (taken from a promotional email), about applying the principles to her business.
Note how she describes her ideal audience, and how she ends the paragraph. Look at that increase in efficiency! Almost creepy how she describes and reveals the same pattern Jung described.
Creepy, but chances are I’m still going to check out the book.
The point?
Capturing attention — getting attention — is a huge industry. You can get university degrees on how to design and direct people’s attention. Endless conferences, meetups, books blogs and agencies focus on behavior design and dive into cognitive biases to help you persuade people to notice your products. Designing choices (choice architecture), and designing algorithms that choose what to present and what to hide are all means to the same end.
Get them (the audience, the user, the demographic) to pay attention.
Designing choices (choice architecture), and designing algorithms that choose what to present and what to hide are all means to the same end.
Get them (the audience, the user, the demographic) to pay attention.
There is brilliance written all over this field. Lots of new developments, lots of intelligent minds propelling the industry by studying the latest insights in cognitive biases and emotional triggers. PhD’s in neuroscience and machine learning hard at work here.
The excitement around it is intoxicating, in the most literal sense of the word.
In some funny ways we are like drunk people lurching about, filled with swirling thoughts of the conquests just ahead and how great we are now. Like drunk people, not noticing whether what we are doing is good or bad.
Attention-jacking isn’t great
There is too much stuff out there. People need their attention protected. Curation is an attention protector. There is opportunity here, but it is close to opportunity lost.
Curation is an attention protector. There is opportunity here, but it is close to opportunity lost
Protecting peoples’ attention has been replaced by hijacking peoples’ attention. Curation has been replaced by clickbaitism.
Curating empty ‘attention-stealers’ does the opposite of protecting our attention. Clickbait is not at the summit of anything. You don’t look up at good clickbait. You look down. Where is the satisfaction in excelling at that?
Answering the call
Whether we like it or not, all those attention hacks and behavior design strategies and algorithms we work on are aimed at people, and we are people. We are them. We are targeting ourselves, our families, and our future.
Think of your dad’s inmail box being filled with clever phishing attempts to divulge his banking information and your daughter feeling insecure after looking at her social media feed. Brilliant strategies, but is that really brilliance at work?
Talent and genius are not automatically great. ‘Great’ depends on what the talent and genius are applied to. Rather than making attention ‘captive’, can we begin to apply genius to protecting it and letting it free? To enabling exploration, rather than exploitation?
Curation is a prime industry waiting for greatness, but who is answering the call?
One more look at this picture. In particular, look at the guy.
Walk the streets of any city that has a tech hub and you will immediately see beards are back in. We’ve already got the beards. Maybe its time to make curation great again and bring back the librarians, real or virtual.
