paris hilton and the attention arms race.

As mentioned in this earlier post, The Rebel Sell influenced my view of many things in society as a kind of arms race. While I read not too long ago that Paris Hilton could best be considered a platform, rather than a celebrity (the argument being that she can aid promotion by associating things with herself, but can’t promote her own works successfully), I’m starting to think that she’s actually the perfect example of the arms race worldview in terms of the mass media.

Let me explain.

We live in an over saturated media landscape. Whether it be advertising or television channels, or celebrities, we are blasted in the face with an insane amount of information on a second by second basis. I don’t know about anyone else, but even going to school in a suburban area, I’ve gotten so used to the noise that silence feels eerie.

What do small children do when no one is paying attention? They start to yell. And when all the children start yelling, they begin to act out. In the same way the girl that no one paid attention to in grade 10 ends up making some bad decisions in her quest for attention, people (in this case, media producers) decide that being a little ridiculous isn’t a big problem, as long as people are looking. Upping the t&a isn’t that high a price to pay, as long as people keep looking. Starting every episode of CSI with three dead hookers and an exploding caddy isn’t that bad, if someone will please for the love of god look.

Having your homemade nightvision porn leak online for every teenage boy to spank it do isn’t shameful anymore. It means people are looking. And the simple fact that people are looking means that you matter, regardless of issues of respectability.

Paris Hilton being famous is the end result of the attention arms race. So are movies where Johnny Knoxville and the Jackass crew get the shit beat out of them by bulls. It has nothing to do with quality. It’s the simple reality that there is so much signal out there, that getting people to look is seen as a matter of being more attention-grabbing than the other guy.

This makes perfect sense, given the broadcast model of mass communication that has dominated for the last several decades. More reach meant more power. Louder meant more power.

The problem is, signal is now noise. All of it. And yeah, people will look when a screech emerges from the static, when a bright flash disrupts the snow. But what happens when that stops being a distraction, and people turn off the radio and the TV?

When signal is noise, you basically have three options;

1) Create a new type of signal.

2) Make people seek you out, instead of vice versa.

3) Get louder.

Obviously, the last option eventually stops working. So, two more things to explore. But the point I’m trying to make is, if you want attention, and screaming isn’t getting it, a conversation will. Interaction is louder than night vision pornography. Creating a discussion among others is essentially viral marketing. Creating a discussion with them, and with you, often falls into the world of crowdsourcing.

Which I guess, is something to talk about next post.

EDIT: some more stuff to look at regarding signal as noise.
NYT article
Anti-Advertising Agency Clip

a way of seeing.

Reading 'The Rebel Sell' was probably one of the major moments in shaping my view of human relations. The view espoused therein of commerce as an arms race has proven applicable to many, many things.

(The gist is, keeping up with the Joneses results in the Joneses trying to pull back ahead, and vice versa, until everyone is unnecessarily spending beyond their means. Heath and Potter (the authors) call it a Collective Action Problem, and invoke the prisoners dilemma to explain further. In the name of all that is holy, buy the book.)

For the last few days, I've been asking myself how do you win an arms race? I've also been refusing to accept the standard answer I would give, which is not to play.

So. How do you win an arms race?

Turn it into a ground war.

Much as guerilla warfare seems to continue to do well trumping ever increasing military budgets the world over, crowdsourcing seems to do the same thing to flush media outlets. I'll admit that crowdsourcing also happens to fit very easily into my ideals about the way media can and should, in some cases, be run. A similar point could be made about guerilla marketing, if we didn't live in a political climate where a lite brite could shut down a major urban centre.

There was a lot of input today that led to me scribbling this down into a moleskine, and I'll get to the related idea at some point in the near future.

Ground war. That is all.