Image: Data In An Alien Context by Jer
I don’t run analytics on this blog. I don’t see how many people visit or get any particular feedback on whether anyone likes or dislikes it. This is partly a response to the fact that the other platforms I use, Twitter and YouTube have powerful analytics tools and perhaps more importantly dopamine triggering alerts and engagement tricks to keep me coming back. We humans are social beings and are wired to seek connection with other humans. The attention economy has developed to exploit this by pinging us with alerts and notifications that someone has clicked on our post or video, setting off little flashes of happy-chemicals in our brains.
My guess is that this is probably bad for us and that we are being conditioned via intermittent positive and negative reinforcement (via online abuse), like the rats who push the lever, sometimes receiving a pellet of cocaine and sometimes an electric shock. So on this site, which I control more than the other platforms I use, I’ve chosen not to install tracking, or seek out any numbers about how many people it’s reaching. It’s also part of why I’ve decided to start publishing an email newsletter. It represents a chance to communicate with you, dear reader, on a platform that is not a video game designed to manipulate your and my emotions.
The more sophisticated these platforms become, the more refined their engagement maximizing mechanisms become, the deeper their datasets of our behavior and the smarter their machine learning algorithms become the more addictive they seek to be. For the many who have learned for the first time that they like communicating via writing or images with their audience via social media, I encourage you to set up your own little outpost online, independent from their platforms. Start a blog, start a newsletter, start a zine. Create a small space to speak and think, away from the ringing bells and flashing lights.
Also: yesterday I discovered this wonderful record: Demur EP by Hanna, thanks to Joe Muggs year end review for Bandcamp.
