Digital Disruption and the Death of Storytelling says that Professor Douglas Rushkoff studies …
… people’s inability to connect with another person or an ideology … while they’re immersed in this era of multitasking and digital chaos.
How many times in the past week have you seen someone stumbling around with their face in a smartphone screen? How often are conversations interrupted by a text message, or an app update, or … something really serious, like a Candy Crush Saga message?
We’re told that successful content these days has to surf this sea of distraction. Digital experts lecture us on the shelf life of a tweet, or on how long you can keep someone’s attention online. The assumption seems to be that publishers should try to compete in that environment.
Why is that the right conclusion?
[Rushkoff] … researches how digital disruption interferes with social interactions and society’s value creation.
Value. What an old-fashioned word.
If value is what you’re after, do you want to be on stage with the wet t-shirt contests, the Onion parodies and the cat videos?
If you want to have a meaningful conversation with your market, why are you trying to do it in a place that doesn’t facilitate meaningful interactions?
“But,” you say, “that’s where the people are. We need to reach them.”
Maybe, but only if you find out that they’re truly your people. Are the people in distract-o-verse the market you’re trying to reach? It’s worth asking the question.
Even if they are your market, that doesn’t mean you have to try to reduce your content to that level. Find them there if you have to, but then move them off to a quiet place, away from the beeps and the noise, and ask them to pay attention for a while.
Yes, people really do that — even in the age of Twit-face-insta-mania.
If you want your publishing business to revolve around slideshows about Taylor Swift, then by all means swim in the ocean of distraction, and good luck to you. But if you want to publish meaningful stuff that requires attention and concentration, the trick is going to be finding people in the distractosphere, then inviting them to another place — another site, another device, another time, another format.
Marketers have been fine-tuning that process of finding and inviting, but it seems to me that the biggest challenge is the next piece, which is finding a way to get your target audience to calm down, step away from the crowd and curl up for a while with your content.
To prime your brain for the challenge, consider the way you consume content. You probably do different things at different times, on different devices.
Consider your own reaction when you click on a link expecting a serious article, and you get a ditsy slideshow. Or, in the alternative, consider how tedious a long article can seem when you’re not in the mood for serious thinking.
This is the challenge in the fragmented world we face. People have to be in the right place and state of mind for your type of content.
For myself, I can’t watch a 20-minute Youtube video at work (because I have a job), or on the train (because I don’t have a data plan on my iPad). I watch those on Sunday morning over tea, or when I’m on the elliptical.
During the week I scan headlines and give short articles a quick read. If I’m interested in something longer, I clip it to my Evernote and read it later — during lunch or on my commute.
But that’s just me. Your mileage may vary, and your market won’t be like either you or me.
Unfortunately, your market probably has subgroups that do things very differently. Some will prefer videos, while some will prefer to read on their kindle. And yes, some will prefer to read in print.
The answer to storytelling in the age of digital disruption is to move people from distract-o-verse into the place where they can stop, listen, and pay attention.