Why Get Attention?

One of the things that I find unhealthy about spaces like LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram is how everyone is fighting for attention. And it’s not obvious how capturing attention can help everyone who’s fighting for it.

I get why bloggers, politicians, scientists, and entertainers are playing the game. They make their living off of how much attention they can capture. And occasionally, they even have really insightful and positive ideas that should be amplified.

Good ideas are scarce. Not everything or everyone needs to be amplified all the time. Harsh, but true.

There is tension here. Sometimes a Tweet or Instagram post is an amazing megaphone to amplify a good message. There are many threads I’ve found value in from random people ranging from 10 followers to 10,000.

I think the key word here is sometimes. What I see much more often are posts that act like noisy echoes of some original message. And often, the original message has been so muddied by all the liking and sharing that it becomes harder and harder to understand why the post got made in the first place.

This dynamic makes me really worried about fighting for attention on these spaces. Why does anyone need to listen to me in the first place? What do I really have to offer to the potentially hundreds of people scrolling through their feeds who might end up with my Tweet in their timeline?

Growing numbers (by themselves) are not good. But they’re the metrics that a lot of people live by. You can optimize them, and they provide immediate feedback to the work you’ve put out.

But the numbers don’t tell you how the message has been received. An extra like, re-tweet, or share hasn’t told you if you’ve actually communicated something valuable to other people, or if you’ve somehow affirmed a bias, added noise to a conversation, or have somehow detracted from the discussion.

This idea is nothing new. Any big (and honest) content creator has mentioned this dynamic.

I guess what I’m looking for are ideas on how I can figure out what to write about and when to write something. And when to know something’s in a state that’s worth sharing.

Sharing too often and too early makes me afraid that everyone else will just see my work as mediocre. But sharing too rarely and too late means that what I have to say loses relevance, and few people will find value in irrelevant topics.

And all I can ask at this point is, “why get attention?”