It's harder to drop back and observe than to participate in the information and culture war
(Not the post I had planned. Plus an update for paying subscribers)
This week I caught myself in a trap.
I was working on a long piece suggesting parallels between current social justice ideology and religion. Much of it original and some of it drawing on the work of dispassionate thinkers who I admire. It's going to be a good one.
Then I deleted most of it and started again. This was because I'd been using some of the tired terminology favoured by participants in the culture war. By overtly signalling my personal position on certain things I was falling into the trap of saying stuff that I knew would be liked by some people.
How often have you read something that confirmed your biases and then described it as 'good'? Countless times, in my case. But I can't adequately express how bored I've become with content that just tightens the bias ratchet like that. I'd read those interminable think pieces by the sensibles of The Guardian if I needed that shit in my life now.
I'd be breathlessly tweeting about how good Matthew Parris's latest assessment of Boris Johnson is. Or how good this or that article about something else I've already made my mind up about was.
But I noticed that all I was writing this week was something that some people would think was good and others would reflexively think was crap because it went along with - or against - what they already thought.
What I want to do is to surface things that make readers think and question their assumptions. To be less reflexive and more contemplative. Because, by doing that myself I became a little less neurotic, frustrated and unhappy with the world.
You might not have heard of the term 'audience capture' but it refers to one of the biggest traps in the public intellectual sphere and journalism. Audience capture is what happens when someone who was initially positioned as ideology-agnostic or an independent thinker ends up trapped into pleasing their audience. I see it happening everywhere. One of the giveaway signs is the comments under an article or a YouTube video. When they are exclusively congratulatory and reinforce the arguments or sentiments of the piece in question. That's a red flag for another turn on the bias ratchet.
And, of course, the concept of audience capture is embodied in reverse, on Twitter, by the summary unfollow. Which is effectively saying I don't like what you say so I'm not going to listen.
In an era in which attention is currency and entire information ecosystems like Twitter or online newspapers stand or fall on clicks, likes, shares and follows, audience capture is inevitable. After all, the customer (follower, liker, sharer) is always right. Aren't they.
But seriously, audience capture is something a writer has to actively resist, if they are to claim independence. Even if that risks losing audience.
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Every post to date has been free, but not everyone has signed up for free.
It seems only fair to me that those who support this content with their hard-earned are rewarded, so I'm moving to a part-free, part-paid approach.
Paying subscribers will get exclusive articles and updates, beginning in October. Frankly, these will be more provocative and potentially controversial than the public stuff. Potentially, therefore, more useful as stepping stones into interesting areas of thought than the standard fayre.
The internet has made us all expect free stuff, regardless of the effort that went into it. These days I have a personal policy of paying for content that I look at often.
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Pic credit: Steve Buissinne on Pixabay