Fleeting Thoughts

A collection of my Shower thoughts, Daydreams, Epiphanies and Observations of the world.
P.S. Don’t cite this in your research. Updated Irregularly and without verification.

#NewsMedia #SocialMedia #AttentionSpan
The entire media industry is fighting each other for the user’s attention and has accepted the fact that people’s attention spans is decreasing. Its NOT! There are still times when people can give undivided attention to things that matter to them or engross them. How do you think people started Binge Watching? So it's not that their ‘attention span’ is decreasing, its the time a person has to GRAB a user’s attention that’s decreasing! and it will only continue as we keep producing more poor quality content. Our focus on Quantity & not Quality is a self-destructive whirlpool!
Users know that most of the content they skim through isn’t worth their time and therefore only glance on them to save time and move on to the next to find the one on which they actually want to spend time. It is just extremely difficult to find such content which is worth spending time on, even if such content is available, their hook to GRAB a user’s attention is something that’s failing to catch the user. Thanks to Social Media everything now has to be extremely attractive on the face of it to trigger the deepest vulnerability or emotion within a human to catch their attention.

#news #journalism

News V Journalism

News and Journalism are often used synonymously but according to me they are not the same. Today, media houses have lost the race of being th source of breaking news, with government offices to hawkers, everyone using social media to reach citizens directly, media houses have in essence lost the race to be the news breaker. The logical step then should’ve been to move to what media is supposed to do, ask questions, probe deeper and spend time being the watchdog for the people, but it took a completely different turn and is trying to win a race it’s not even a part of. The turn it’s taken, is well known and is for a different time. Right now, I want to talk more about how Journalism is different than news.

News, is information, Journalism is Insight. Everyone has information, the facts, the figures, the What, When and Who. It’s only those who have the How & Why, the deeper Insights that have an edge on people. You can get the how and why for everything and neither does everyone cares about the how & why for everything under the sun and thus News was born, a form of information delivery that gives you a list of things that happened and then you decide what interests you enough for you to care and dive deep into. Not every topic can lead to a full page article, some are just worth a few lines and that’s fine but that’s not Journalism.

Differences:

News-information, Journalism-insight

News-Fast, Journalism-Slow

News-Updates, Journalism-Unraveling

News-Statements, Journalism-questions

News-Right Place right time, Journalism-Right mind

#SocialMedia #News #Advertisement

Social media is designed to keep us on the platform for as long as possible and pay as much attention as possible. People don’t like that, there are uproars of how these platforms are bad for us and why people should quit, but people initiating these uproars are hypocrites. They themselves are using the consumer’s vulnerability towards the platform and providing them everything ont he platform, if you really want people to quit then make the platform just an index, an advertisement board to your services, a brochure for your product, not the product itself. Take the new age media houses/independent Journalists, why are you releasing your whole content on social media? You make videos which aren’t teasers, but whole content, you make carousels which make people feel they know everything about the issue, WHY? If you hate social media and want people to actually visit your site, why not make a damn good teaser and ask them to go see the full thing on the website?

Social media is a space for marketing & advertisement, use it as such, dnt make it easier for this alluring technology to lure consumers in, it’ll only backfire, you’re axing the branch you’re sitting on. You think your followers on social media mean something? People follow thousands of people and see content from more than that. They aren’t loyal to anyone, one minute you’re the favourite and the next they’re attracted by someone else, you’re trying to keep people stuck to you in a place that had no barrier to entry and where you’re up against EVERYTHING! That’s a stupid game to play.

If you want to get away from the advertising model, then use social media for what it is, an advertising platform.

Yes, I have been trying this, but it seems that we have not been able to connect with people, I think that’s about to change now.