Manifesto
How attention flows on the web
Great summary of a longer Buzzfeed post where the author observes his sister using Snapchat.
“No conversations…it’s mostly selfies.”
The way she interacts with friends’ messages doesn’t match-up with how ‘brands’ market themselves on Snapchat.
“I don’t really see what they send. I tap through so fast. It’s rapid fire.”
Snapchat needs to generate revenue from advertisers. Yet the dominant user behaviours appear fundamentally incompatible with how advertising operates in this medium.
“Industrialization made it so that people could live farther and farther apart from each other, which is weird for social animals like humans and particularly difficult for teenagers for whom that social connection is the most important thing in their lives.”
People’s needs and the behaviours that manifest as a result on social platforms aren’t congruent with a model of marketing that is still based on the ‘broadcasting’ of messages en masse.