Current trends encourage businesses to pay considerable lip service to the huge potential of digital, algorithm-driven, AI-enhanced systems with limitless applications operating at the edge of our imaginations. At the same time, we all recognise that there has been a profound drop in quality in the online offering as a result of their introduction. The internet has steadily become a less positive, more divisive, more attention-hungry and generally angrier place to explore.
We entered the new millennium with a huge focus on exploring new ways to create and serve content. However, as we have moved ahead, we have deliberately ignored what it means to create great content.
We have travelled very far from the concept of masterful storytelling and ventured deep into techniques of seduction. By design, our media platforms lull users into maintaining their engagement by removing the normal cues that remind us to stop engaging when we need to do something else. That’s not actually what the word “engagement” means at all, it’s something more like “enthrallment”.
That form of persuasion cannot possibly endure in the media for very long, and if we’re being honest about what’s good for us, neither should it. It’s a shadow of genuine storytelling, something that has endured consistently throughout the history of human civilisation, capturing attention organically and in a sustained way.
If you’re creating content, don’t forget to ask yourself – why am I doing this? Is this actually good for people to read or watch, or am I just distracting them from what’s actually important to them? What’s the value of my work?