Jerome Marot
Well-known member
Lately, I discovered an interesting article about photography and social media: http://photothunk.blogspot.de/2013/01/interestingness-stickiness-and.html.
I'll cite the relevant passage:
What is stickiness? For our purposes I will define it to be a quality of an advertising-containing medium (e.g. a magazine, a web site, a mobile app) which allows it to hold the attention of a typical viewer. It is a measure of the ability of some advertising delivery system to hold your attention and deliver advertising. Interestingness is closely allied to stickiness in that we tend to find our attention held by things we find interesting.
(...)
Social media is, essentially, an advertising medium in which the content is provided for free to the advertisers by the targets of the advertisements. Roughly, social media is a method by which the cow can be persuaded to butcher and pack itself. A magazine is static and limited in size, it must use content that is broadly interesting. This is why they use pictures of celebrities and stories about celebrities. Social media is built on the observation that a digital medium is neither static nor size-restricted. Social media can then use any old content, great masses of it. As long as some small fraction of it is interesting to some people, the potential for stickiness is there. The technological problem of social media is therefore to present to each viewer a sifted collection of the shared crud likely to be found interesting. To first order, this boils down to:
Permit tagging photographs with the names of the people in it.
Notify people when their name has popped up in a photograph.
This creates the cycle of positive feedback which keeps all of us uploading more and more photographic (and other) content, which can in turn be fed into the "who is this interesting to?" grist mill, which in turn drives the stickiness of the social medium in question.
Basically the article says that Facebook wants us to upload and tag pictures of our friends so that people can be presented with pictures of themselves. The system is based on the observation that people are first and foremost interested in pictures of themselves. Having taken pictures at social functions and managed the prints, I can readily agree to that.
But there is a particular problem with Facebook. The vast majority of the people I know object to having their face uploaded to Facebook and tagged. It seems to be a consequence of historically more stringent privacy laws in Europe. It could also be my selection of friends and acquaintances. I would also say that in the time I had a Facebook account, I found the whole system pretty boring, but that is just me.
But I am a bit puzzled by the difference in attitude. Therefore my question: do your friends also object to their pictures being taken, uploaded and/or tagged?
I'll cite the relevant passage:
What is stickiness? For our purposes I will define it to be a quality of an advertising-containing medium (e.g. a magazine, a web site, a mobile app) which allows it to hold the attention of a typical viewer. It is a measure of the ability of some advertising delivery system to hold your attention and deliver advertising. Interestingness is closely allied to stickiness in that we tend to find our attention held by things we find interesting.
(...)
Social media is, essentially, an advertising medium in which the content is provided for free to the advertisers by the targets of the advertisements. Roughly, social media is a method by which the cow can be persuaded to butcher and pack itself. A magazine is static and limited in size, it must use content that is broadly interesting. This is why they use pictures of celebrities and stories about celebrities. Social media is built on the observation that a digital medium is neither static nor size-restricted. Social media can then use any old content, great masses of it. As long as some small fraction of it is interesting to some people, the potential for stickiness is there. The technological problem of social media is therefore to present to each viewer a sifted collection of the shared crud likely to be found interesting. To first order, this boils down to:
Permit tagging photographs with the names of the people in it.
Notify people when their name has popped up in a photograph.
This creates the cycle of positive feedback which keeps all of us uploading more and more photographic (and other) content, which can in turn be fed into the "who is this interesting to?" grist mill, which in turn drives the stickiness of the social medium in question.
Basically the article says that Facebook wants us to upload and tag pictures of our friends so that people can be presented with pictures of themselves. The system is based on the observation that people are first and foremost interested in pictures of themselves. Having taken pictures at social functions and managed the prints, I can readily agree to that.
But there is a particular problem with Facebook. The vast majority of the people I know object to having their face uploaded to Facebook and tagged. It seems to be a consequence of historically more stringent privacy laws in Europe. It could also be my selection of friends and acquaintances. I would also say that in the time I had a Facebook account, I found the whole system pretty boring, but that is just me.
But I am a bit puzzled by the difference in attitude. Therefore my question: do your friends also object to their pictures being taken, uploaded and/or tagged?
