dukeMedia

I have spent a lot of time studying the various Web 2.0 and social networking sites of late.

One of the things that I am self-analyzing is the cognitive response time for link-inducing behavior. That is, with all of the noise of attention-gathering mechanisms, which devices are the most efficient use of my processing cycles.

Music, for example, may take 30-40 seconds for a lyrical piece, or 10-15 seconds for a melodic piece for someone to form a rough opinion on whether they like it, or don’t like it. Text-based media requires, tag-lines, cover-lines or ‘deks’ to get people to commit to the attention required to make a choice as to it’s value. Video requires time to develop a story, etc.

Still photography, combined with network enabling features, like flickr, delivers a huge amount of information, in an incredibly short amount of time. This allows the users of these networks the ability to make decisions about the relative importance of links in a much shorter time than music, or videos.

(I use the word links, generically, because ‘friends’,'contacts’ and the like, are just different ways of branding a contextual link between one member [or node] of a network, and an other. This is well documented in the book ‘Linked‘ by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi.)

Anyway, with the collapse of the Media Attention Span, it is becoming increasingly apparent to me that we are about to enter into a new golden age of still-image representation. It’s ability to suspend disbelief is nearly instantaneous. Combined with the viral nature of social network, this is where there is true opportunity to create some powerful, and crummy disruptions.

more later…