Tag Archives: attention

Hacking the Attention Economy

For most non-technical folks, “hacking” evokes the notion of using sophisticated technical skills to break through the security of a corporate or government system for illicit purposes. Of course, most folks who were engaged in cracking security systems weren’t necessarily in it for espionage and cruelty. In the 1990s, I grew up among teenage hackers who wanted to break into the computer systems of major institutions that were part of the security establishment, just to show that they could. The goal here was to feel a sense of power in a world where they felt pretty powerless. The rush was in being able to do something and feel smarter than the so-called powerful. It was fun and games. At least until they started getting arrested.

Hacking has always been about leveraging skills to push the boundaries of systems. Keep in mind that one early definition of a hacker (from the Jargon File) was “A person who enjoys learning the details of programming systems and how to stretch their capabilities, as opposed to most users who prefer to learn only the minimum necessary.” In another early definition (RFC:1392), a hacker is defined as “A person who delights in having an intimate understanding of the internal workings of a system, computers and computer networks in particular.” Both of these definitions highlight something important: violating the security of a technical system isn’t necessarily the primary objective.

Indeed, over the last 15 years, I’ve watched as countless hacker-minded folks have started leveraging a mix of technical and social engineering skills to reconfigure networks of power. Some are in it for the fun. Some see dollar signs. Some have a much more ideological agenda. But above all, what’s fascinating is how many people have learned to play the game. And in some worlds, those skills are coming home to roost in unexpected ways, especially as groups are seeking to mess with information intermediaries in an effort to hack the attention economy.

CC BY-NC 2.0-licensed photo by artgraff.

It all began with memes… (and porn…)

In 2003, a 15-year-old named Chris Poole started an image board site based on a Japanese trend called 4chan. His goal was not political. Rather, like many of his male teenage peers, he simply wanted a place to share pornography and anime. But as his site’s popularity grew, he ran into a different problem — he couldn’t manage the traffic while storing all of the content. So he decided to delete older content as newer content came in. Users were frustrated that their favorite images disappeared so they reposted them, often with slight modifications. This gave birth to a phenomenon now understood as “meme culture.” Lolcats are an example. These are images of cats captioned with a specific font and a consistent grammar for entertainment.

Those who produced meme-like images quickly realized that they could spread like wildfire thanks to new types of social media (as well as older tools like blogging). People began producing memes just for fun. But for a group of hacker-minded teenagers who were born a decade after I was, a new practice emerged. Rather than trying to hack the security infrastructure, they wanted to attack the emergent attention economy. They wanted to show that they could manipulate the media narrative, just to show that they could. This was happening at a moment when social media sites were skyrocketing, YouTube and blogs were challenging mainstream media, and pundits were pushing the idea that anyone could control the narrative by being their own media channel. Hell, “You” was TIME Magazine’s person of the year in 2006.

Taking a humorist approach, campaigns emerged within 4chan to “hack” mainstream media. For example, many inside 4chan felt that widespread anxieties about pedophilia were exaggerated and sensationalized. They decided to target Oprah Winfrey, who, they felt, was amplifying this fear-mongering. Trolling her online message board, they got her to talk on live TV about how “over 9,000 penises” were raping children. Humored by this success, they then created a broader campaign around a fake character known as Pedobear. In a different campaign, 4chan “b-tards” focused on gaming the TIME 100 list of “the world’s most influential people” by arranging it such that the first letter of each name on the list spelled out “Marblecake also the game,” which is a known in-joke in this community. Many other campaigns emerged to troll major media and other cultural leaders. And frankly, it was hard not to laugh when everyone started scratching their heads about why Rick Astley’s 1987 song “Never Gonna Give You Up” suddenly became a phenomenon again.

By engaging in these campaigns, participants learned how to shape information within a networked ecosystem. They learned how to design information for it to spread across social media.

They also learned how to game social media, manipulate its algorithms, and mess with the incentive structure of both old and new media enterprises. They weren’t alone. I watched teenagers throw brand names and Buzzfeed links into their Facebook posts to increase the likelihood that their friends would see their posts in their News Feed. Consultants starting working for companies to produce catchy content that would get traction and clicks. Justin Bieber fans ran campaign after campaign to keep Bieber-related topics in Twitter Trending Topics. And the activist group Invisible Children leveraged knowledge of how social media worked to architect the #Kony2012 campaign. All of this was seen as legitimate “social media marketing,” making it hard to detect where the boundaries were between those who were hacking for fun and those who were hacking for profit or other “serious” ends.

Running campaigns to shape what the public could see was nothing new, but social media created new pathways for people and organizations to get information out to wide audiences. Marketers discussed it as the future of marketing. Activists talked about it as the next frontier for activism. Political consultants talked about it as the future of political campaigns. And a new form of propaganda emerged.

The political side to the lulz

In her phenomenal account of Anonymous — “Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy” — Gabriella Coleman describes the interplay between different networks of people playing similar hacker-esque games for different motivations. She describes the goofy nature of those “Anons” who created a campaign to expose Scientology, which many believed to be a farcical religion with too much power and political sway. But she also highlights how the issues became more political and serious as WikiLeaks emerged, law enforcement started going after hackers, and the Arab Spring began.

CC BY-SA 3.0-licensed photo by Essam Sharaf via Wikimedia Commons.

Anonymous was birthed out of 4chan, but because of the emergent ideological agendas of many Anons, the norms and tactics started shifting. Some folks were in it for fun and games, but the “lulz” started getting darker and those seeking vigilante justice started using techniques like “doxing”to expose people who were seen as deserving of punishment. Targets changed over time, showcasing the divergent political agendas in play.

Perhaps the most notable turn involved “#GamerGate” when issues of sexism in the gaming industry emerged into a campaign of harassment targeted at a group of women. Doxing began being used to enable “swatting” — in which false reports called in by perpetrators would result in SWAT teams sent to targets’ homes. The strategies and tactics that had been used to enable decentralized but coordinated campaigns were now being used by those seeking to use the tools of media and attention to do serious reputational, psychological, economic, and social harm to targets. Although 4chan had long been an “anything goes” environment (with notable exceptions), #GamerGate became taboo there for stepping over the lines.

As #GamerGate unfolded, men’s rights activists began using the situation to push forward a long-standing political agenda to counter feminist ideology, pushing for #GamerGate to be framed as a serious debate as opposed to being seen as a campaign of hate and harassment. In some ways, the resultant media campaign was quite successful: major conferences and journalistic enterprises felt the need to “hear both sides” as though there was a debate unfolding. Watching this, I couldn’t help but think of the work of Frank Luntz, a remarkably effective conservative political consultant known for reframing issues using politicized language.

As doxing and swatting have become more commonplace, another type of harassment also started to emerge en masse: gaslighting. This term refers to a 1944 Ingrid Bergman film called “Gas Light” (which was based on a 1938 play). The film depicts psychological abuse in a domestic violence context, where the victim starts to doubt reality because of the various actions of the abuser. It is a form of psychological warfare that can work tremendously well in an information ecosystem, especially one where it’s possible to put up information in a distributed way to make it very unclear what is legitimate, what is fake, and what is propaganda. More importantly, as many autocratic regimes have learned, this tactic is fantastic for seeding the public’s doubt in institutions and information intermediaries.

The democratization of manipulation

In the early days of blogging, many of my fellow bloggers imagined that our practice could disrupt mainstream media. For many progressive activists, social media could be a tool that could circumvent institutionalized censorship and enable a plethora of diverse voices to speak out and have their say. Civic minded scholars were excited by “smart mobs” who leveraged new communications platforms to coordinate in a decentralized way to speak truth to power. Arab Spring. Occupy Wall Street. Black Lives Matter. These energized progressives as “proof” that social technologies could make a new form of civil life possible.

I spent 15 years watching teenagers play games with powerful media outlets and attempt to achieve control over their own ecosystem. They messed with algorithms, coordinated information campaigns, and resisted attempts to curtail their speech. Like Chinese activists, they learned to hide their traces when it was to their advantage to do so. They encoded their ideas such that access to content didn’t mean access to meaning.

Of course, it wasn’t just progressive activists and teenagers who were learning how to mess with the media ecosystem that has emerged since social media unfolded. We’ve also seen the political establishment, law enforcement, marketers, and hate groups build capacity at manipulating the media landscape. Very little of what’s happening is truly illegal, but there’s no widespread agreement about which of these practices are socially and morally acceptable or not.

The techniques that are unfolding are hard to manage and combat. Some of them look like harassment, prompting people to self-censor out of fear. Others look like “fake news”, highlighting the messiness surrounding bias, misinformation, disinformation, and propaganda. There is hate speech that is explicit, but there’s also suggestive content that prompts people to frame the world in particular ways. Dog whistle politics have emerged in a new form of encoded content, where you have to be in the know to understand what’s happening. Companies who built tools to help people communicate are finding it hard to combat the ways their tools are being used by networks looking to skirt the edges of the law and content policies. Institutions and legal instruments designed to stop abuse are finding themselves ill-equipped to function in light of networked dynamics.

The Internet has long been used for gaslighting, and trolls have long targeted adversaries. What has shifted recently is the scale of the operation, the coordination of the attacks, and the strategic agenda of some of the players.

For many who are learning these techniques, it’s no longer simply about fun, nor is it even about the lulz. It has now become about acquiring power.

A new form of information manipulation is unfolding in front of our eyes. It is political. It is global. And it is populist in nature. The news media is being played like a fiddle, while decentralized networks of people are leveraging the ever-evolving networked tools around them to hack the attention economy.

I only wish I knew what happens next.

This post was first published as part of a series on media, accountability, and the public sphere. See also:

 

This post was also translated to Portuguese

Publicity and the Culture of Celebritization

In this month’s “Rolling Stone,” the magazine published an article called “Kiki Kannibal: The Girl Who Played With Fire”. The article tells the story of a 14-year-old teen in Florida who used MySpace to create a digital persona that attracted a lot of attention. An insecure and awkward teenager, Kirsten used MySpace to perform a confident, sexy persona named Kiki, sharing artistic photos that reveal a lot of skin. Not surprisingly, her sexy digital persona attracts a lot of attention – good, bad, and ugly. On one hand, she loves the validation; on the other, the stalking and personal attacks get increasingly severe and scary. This article raises all sorts of issues, in addition to those concerning attention, including sexual victimization (by a mentally unstable 18-year-old that she was dating), parental engagement (her parents encouraged her online participation as a depression-reducing strategy), and exploitation (by websites who profit off of drama). The story itself is actually quite complex, messy, and peculiar. It’s also quite clear that there’s a whole lot more to the story than what the journalist is able to pack into an article. Before Rolling Stone shut down the comments, people who said that they knew Kiki were commenting about how Kiki was more a bully than a victim and the self-declared mother of her now-dead ex was saying some fairly inflammatory things about Kiki. But in some senses, the details matter less than the overarching messy portrait. There are many fascinating aspects of this story and the ways in which it complicates how we think about teens and digital activities, but I want to drill down into the social factors involved in celebritization.

Part 1: Everyday Participation in the Attention Economy

As information swirls all around us, we have begun to build an attention economy where the value of a piece of content is driven by how much attention it can attract and sustain. It’s all about eyeballs, especially when advertising is involved. Countless social media consultants are swarming around Web2.0, trying to help organizations increase their status and profitability in the attention economy. But the attention economy doesn’t just affect the monetization of web properties; it’s increasingly shaping how people interact with one another.

Teens’ desire for attention is not new. Teens have always looked for attention and validation from others – parents, peers, and high-status individuals. And just as many in business argue that there’s no such thing as bad publicity, there are plenty of teens who believe that there’s no such thing as bad attention. The notion of an “attention whore” predates the internet. Likewise, the notion that a child might “act out” is recognized as being a call for attention. And it’s important to highlight that the gendered aspects of these tropes are reinforced online.

So what happens when a teen who is predisposed to seeking attention gets access to the tools of the attention economy? Needless to say, we see both exciting and horrifying events play out. We see teens like Tavi Gevinson propel her interest in fashion into a full-blown career before the age of 14. And we see countless teens replicating the trainwreck activities of Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan, and other celebrities. When teens leverage social media to propel themselves into the spotlight, they fully (and with reckless abandon) engage in a set of practices that Terri Senft and Alice Marwick talk about as micro-celebrity. They work to manage their impressions, cultivate attention, and interact in ways that will increase their fame and social status.

Like it or not, the culture that we live in is saturated with narratives of celebrity success and celebrity failure. It’s downright hard to avoid Charlie Sheen’s meltdown or Kate Middleton’s wedding. With the rise of reality TV and the unfolding of major social media, individuals have felt closer than ever to the possibilities of celebrity. Celebrity becomes a correlate to a perfect life- money, designer clothes, and adulthood. What being a ‘celebrity’ means is discarded; fame is an end to itself with the assumption that fame equals all things awesome despite all the copious examples to the contrary. So teens only hold on to the positive aspects, hoping for the benefits of becoming famous and ignoring the consequences.

Kiki’s story is all about the celebritization of everyday life. She leveraged social media – and her image as a sexy young woman – to capture widespread attention. She turned herself into a commodity, and commoditized her popularity through her jewelry store. And the more attention she captured, the more she faced the benefits and costs of celebrity. Like her more famous peers – folks like Miley Cyrus and Demi Lovato – Kiki attracted both fans and haters. But what’s different is that Lovato’s fame has come with a fortune and a whole lot of handlers; Kiki lacked the resources to handle the onslaught and never made it big enough to recoup the ground she lost to weather the fame.

To complicate matters more, Kiki is engaged in a set of attention-seeking practices that make most adults nervous. She’s not capturing massive attention through being a clean-cut geek, like Rebecca Black (of “Friday” fame). And she’s not the center of a controversy for violating social norms, like Alexandra Wallace (of “Asians in the Library” fame). Instead, she’s using her image and her creativity to express herself as a sexy young woman in a sex-saturated society that hypocritically loves sexualized imagery and deplores young women who engage in it. This leaves her in an awkward and tenuous position – she’s successful at attracting attention but, because it’s outside of the media machine and involves the tropes of underage sexuality, she’s also under attack and not defended.

Part 2: The Toxicity of Fame

In reading Kiki’s story, it’s hard not to wonder why she doesn’t just walk away from her digital persona. Sure, her digital business – which depends on her celebritization – would falter (and there are some interesting implications in this wrt her family’s limited resources). But if the cruelty is so psychologically harmful, is it really worth it?

For years, I worked for V-Day, an organization committed to ending violence against women and girls. I’ve met countless women who continually return to abusive relationships because the highs make the lows worth it. My own experiences required me to constantly push back against the voice in my head that said: “this time will be different, right?” Again, it comes down to attention. Being showered with love feels so good that it’s often easy to forget the bad days. There are countless reasons behind why those in abusive relationships stay in them, but one things clear: walking away from an abusive relationship is never easy.

Life in the spotlight can easily take the form of an abusive relationship. When the attention is good, it’s really good and it feels really good. And when the attention fades, people can feel lonely and anxious, desperate for more, even if it’s negative attention. But when the attention gets negative, things can easily spiral out of control. There are countless examples of celebrities for whom fame is a toxic substance. There’s always a cost to the attention. Herein lies a challenge… is the fame worth it?

Personally, I’ve always struggled with this. I have the great fortune of being highly visible and the rewards of my micro-fame have been tremendous. But I can’t say it’s been easy or that it’s always fun. It’s hard to stomach photoshopped images and cruel comments. And people aren’t always kind when they think that I don’t deserve the attention I’ve gotten. But, all things told, I have it pretty good. I’m confident in who I am; I have a successful career; and my haters aren’t that vicious. But I’ve managed to achieve enough attention to be wary of it and to appreciate how toxic and cruel a substance it can be. And there are certainly times when I find myself slipping into a pattern that I know so well, where I feel like my relationship with the internet has the same cycles of some of my more abusive relationships.

I’m not convinced that people of any age are well equipped to handle fame, let alone the cruel cycles that can come with it. Certainly, experience makes it easier to stomach, but Charlie Sheen’s meltdown should make it crystal clear that it’s not just teen girls who struggle with the spotlight. The thing about youth is that they often crave celebrity a lot more than adults. And their mental images of what it means are often distorted. So many teens that I interviewed over the years have talked about fame as freedom, failing to recognize the constraints that come with those golden handcuffs.

Kiki is living in a whirlwind of fame, attention, and commodification. She’s turned herself into someone to watch and those who are watching are asserting power over her in deeply problematic ways. She’s created a digital icon but her audience has objectified her, failing to recognize or value the person behind the icon. This puts her in a peculiar place with limited control. And that would be the precise location of celebrity.

I suspect we are going to see more and more stories of individuals who have wanted celebrity to more or lesser degrees and who are sucked into a tumultuous relationship with fame. And I suspect the public will swing between feeling sympathy for their plight and blaming them for putting themselves out there. This is certainly the case with respect to those brought into the public eye through reality TV and tabloid magazines, and even those who are fired from jobs or kicked out of school for what they post on Facebook or Twitter. But I fear that our collective objectification of very visible people is also going to get much worse as more individuals come to prominence online. And many of those for whom the worst vitriol is reserved are young women, especially those who transgress the social boundaries of what it means to be nice or sexually appropriate. Internet commenting makes it easy to spew venom towards those in the crosshairs of celebrity, but we should recognize this isn’t simply a position to be envied. Just because people benefit from being visible doesn’t mean that they have the wherewithal to stomach the attacks. At the same time, just because celebrity is an option doesn’t mean that it’s a healthy one.

Widespread celebritization is the flipside of the “attention economy” coin and I think that we have a lot of deep thinking to do about the implications of both of these. Both are already rattling society in unexpected ways and I’m not convinced that we have the social, psychological, or cultural infrastructure to manage what will unfold. Some people will become famous or rich. Others will commit suicide or drown attempting to swim in these rocky waves. This doesn’t mean that we should blockade the technologies that are emerging, but it’s high time that we start reflecting on the societal values that are getting magnified by them.

[This post wouldn’t have been possible without the help Alice Marwick, Mary Gray, and Mike Ananny.]