After The Spike and After The Like — A Brief History of Attention — Medium: This is why we need to focus on stories and audiences again. The last 50-60 years of mass media reduced the feedback loop between storytellers and audiences to a quiet signal, represented mainly by one big number. The early era of digital has adopted some of these old patterns, and focused mainly on the Spike and the Like, but we’re moving away from that now, and seeing the emergence of interesting new patterns that are based on more complex relationships between the audience and the storyteller.
We’re still only in the beginning, and the next couple of decades will see content industries rise and fall based on their ability to adapt and build businesses around these new patterns. There’s never been a better time to tell stories, and never a better time to be in the audience.