In my previous introductory post I noted that one of the subjects of social media is mass psychology and social representations. Let me explain.
In my browsing time in many blogs, I noticed quite often posts about traffic. The Blog Herald wrote “How to get me read your blog”, Darren Rowse in Problogger.net wrote “10 Techniques to get more comments on your blog” and randiz in “seomoz” noted “21 tactics to increase blog traffic”. I found all these posts very interesting and enlightening and I am not advocating against them. It is extremely difficult in this unthinkable complexity of the blogosphere to get heard and every blogger needs some starting tips (I know I do).
The bottom line of such posts is attentiveness. What to do, to get attention to your blog.
Understanding how the collective mind functions (explained by the studies of social and mass psyschologists), surely helps us grasp what draws the attention of individuals. The simultaneous post of content in several engines (digg, technorati, delicious, reddit, slashdot and endless more) is also one of the main techniques of mass media broadcasting.
- It is called repetition. Advertising has been based on repetition for decades. The more posters and tv spots we see about the new iPhone, the more it gets our attention.
- Catchy headlines have the same magnetic function. Like reading a newspaper; which title will draw our attention?
- mouth-to-mouth dispersion (the way digg or slashdot function) of a message is also a subject of mass psychology.
And these are just a few similarities of attentiveness between mass and social media. I’m not saying that these mass media principles can be transferred in the social web. We are dealing with completely different forms of communicating a message and a completely different public. But still seeing how the collective mind works, surely gives us the basics. The question is where can we set these boundaries between attention in mass and social media? To which degree can the (in a way) outdated theories of mass psychology find usage in the blogosphere?
Chris responded on 29 Jan 2008 at 11:36 am #
Great post. Found the article when I was trying to research an article of my own (dammit…). Anyway, thought you might find this link interesting. It’s the book, “Propaganda”, by Edward Bernays. It’s pretty depressing stuff.
http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/bernprop.html
robojiannis responded on 29 Jan 2008 at 5:30 pm #
@ Chris
great link, thanks! I didn’t managed to read the whole thing, but looks very promising. I’m out of town for a couple of days, I’ll read it more attentivelly when I return.