Ted Talk: How craving attention makes you less creative – Joseph Gordon-Levitt | Hacker News Reader

Ted Talk: How craving attention makes you less creative – Joseph Gordon-Levitt

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27 pointsmomentmaker11 comments

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Speaking of craving attention- here's my TEDx talk on the same issue:

Protecting our creativity from the side-effects of technology

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6LNjVmcVF68

Please pay attention to my TEDx talk about how craving attention is bad! ;)

I jest. Given I'm creating free content for a website so I can earn worthless attention points, I'm no better.

"Earning" attention points is a frame of mind, as the reciever of votes may look upon themselves as a sort of beneficiary. Being invalidated by the metric of how many people/machines (digitally) voted against one's content does not invalidate the idea itself. Write instead for your curious audience of historians digging through archives over the next few decades. But more importantly, for those of us that know to wade through digital (or analog) noise in order to find valuable information worth repeating.

I prioritize reviewing the most downvoted content, because the average downvote is an overreaction (emotional response). Ignoring the first few "top voted" responses (or search results, beginning sentences of a news article) is a shortcut to the more useful content.

"Points" are not good or bad. They are an indicator of traffic (automated or genuine). They are not worthless.

They're worthless to me. I've not gained anything by having them.

I suppose I shouldn't have said "they are not worthless" after listing reasons why the point system could be compromised (emotional voting or the vote dilution of agenda-driven automated bots).

I think it is because you said the word "earn" which I thought may have reflected the outlook of most digital forum participants (earn implies value).

In a physical space we may evaluate reception of our ideas through nodding, verbal affirmation, or during our turn of the conversation. I would think it would be more difficult for a malicious actor to manipulate public opinion with these classical communication methods.

Perhaps now it is more difficult for quality content to be injected into society (or for society to think for itself) when most folks may naturally feel more comfortable consuming content with the largest (potentially artificial) view, vote, stream, or click count.

Maybe there are entire divisions of allocated cognitive labor designed exclusively to determine authenticity of traffic, which is unfortunate but necessary (and will likely not be thorough).

Maybe there are not.

I find a lot of people dealing with startups ... employees and founders (mostly) posting practically everything on social media from going to an event, launching a product / service, last night's dinner, a picture of every coffee in the day, a message in the loo and a coworker dozing off ... etc

I always wonder if this is a means of guerrilla marketing, being social, expressing camaraderie or showing gratitude?

I think of it as social validation and wonder its impact on creativity, morale, etc (if any at all)

ORIGINAL SOURCE WITH TRANSCRIPTS

https://www.ted.com/talks/joseph_gordon_levitt_how_craving_a...

are there any social media platforms that don't have metrics like follower counts, karma etc ?

Sure, there's 4chan

4chan is an excellent example of a cure worse than the disease.

Not really. Even Mastodon has them, but you can tweak settings to hide how many people you follow and how many followers you have. You can also filter your notifications so that you only see replies instead of replies, boosts, and faves.

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