The Perils of Audience Capture

The Perils of Audience Capture
gurwinder.substack.com

The core idea here goes beyond that of creator and audience, though. We are shaped by who our community expects us to be. It then becomes hard to break out the norms we find ourselves in. We cannot escape our community's expectation. Be they parents, friends, or partners. We are locked into ourselves by those that root us.

It's for this reason that solo travel seems the be the great reset of who we are as people. The vague and hokey-seeming idea of 'finding yourself' is really about escaping prior expectations and trying own new personas. In each new city, you can be a new person.

The aspect explored in the article is important not just for creators but for your online persona via social media wherein the participant gets positive reinforcement for specific kinds of posts and that reinforcement shapes their lives in real ways. We become the people that are most rewarded by the platforms. This is both normalizing (as in instagram insincerity) and antagonizing (as with twitter/facebook engagement metrics promoting inflammatory opinions).

I have trouble seeing any good that comes from our algorithmically created personalities.

Everyone is in search of an audience, or in economic terms, each producer is in search of consumers.

Once you find a market you can tailor your fit to suit that market. I might start out making leisurewear, but when I discover most of my sales is sweat-pants, I'm likely to focus my attention there, creating more designs in a narrower niche.

"influencer" is a recent career option, so it seems like it's full of unknowns, but clearly it's the same processes. First find an audience, then do whatever it takes to enlarge that audience and make them "buy more tickets".

Music, movies and TV are the same - you might think Jean Claude van Dam movies are formulaic, but clearly he has found an audience that likes that formula. He can't make a romcom because his non-fans won't give it a chance, and his fans won't pay for a romcom.

If you find a sudden audience by going viral, then clearly you're going to try and hold that audience by repeating the formula. And wacko theories always attract good repeat customers, for reasons which are pretty obvious.

One person has perfected this to the point where his audience gives him $250 million when he loses a race, as long as he claims it won. Hmm, maybe influencer isn't such a new job after all (just a new job description).

I read twitter accounts sometimes and note that sometimes the person writing is mentally ill, but has so many followers encouraging them, that I dont think they will ever escape from their delusions.

Prior to the internet, they may not have attracted such a large audience, and their life would have been very different.

I think the lady doth protest too much.

>On Twitter I cultivated a reasonable, open-minded audience by posting reasonable, open-minded tweets.

The most open minded audience on Twitter is a bit like the most hygienic landfill.

Being inconsistent is the only way to be true to yourself. This is antithetical to having an audience which expects you to act in a certain way. Regardless of how open minded you think the people who follow you are they will stop following you after a point.

This is why having One True Identity^(tm) is antithetical to being human regardless of how much google, twitter, the government and lynching enthusiasts want you to.