Florian Aigner, physicist and science explainer who is only too happy to deal with pseudoscience, writes in a column on Futurezone.at about the attention economy in social media.
Reading recommendation! Aigner writes clearly: we pay too much attention to the wrong people. Instead of engaging with clever content, scandalous, dramatic and stupid content is preferred. In his eyes, music, literature and good journalism stand in stark contrast to fail, videos, beauty tips and cheap hate speech.
In his opinion, the oversupply of information means that in the end we are no longer able to recognize which content is relevant and which just dumbs us down.
bread and games
We can definitely agree: people want to convey wrong content, people want to consume wrong content. It's not about whether what's being said is true, but whether you want to hear it. And whether it entertains. False reports or perceived scandalous truths not only have a higher entertainment value, but also a much greater and faster reach. Debunking, as we do on our websites, is only successful to a limited extent. That’s why we are placing more and more emphasis on digital media education. Teaching people how to use social media. How does social media work, what do I have to pay attention to? What is my “digital self”? How is content created and how does it work?
The problem is us. We who want to have everything in the end, who want to do everything, but in the end don't want to stand up for our actions. We who only want to know what outrages us, only consume what thrills us. We have to rethink things, we have to put our consumption budget to the test.
Do we want to be dumbed down because we pay too much attention to stupid content?
“ Don’t make stupid people famous!” The most important currency of our time is attention. We dedicate them to the wrong people ”. says Aigner. Read more at Futurezone.at
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Notes:
1) This content reflects the current state of affairs at the time of publication. The reproduction of individual images, screenshots, embeds or video sequences serves to discuss the topic. 2) Individual contributions were created through the use of machine assistance and were carefully checked by the Mimikama editorial team before publication. ( Reason )

