Over the past couple of decades, the information field has changed dramatically, and with it the features of our perception of information. How did content producers have to adapt their messages to our new needs?
About the Author: Alexander Izryadnov, co-founder and CEO of Vinci Agency.
With the advent of the Internet, the number of channels for obtaining information has grown exponentially: instead of several newspapers and television channels, we have received billions of sources, a huge variety of formats and, as a result, an infinitely dense information flow. It is completely impossible to pass it through yourself, so people have developed tough filters that filter out unnecessary messages and save you from overload. Now a person is much more difficult to “hook”.
Most of the content that comes into our field of vision, we do not even fix, and if we pay attention to it, we quickly throw it out of our heads. That is why the media, politicians and bloggers are forced to change the format of broadcasting their messages.
Current trends in content delivery:
I will expand on these points in more detail.
Fight for the audience
Producers of information, whether they be media, politicians, public figures or brand marketers, have to fight a real fight for the interest of the audience. Over several information-saturated decades, we managed to develop high expectations from the information received. And the more attractive it is, the better it “gets” into the audience, the more chances it has to attract attention. Therefore, although everyone now has access to the mass broadcast of their thoughts, it is not enough to start your own channel on Telegram or on YouTube to form the agenda. If the content is boring and not relevant, the audience will simply pass by.
The same applies to the variety of formats: infographics, videos, stories, podcasts, tests, posts on social networks – the right mix of all this, of course, increases the chances of “reaching out” to a person, but this is impossible without high-quality content. For example, The New York Times has relied on diverse – journalists talk about politics, business, science, health, culture and food – and high-quality content. It can be accessed via paywall. As a result, the NYT has become the most widely read paid publication in the world.
Another feature of modernity has become the parallel consumption of content: while watching a series, we can simultaneously not only scroll through the Instagram feed and talk with a friend, but also google information about the same series or actors. For content producers, our multitasking has opened up the opportunity to influence the audience in a complex way, attacking it with our messages through all possible channels. In particular, for these reasons, most media are no longer limited to a website or a printed version, supplementing them with pages on social networks, an application, podcasts or a YouTube channel.
Miniseries and voice-over rejection
The increased information load could not but affect the concentration of attention: we began to perceive long formats with difficulty, often do not read the news beyond the headline and lead paragraph, and from a series of stories on Instagram we watch only the first one in full. Today, users do not read the content completely, but scan the page diagonally, stopping their eyes only on its individual elements.
As a result, formats are getting shorter: long reads have been replaced by short notes, and endless soap operas have given way to miniseries, and even in a regular series, the number of episodes per season has been reduced from the standard ten to six or eight episodes (as happened, for example, with ” Game of Thrones). This is largely due to the desire to reduce production costs, but to a greater extent it is dictated by the desire to ensure that the maximum number of viewers watch the entire season.
To make it easier to read, content is broken up into small chunks, which is why the Instagram story format has proven so popular. The number of thoughts embedded in the message is also reduced. Although our bandwidth has increased over the past 25 years, it still proved to be finite – therefore, along with the expansion of the number of channels of influence, the diversity of content is reduced. The principle of “one piece of content – one thought” applies to all formats. A good illustration of this thesis can be a typical text in the American media, where the same message is repeated in the headline, lead paragraph, first paragraph, and so on – so that the reader accurately catches what they want to convey to him. Messages are “cleaned out” not only from additional meanings, but also from superfluous layers: for example, voice-overs gradually disappear from commercials so as not to distract the viewer from the main idea.
End of reflection
The increase in the density of the information flow is associated with another trend: subtext is gradually disappearing from the information. If earlier the author often put an implicit meaning into the message in the expectation that the audience would see him and he would respond to her, today information producers are trying to speak as straightforwardly as possible and avoid discrepancies. All efforts are now directed not to dialogue with the public and receiving feedback from it, but to conveying the message as accurately as possible. And it’s not that people are becoming stupid: the reason lies in the huge amount of information that we deal with every day. There is simply no time left for “reading” in such conditions, so content producers consciously refuse to rely on the audience’s ability to reflect.
But the subtext is replaced by an emotional load: any message now must necessarily be emotionally charged, contain a ready-made emotional experience. In particular, this is why it is so often said that the demand for independent journalism is disappearing in the world. It is interesting for us to perceive such information, where the attitude of the author was originally laid down. This is also partly due to an increase in the information load: we have no time to reflect on the message, to develop our own opinion and attitude towards it. Therefore, someone who can do all this work for us, including in relation to emotional experiences, enjoys the well-deserved attention of the audience.
Subscribe also to the Trends Telegram channel and stay up to date with current trends and forecasts about the future of technology, economics, education and innovation.