« Dibbell earns $47k annualized in Ultima Online |
Main
| Creation of a Social Innovation Map in Vienna »
April 18, 2004
LJ Images
Posted by Clay Shirky
Short post: A page that displays the
10 most recent images from LiveJournal.
And now the long post-script: This goes in the 'I don't get it' category -- saw this a while ago and passed over it, but several people have since forwarded it to me, so there's obviously something there, but what?
Here are the answers I've been able to think of: first, people often see things like this, and are interested only for as long as it takes to forward the links. It's like that old Plumb design 'Visual Thesaurus' -- everyone loved it when they first saw it, but no one ever used it.
We've gone from a world where passing something on to a friend meant that you were interested in something for long enough to remember it to a world where you don't have to have anything other than a momentary frisson to forward it to someone who thinks its cool just long enough to forward it again. LJ Images as the new Hamster Dance.
Second, images appeal, necessarily, to a sub-intellectual part of the brain. (necessarily, because eyes existed long before cerebellums.) It may be that anything using images sparks positive short-term reactions.
Third, skin. Enough of the pictures are party snapshots, and the LJ cohort skews young and restless, so there may be a "Girls Gone Wild: LJ Edition!" pleasure in hitting refresh while looking for the occasional moderately revealing photo.
But overall, the service is a bore, especially compared with the
LJ Random User feature. I wonder if the pressure to get and even lead the rush to any new discovery in the weblog world leads people to over-forward stuff like this, creating an attention market for material with high immediate appeal and short shelf-life? What would happen to our memes if there were a 24 hour lag between viewing and recommending?
Comments (7)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: social software
- RELATED ENTRIES
- › Spolsky on Blog Comments: Scale matters
- › "The internet's output is data, but its product is freedom"
- › Andrew Keen: Rescuing 'Luddite' from the Luddites
- › knowledge access as a public good
- › viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace
- › Gorman, redux: The Siren Song of the Internet
- › Mis-understanding Fred Wilson's 'Age and Entrepreneurship' argument
- › The Future Belongs to Those Who Take The Present For Granted: A return to Fred Wilson's "age question"
1. simoniker on April 18, 2004 10:20 PM writes...
I find it fascinating because it's a weirdly telling cross-section of people using LiveJournal right now - it's actually addictive, weirdly enough. I claimed of it on my weblog:
'Completely, brainsuckingly addictive, anyhow, and either a haunting indictment of today's Internet youth, or just a whole bunch of fun. I vote for the latter.'
So, don't get it, but like it.
Permalink to Comment2. Cory Doctorow on April 19, 2004 1:56 AM writes...
Serindipitous LJ images are being posted and discussed on a private image-sharing community I'm a member of. It reminds me a lot of the experience of using EtherPEG on a network at a conference or -- more closley -- in a hotel-room, where you don't know anything about the other people on the network except what you can deduce from the image zeitgeist.
Permalink to Comment3. Seb on April 19, 2004 8:35 AM writes...
Isn't LJ Images just another way of picking a random LJ user, with a different bias?
Re your postscript, many people don't notice that they're becoming sources of occupational spam. Mindless link propagation should always be opt-in. Thanks to del.icio.us and the like, doing it in this way becomes easier than emailing, so why not use that?
Permalink to Comment4. greglas on April 19, 2004 10:22 AM writes...
Clay> Second, images appeal, necessarily, to a sub-intellectual part of the brain.
Hey now -- them's fightin' words! Heuristic and intuitive thinking is not "sub-intellectual". The right brain tribe is just differently abled. Remember, any one of these pix is worth *1000* words.
This is like channel-surfing with your TV remote, or people-watching in New York, or taking a Sunday drive. Each image you see is one very personal vote saying "I liked this image enough that I uploaded it for others to see." If you happen to share that taste, you click and go deeper, and maybe even get some of that "intellectual" textual commentary. If you don't, it's easy to move your eyes to the next image. I see the value in it, though I think a large part of the fascination with this has to be the immediate temporal aspect.
Permalink to Comment5. Ben Hyde on April 19, 2004 10:27 AM writes...
It's an interesting complement to the question of why people reveal stuff - i.e. why do we care to observe what they reveal?
Monkey see, monkey do, monkey monitize :-)
Is there an chat room someplace I can hang out and join others to make snarky comments on pictures randomly selected from the media stream?
Permalink to Comment6. Evan Martin on April 19, 2004 2:04 PM writes...
The site you linked uses a data feed that was created as a favor to jwz for his webcollage, which needs sources of arbitrary image URLs.
In the source, he mentions that Alta Vista provided him a feed and that Google turned him down.
Permalink to Comment7. poszoski on April 19, 2004 2:41 PM writes...
"Second, images appeal, necessarily, to a sub-intellectual part of the brain."
I've been looking at LJ images quite a lot this couple months, having chosen them as an object of study. I think there is nothing sub-intellectual to watching LJ images as a research object, only an attention span longer than couple minutes is needed.
But sub-intellectuality does surface for me in this story, but it has more to do with
a. (what Clay observed) the pointlessness of some linking activity, and even more:
b. the image-sucking tool itself. Internet offers easy ways of scooping up content. Instant research gratification. And there is something satisfying about statments like "most recent", "10 pictures" (top 10 pictures?). But in fact, use of this script can be compared to finding out anything from latest issue of Science by flipping through it quickly and trying to make some sense of the graphics.
For instance, if instead you check out livejournal's 'posts from the last minute' feed, you'll find out that every minute there are always several posts out of a hundred that report user's results on one of the 'meme questionnaires'. ("You are Frodo, the hero of the netherworld" - they are very popular on LJ).
Just a fad, one might say, but sheer popularity says tonnes about people and culture today.
And if you look in right places, visual side of LJ offers much more than: "Completely, brainsuckingly addictive...whole bunch of fun". There are places, where images are utterly sad, and others where their message is outright scary.
I think LJ is much like normal life and we should stop thinking about it as just a mindless circus or shopping mall, where teens hang out. This attitude seems quite prevalent, to build the prestige of the bLOGOSphere by criticizing LJspace. And the only reasons for which LJ is commended is the ease, with which some social network analysis exercises are executed there.
Permalink to Comment