Publishing in the Age of the Apphole
Craig Mod’s latest Roden Explorer newsletter features excerpts from a long speech he delivered about dopamine, smart phones appholes, and the social contracts of entertainment. You can check it out via his newsletter archive, and I’d suggest it’s as required reading if you’re an author trying to forge a living in a social media world. Part of what interests me about the speech is the way he charts the progression of certain media outlets into dopaminergenic publications–a frequent problem with legacy media outlets transitioning into an online space, forcing them to at least partially shift their business model to capturing your attention and keeping your eyeballs on their sites in order to reap sweet advertising bucks. When these incumbent newspapers were print only, there was only one way to “enter” the content: Through the front page. The front page was all you could see on the news stand. Once you bought the thing, you were converted to a paying participant.
