Hamish McKenzie, in  addressing the attention economy  on the Substack blog, refers back to the old (pre-social media) internet and blogging. This is internet history. That was then. We now live and work in the attention economy  with  its environment of perpetual digital distraction  where  companies  (eg., Facebook and Google) are targeting our attention to make money. Their business model is  the monetisation of attention to  passively consume through governing modes of participation  within the system. Facebook's  software has the capacity to  produce and instantiate modes of attention as well as to track and process  user data across the web. This is an infrastructure that  works invisibly in the background to shape forms of sociality.   

What has emerged is a techno-culture of perpetual distraction--all those pings, pop-ups, notifications  that cause us to be perpetually distracted.  Rather than democratising the public sphere, social media replaces it with a global Freudian id, in which everyone’s darkest impulses collide, and rational  debate becomes difficult.

So we need to critically think about the  role of Facebook's network of friends in our lives,  how it affects our mental capacities and predicts our future interests.   

So how might we critically engage? 

McKenzie  say that  Substack,  which  is an independent publishing platform  based on a subscription model,  is a place where writers are rewarded not for doing the things that capture attention but instead for doing the things that respect readers’ trust. Substack emerged as a digital publishing platform from a  frustration with:

"how the quality of discussion has been degraded on social media. We are dumber on social media than we are in real life. We are less forgiving, less willing to listen and understand, and more prone to dismiss and then torch our ideological opponents. That, after all, is how we earn internet points....the incentives that underpin today’s dominant internet media businesses have led to tribalism and groupthink ... With an ad-based business model you have to play for scale, which isn’t always conducive to good discourse. To make any meaningful money in such a model, media producers have to generate millions of ad impressions." 

He says that the old internet internet felt like a less hostile place then, and there were fewer heat-seeking algorithms that sought to transmute attention into gold. Substack, as a counter force to social media  he adds,   frequently references that blogging era,  and  it seeks to recapture some of what made it special.

Substack is primarily a critical response to the decline in newspapers and mass media.  McKenzie  says that the news business--- interpreted in its broadest sense—is unsustainable,  if it continues to rely on advertising,  given Google and Facebook's predominance in capturing online advertising.   McKenzie's hope and argument is that  a niche model based on subscriptions can trigger an explosion of independent publishing.  Substack is an example. 

 So what of other creatives--eg., those in the visual arts? Well,  there is Patreon, which I know very little about.

How are photographers acting as a counter response or force  to the visual noise on social media in a world  (news/journalist ) photography is a part of our widely networked information/data system; a world where  photography’s immediacy does  stand in the way of producing an understanding of political events that  mostly stage managed as theatre.  

Not many photographers  continue to blog. If they  do, like myself,  this has problems with limited distribution and a lack of comment/discussion.   Consequently, I mostly use my  photo blogs to edit possible  or emerging projects.  A niche  photography model based on subscriptions (the Substack model) doesn't appear to have  been taken up. A thousand flowers have not bloomed,    even though precisely targeted and curated content does mean less data and noise.

Some  like myself have started doing free newsletters, utilising a peer-to-peer approach,  so as to broaden their audience in a world of  data overload, hyper-consumption, attention scarcity,  and the increased  competition for people’s attention in an age of information/data  overload. It is difficult to build an audience, and  gain their deep attention, when the newsletter  is filtered  into  the junk file in the mailbox. It is difficult to counter  Facebook's techno-culture of Facebook's ways of attending to the world that shape the negation of 'the public'  in favour of the emphasis on  the specific individual user.  The niche newsletters struggle to  attract attention in an attention economy.