Blink

A MAN'S EYE

EXTREME CLOSEUP. Open wide. The man's skin wet, speckled with soil and flecks of blood. His breathing CLOSELY MIKED -- erratic. This man's in shock. The SOUNDS of INSECTS and ANIMALS other-worldly. A blink.

Then, the REVERSE ANGLE: staring up hundreds of BAMBOO STALKS. Sunlight almost impenetrable through the dense forest.

SLIGHTLY WIDER on the Man's face as he stares upward, disoriented, stunned. 40-years-old. Fit. In normal circumstances, one glance would make you feel confident in him. Trusting. But here, now, he's the one in trauma.

His name is JACK.

At this point, about fifteen seconds into the pilot episode of Lost, I turned off my mobile phone, smiled and thought, “This is going to be interesting.” If you’d called me at that moment (on the landline) to ask what I meant, I probably would have snapped something like “I mean it’ll be worth thinking about!” before hanging up in an equally rude manner which I now regret.

Since then I’ve calmed down and thought a bit more about both interestingness and what I saw in Jack’s eye and I’ve come to see that my initial definition (interesting = worth thinking about) begs a more relevant underlying question: How do we decide that something is worth thinking about before we’ve thought about it?

Because that’s what we do, isn’t it? We don’t probe the potential depth of all stimuli in a uniform, experimental way. Instead, confronted by some overwhelming number of directed messages per day (let alone the infinite number of undirected ones), we behave like any other animal snuffling through its environment: by responding instantly, unconsciously, reflexively to signs. The bright colors of a poison dart frog are enough to warn (or deceive) potential predators: This is poison. Do not investigate further. And frogs, in turn, are automatically drawn to a particular visual sign, an intermittent motion pattern, whether the object displaying that sign is the promised tasty bit o’ fly or just a tricky experimental apparatus.

So I’m wondering, what are the signs that say, “Trust me. This will not bore you. Nor will it simply yank your attention chain for a voyeuristic moment during which we will attempt to imprint our logo on your retina. This will be worth your continued rational, emotional and practical engagement”? What makes some things immediately seem interesting to us before we know whether they actually are or not?*

This question is increasingly important for advertisers as the commercial messaging environment becomes more crowded, largely by swarms of “teasers”: relatively small, information-poor messages designed to encourage “click through”, literal or figurative. This includes web banners, AdSense blurbs, urban spam, 1- to 5-second ads, billboards or anything else primarily intended to drive viewers to a website or some other high-engagement experience. Like all touts, they want to get you inside to spend some of your hard-earned (attention), but they’ve got very little time (maybe only a blink) and space to do it. What signs will make the most efficient use of that tiny stage?

Based on some desultory snuffling, my first guess is that a thing that seems interesting has one or more of these characteristics:

• It’s new (To the viewer. In some way. We tend not to be interested in things we’ve seen before and think we understand.)
• It promises to reveal unexpected regularities in the world (This is important as it rules out the uninteresting novelties of static/noise. But it also needs a lengthier explanation than I can fit here so I’m going to leave it for now and come back to it in later posts.)
• It promises that those regularities will be discoverable with a relatively minimal effort (“Relative” meaning just that we tend to pick the low hanging fruit first.  I’m sure I’d discover lots of novel and unexpected (to me) regularities by reading a physics textbook, but the effort required makes the prospect distinctly uninteresting.)
• It holds the interest of trustworthy sources. (As Jen says, “If The New Yorker wants to tell me why the color blue is fascinating, I’ll listen.” The effect of this sign is heightened when it’s not entirely clear why those sources are interested (i.e. “buzz”)

Somehow, this list manages to appear both obvious and wrong at the same time. So now I intend to improve it, to make it more specific, by throwing examples against it and looking at how it relates to things like storytelling, insights, spectacularism, Low Attention Processing, brief writing, boredom, creativity, Coca-Cola, how (some) advertising works, web navigation, crying babies, media ecology, the lameness of teaser campaigns, the value of curiosity, tracking, music marketing, what makes a good planner and why I eventually lost interest in Lost despite the apparent reflection of low hanging, unexpected regularities in Jack's eye.

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* The word “interesting” is often used to describe anything that displays the signs of interestingness, whether or not what’s behind it actually turns out to be worth thinking about. By this definition, there is no mere seeming to be interesting. Seeming to be interesting is being interesting. If, however, you, like me, have ever fallen for a bitterly disappointing teaser campaign, you will agree that these two ideas should be clearly distinguished from one another for the sake of both clear communication and personal mental hygiene.

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