The balance of seeking and paying attention
Social networking websites take an important part of our lives now. We have to constantly check our feeds to keep up and interact with others. You may think that updating statuses or uploading photos is nothing more than sharing about your lives. But this actually shapes your identity, people have different impressions of you based on what you post on these websites.
We all have that friend on facebook (usually girls) who always post pictures, status fishing attentions. They usually present the emo side of them. They posts from pictures of them crying, wallpost with over-exaggerated statements to vaguebooking statuses like “I’m sad…” , “Had the worst day ever…”, but when you ask them what is wrong, they will just tell you “it’s really personal, so don’t ask”. Every time I see stuff like this, this is my reaction:
Michael Holdhaber (1997) said that we are living in an attention economy where value is created from the exchange of attention. We seek attention, obtain attention and pay attention. Every thing is dying to get our attention so that we will spend a little time on them. Most of the social networking websites are built upon this concept. What’s the point of updating your status on facebook? People want attention from others. They will talk about interesting thing happened that day, post some pictures, or share some funny videos. You show that you have paid attention by liking or commenting, so that the original poster won’t look like he/she is talking to himself/herself. We all need to manage a balanced attention structure. We have to seek, obtain and pay attention at a right level. Seeking too much attention or paying too much attention is annoying.
The internet users came up with a term “attention whore” to refer to people who crave attention to an extent that they become annoying and would almost do anything to get attention. These people are usually in their early adulthood, insecure, emotionally unstable and needy. Some common symptoms of this “attention whore” disease patients are that they always upload excessive amount of self-portraits wherever they go and vaguebooking. They post status updates fishing attentions. Usually, their status updates are vague, you don’t know what they really want to say and you want to ask them what really happened. They lure you into asking them questions so that they get the attentions they want. This is how this whole trap works. If one person asked, these “attention whores” succeeded. They do this in order to get attention, to feel secured.
This “attention whore” term exists because most of the internet users are annoyed by these “attention whores”. Those meaningless whining, photos that look all the same annoy others because these “attention whores” clearly violated the whole balance of the attention structure. People might be interested in what they are up to in the first few times. But after posts after posts, statuses after statuses, it becomes annoying. They seek way too much attention, and other people eventually lose their interest in these “attention whores”.
Paying too much attention is not a pleasant thing either. It is creepy and annoying. This happens the most on facebook as the users can see photos, videos of a particular user other than just status updates. This kind of people pay an excessive amount of attention to other users. Some of them like every thing, comment on every thing, read every thing; some of them just stalk without being noticed but they actually saw every thing that you’ve posted on facebook. The internet users call this kind of people “facebook creeper”. According to the urban dictionary, a “facebook creeper” is “someone who uses facebook but is looking at other peoples profiles, going through their pictures, reading their messages. It’s a little like stalking.”
This kind of behaviour might be more acceptable among close friends. But it is actually still very rare to see close friends liking or commenting every single posts by each other. Again, this behaviour is another example of losing the balance of attention. Paying the right amount of attention to others is a very pleasant thing, it helps you to become popular, to build a friendly image. But paying too much attention is just creepy as hell. It annoys others. And people might actually think you are a creep, a stalker or a psychopath.
So if you don’t want to see people ignore you because you are posting too many annoying stuff on facebook, or don’t want to see people avoid you because you are stalking them, remember to maintain a good balance between seeking attention and paying attention. Too much of each can kill your facebook life.
Curiouser and curiouser 