(A video version of this post can be found at: https://www.instagram.com/p/DeVAJZ8SR-Y/)

Back in July, I posted a book recommendation – Feed, by M.T. Anderson.

Though it has been many years since I read the book, my biggest take away from it was the idea that society was being dumbed down by the constant FEED of information every moment of their lives. In the book, the internet is basically implanted in a person’s brain, so ads and news and content are constantly flashing across a person consciousness.

Since my last two books were released in March of this year, I’ve been diligent in creating content for all the various platforms I belong to. Let me pick one for a moment – TikTok. I had read that having a platform on TikTok with hashtags attached to my content aiming at BookTok was a viable method for an author to spread the word about the books they’ve published.

I took a trip down the rabbit hole.

You should prepare yourself for the wave of videos that will confront you with endless tidbits and advice and how-to suggestions and best practices. No one person could ever consume the raw data or act on it or even decide which is good stuff and which is garbage. It’s the same with Instagram, Facebook, Threads, LinkedIn – a gazillion talking faces chatting away like a swarm of gnats buzzing in your ears and assaulting your eyes.

So, I’ve posted videos on all of them on topics ranging from books and writing to politics and religion trying to promote my novels and brand myself as the author behind them. In our world today, they amount to an infinitesimal drop in the ocean. You spend a little money to boost them so the algorithms that make these platforms work will send your content beyond the following you’ve managed to build and slowly…very slowly, watch you “follower” list increase.

This is just social media. I’ve discovered the same thing regarding my book listings on Amazon. My two books published in March were among 300,000 other new titles that month. I looked up how many titles are listed on Amazon and the result showed somewhere between 32.8 million and 50 million books. If you take the median of 41.4 million, then my three books on Amazon amounts to a percentage that starts with a number that has 7 zeros in front of it to the right of the decimal point (.00000007246%).

Something else I’ve witnessed. I logged on to my account with Dreamstime to license an image I wanted to use in a blog post. Now, on my computer, that picture pops up as an add when I want to play a game of FreeCell. Here’s another doozy. My wife looked up where she could buy some Manuka honey…on her phone…in our house…using our internet. Within hours, I was seeing posts on MY Facebook feed about…guess what? Manuka honey. WTF?? Watching television, every other add seems to be advocating one kind of drug or another – I can’t help but think the price of prescription drugs in American would drop significantly if the cost of pharmaceutical ads disappeared.

What does all this amount to?

WHITE NOISE

By the end of a day, unless you spend it quietly sitting on your couch, reading a book, or listening to music, your brain is so overloaded it’s impossible to make sense of the world. Are you like me? Do you sometimes wish to open the window and shout SHUT UP to the world or put a pillow over your head?

Where are we going with this? I can tell you, it’s no place good. This isn’t going to get better, it will only get worse. I wish I had a suggestion or an answer – I don’t. I have to do content creation if I want to compete for any part of your attention, but it’s a losing game due to The Dilution Effect – when a piece of output is weakened by the overproduction of other, common output. When whatever you’re talking about is overlapped with a thousand other competing sources of content.

Finally, there is Gresham’s Law – an economic principle where “easily duplicated, or low-quality” content “dilutes the ecosystem, making it increasingly difficult for high-quality” content “to maintain its percentage of audience attention.” Thank you Amazon for allowing just anyone to publish books without polish, thank you Barnes & Noble for allowing AI created content to be sold by you, and thank you AI for adding the existential threat to artists, actors, composers, writers, editors…well anyone who used to rely on innate talent to create something from scratch without technology.

It’s the White Noise like it was predicted in the novel Feed…and it’s volume is only getting louder.

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