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Sticky Content

Nice Fast Company article on what makes for sticky internet content. The author writes:

 Marvel Studios makes its sequels bigger, louder, and funnier than the originals. When it applies to online content, it means that we’re being pushed from funny, useful, beautiful, and inspiring stuff into something that appeals to us on a much deeper, and potentially more damaging, level.

 What makes us happy? For almost all the people we studied, the answer was: other people’s unhappiness. Any psychologist will tell you that this isn’t surprising. 

 I wonder if that is because happiness as most people know or experience it only matters on a relative scale. To that end, it may be hard to feel or quantify happiness unless in the context of those around us - that creates a scale on which measurements start to make sense. 

 The more "friends", "followers" and "connections" we have the more extensive and graduated the scale. Everyone needs to scored and somewhere there we find our own spot. If that is accurate, schadenfreude would be the way a person inches closer to the top - the larger the number of relatively unhappier people they know the better their own placement. Social media offers a way to adjust the scale in real-time and a person rises and falls in the happiness leader-board constantly - a game that is all but impossible to walk away from.

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