Adeline DeHarpporte
When’s the last time you checked your phone? Do you have any new notifications? What if something important is happening on your favorite app? If you live in the 21st century, it’s likely these thoughts run through your head every single day. Social media apps have hacked our brains and taught us to constantly be checking, looking for the most recent update, seeing what people are talking about. This is called the attention economy, where social media platforms get paid the longer they can keep you scrolling. It permeates our life to a frightening extent, and we need to understand how it impacts our online social relationships.
Yakking About College Life shows us that even in an anonymous space where users can say anything, they still try to tailor their posts to the mainstream beliefs and attitudes around them. In Our Mothers Have Always Been Machines, we see how motherhood and mommy blogging both use the idea of attunement: the mothers become attuned to both their children and their blogs. By putting these two articles in conversation, we can see how attunement affects college students on Yik Yak, and how mommy bloggers search for community.
‘Our Mothers Have Always Been Machines’ is an analysis of how mommy blogging uses the same tool for mothering-attunement-for managing a blog. Attunement is described as the main act of parenting, to watch the child and make sure that they are safe. Attunement involves constantly checking the child and trying to understand what they need or how they will act. The author compares this to the culture of mommy blogging, where mothers write about their experiences as a parent. In a similar way to being attuned to a child, the bloggers have to be attuned to their audiences, their comments and the culture happening online, and both are argued to be a kind of labor that is undervalued in our society.
While this article did a good job explaining how attunement works in parenting, it didn’t fully convince me that this theory is essential to understanding blogging. The article cited examples from blogs of women describing how blogs have helped them with parenting, but it doesn’t have any examples of women describing how they keep up to date with their blogs. I expected the third act of this article to be examples of women tending to their blogs and carefully reading the comments, showing how they are attuned to what’s happening online as well as with their children. But that part never came, and the author fails to fully bring the argument together.
‘Yakking About College Life’ dives into the app Yik Yak, an anonymous text-based app often used on college campuses. Yik Yak uses a technology called geofencing which allows users to see only posts that were made within a five-mile radius of them. The anonymous posting feature brings up the issues of hate speech and bullying, which are often present on anonymous forums. However, the article shows how users are actually influenced by how the people who will be viewing their posts are mostly their own peers, and often only post things that they think will be popular. Users will read the posts before creating a post so they have an understanding of the social rules of the app before starting to make their own posts.
This article is making a similar argument to that of the mommy blogger article, but it takes the extra step and interviews users on the motivations behind their posts. Through their quotes we can understand how users grow accustomed to the app, their view on the anonymity and what they decide to post. These interviews allow the author to validate their claim that although anonymity often makes people post harmful content, when users know their audience is their own community they plan their posts very carefully beforehand.
By using the theory of attunement put forth by ‘Our Mothers Have Always Been Machines,’ we can see how attunement plays a role in the way that students post on Yik Yak. In the article, the author describes how users become attuned to the culture of Yik Yak: “First, they would just read others’ Yaks and occasionally vote. Then, users described how they would
begin commenting on others’ Yaks to, in the words of numerous interviewees, “get their confidence up” before posting any original content.” The article also tells the story of a user who deletes any Yak that gets less than fifty upvotes, because he views it as a failure. The article paints us a picture of a community on this app that is homogeneous. In order to get upvotes, the Yak has to be a post that the general public will agree with. Users therefore become attuned to the culture of the app in order to make sure that they are following the norms and posting popular opinions. The theory of attunement helps us understand how Yik Yak users decide what to post.
These articles show us how social media platforms influence users to constantly check their sites, trying to keep up to date with trends and recent activity. The term ‘attunement’ can be used to describe the way users on Yik Yak come to understand the platform culture, as well as the way mommy bloggers curate a blog. As the internet has become more reliant on the attention economy, where eyeballs equal money for companies, it’s important to recognize the ways platforms encourage the compulsive need to check. Both of these articles can help us understand how users cultivate a following in this attention economy.