Addiction in Verticals Format
Last week, reader Léah wrote:
Hey Ian,
Thanks for this take on Verticals -- nice to hear from the faith side of things! I've been dedicating time to studying them recently and the trends coming out of China.
The thing that makes me reluctant about making verticals is the addiction aspect. A producer from China shared that psychologically, it's exactly like gambling, as verticals are structured to keep people hooked indefinitely, while feeding their content addiction. There's also the problem of limiting people's attention spans significantly to the point they don't want to watch long form content, just the "quick wins". The companies see this as a good thing, because it makes them lots of money, of course! It kinda made me feel gross about the whole thing. Television has always been good at "hooking" people, and there's nothing like a good binge of a great show, but I feel like the soapy content and the megashort format make verticals a very different beast.
I would love to hear your thoughts on this though? How can we redeem this beast for God's kingdom? :)
Léah
Leah, this is a great thought we should all engage.
Vertical formats with their hooks and cliffhangers are like commercial breaks and chapter breaks in a book, designed to make you return after a short restroom break. In fact, I’ve learned that if I need to put a book or show down for another day, I won’t read or watch to the end of a chapter, because that’s where the cliffhanger is.
Your argument about not being addictive, especially for younger audiences, is more important. I've learned recently that this is called ‘open loop’ and it’s what causes stress in our lives. If we start too many things and have too many open loops, we must either close some or make a note and give ourselves permission to close them mentally, knowing we can open it later if we need to.
In screenwriting, an established writer taught me this in regards to finishing a puke draft as fast as possible. His goal is to write a page every 15 minutes. What he does if he has an idea that could derail him, is writes a note or leaves a ??? in the text that he can search for later. Then he gets to the end without opening new loops, and he visits to the notes. He says, chances are the notes won’t be valid anymore.
I suppose, if Christians were going to make verticals with integrity, we could close the loops every so often intentionally. It’s worth a conversation.
I’m definitely going to discuss addictive storytelling and marketing tricks in a future issue.
Thanks,
Ian
