what is interesting?

February 17th, 2010 • posts i've written

do you find this interesting?

If you follow me on Twitter, you may know that my bio reads: I’ll be interested if you’ll be interesting, and vice versa.

Pithy, right?

But what the hell is interesting?

That’s the question I’ve been asking myself for the last day or so – what makes something interesting?

For most of us, interesting is something we take for granted. To borrow from Justice Stewart (who borrowed from Casablanca), we know it when we see it.

But most of us are tasked with making interesting things, so it seems appropriate to ask the question.

If you stick your nose into academic research on the topic, you’ll find a good deal of it centered around work from the 1960′s on conflict, curiosity, and arousal by behaviorist Daniel Berlyne of the University of Toronto. (see his book Conflict, Arousal, and Curiosity)

Berlyne detailed what he called his collative variables – novelty, complexity, uncertainty, and conflict – that give rise to interest. Berlyne believed that something new and uncertain is interesting only if it represents a problem to be solved. Furthermore, he believed that too much uncertainty could dissuade exploration and problem solving, just as too little uncertainty could result in boredom.

This reminded me of my creative writing studies in college; I would bake in mystery to a story only to be told that I either gave too much or too little away for it to be interesting. Today I am not a well known writer of fiction.

Before I read of Berlyne’s work, I made myself jot notes about why I found something interesting when I did, and I came to the realization that very little has changed since his work. Many of the adjectives or variables I cooked up could easily be folded back into his; except for two things that simply wouldn’t fit for me.

the web has turned our friends into interesting machines

#1 – Spreadability

Spreadability made my list because when I come across something, I tend to ask myself, who can I share this with? I do some quick mental math about my friends, readers, and followers, their interests, and the interests we share. If something doesn’t seem fit to share, I consider it far less interesting.

Sharing is the action we take when we find something interesting. And when we share something interesting, we make it more interesting (and our friends help). Sharing seems more important, and prevalent, today because of social technologies that enable the behavior.

If our job is to make interesting things, it’s more important than ever to understand the motivations behind sharing. Because we spend so much time interacting with our social graph, and because we place such a high value on feeding and sustaining it, we’re much more cognizant of the needs and interests of our friends.

ever notice how still and focused people seem while watching TV in photos from the ’50s?

#2 – Context

While making my list, I focused quite a bit on how something related to the last thing that held my attention, or how likely I was to give something my full attention.

Yesterday, the people in charge of making interesting things had control of how you came across it. When interesting was scarce, it was easier to make something stand out and trigger the part of our mind which is so good at recognizing patterns; either play into a pattern or confound our senses altogether with something nonsensical.

Today, interesting is abundant and rapid. Inside my reader, with the help of the ‘j’ button, I can spend most of my day flooding my senses with interesting from sources that are my friends and peers. Moreover, my attention is now splintered across mediums and devices.

Yesterday it was much easier to insert interesting at the right moment. It started with the shelf. As we reached for a product, brands competed with each other by making something interesting (a label, a coupon, a cut-out).

Today, as we race to hunt out interesting in new places, brands race to those places to try to create something interest – and usually this is a failure in the beginning (almost all early TV commercials were a clumsy translation of the radio advertisement, banner ads are digital versions of the billboard, etc).

If our job is to make interesting things today, what can we do?

• Take our ball and go home. Making interesting things that people pay attention to is hard.
• Compete for people’s attention by using our own channels – buy media, run ads, build up our websites and microsites, and get people to come to us. Expensive, but not impossible.
• Learn how to share the networks that people have already built for themselves. If people care so much today about feeding their networks, we should be creating the meal. The interesting things we make should be as spreadable as possible and targeted as possible to the networks we co-operate with. Here’s a secret: the better you get at this, the less expensive bullet point number two gets because people will want to know what you’re up to next.

Related posts:

1. least interesting trend of 2010
2. blippy and the over-simplification of sharing
3. let’s write a book together

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