Snackable content might be junk food for employees
It’s the age of content. Whatever that means. Pictures, videos, tweets, and other written content flood our social networking channels whether on personal networking sites or professional sites. And god, even intranet networking sites like Facebook workplace. We are now at an age when social norms from personal life gets transferred to workplace platforms and creates this kind of brown, sweet-salty-sour-bitter-tasting lived experience we lovingly call “work-life integration”. It sucks but inevitable. But just like getting angry at the trafficjam while being a contributing part of the same jam; we humans create the workspace.
Now, it is normal if we get ideas from our personal experience and make them part of the work experience. As a strategist for employee experience myself, I too have been doing this. But there is this one concept from our personal lives — specifically our social media lives that I just realized should be adopted judiciously. It’s snackable content.
Snackable content
“Snackable content” are bite-sized photos, videos, graphics, or texts that we see (or are algorithmically fed to us) on social media. It would usually take us a quick as a few seconds to as long as a minute to snack on these information. And the idea is that in those few moments of ingesting them, we would have been able to chew and swallow them. And with the democratization of content creation tools with mobile phones as the Moses, everybody is able to cross the proverbial Red Sea. And a polluted sea is has become.
Everyday we create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data. That’s 2.5 million TERRAbytes. That’s a very expensive iPhone storage upgrade. 300 million photos and a lot more comments are uploaded everyday. And with this article, I just did my noble duty as a netizen of adding one more. That’s 300 million photos and articles to grab a few seconds of attention everyday. And now your office wants to add more.
The idea of including bite-sized information as a manner of communicating to employees is not entirely new, but its use has been finding resurgence now that human consumption behavior has been primed for it. Companies are strategizing ways to do internal communications in small amounts to sustain learning, shape employees to certain beliefs, or help them retain learnings from training. But should we?
Boredom and Innovation
In a completely accurate retelling of scientific history, Sir Isaac Netwon was bored out of his mind hanging out under an apple tree when the apple tree reminded him to get to work by dropping an apple on his head. This event is known to be the triggering event of his discovery of the Law of Gravity. No boredom, no gravity.
Boredom is said to have direct connection to creativity and innovation. Having these dull moments of emptiness opens up our minds to wander and find connections around us in its effort to entertain itself. The best ideas come when we’re bored, they say. But they also say that and idle mind is the devil’s playground. But eitherway, good or bad, having nothing to do helps us be creative. I do my best work when I’m bored. I’m actually bored right now while I wait for my car’s radiator to be repaired. And that’s the gift and function of boredom. And snackable content is killing it.
Social Media and Boredom
We use social media when we’re bored. That’s an inarguable experience we share as 21st century humans. We scroll through Facebook, Instagram, and hell even LinkedIn if you’re a psychopath like me because we want to be stimulated out of our boredom. We’ve become so boredom-averse that even at the slight sense of a microboredom we immediately grab our phones and start scrolling. But studies show that social media do not alleviate boredom. In fact it increases it! You know what does? Homework. Productivity alleviate boredom.
This is my main concern over snackable content. It’s a concept rooted in social media, which takes advantage of our averseness to boredom by feeding us content that can be consumed in seconds so we can scroll on to the next one. And it’s killing productivity. I’d even hazard a guess that it’s not the content that’s taking your time — it’s the infinite scrolling. So much so the creator of the infinite scroll regrets it.
And this is why we need to be judicious with how we feed snackable content.
Snackable Junk Content
A swissknife is a tool when you don’t have the best tool with you. I believe the same for content, particularly office content, even more particularly learning and training content.
I’ve been in the education and training industry for 12 years as a training facilitator and learing designer for tertiary education and professional training. In the past 6 years I’ve also been studying the idea of Transmedia Storytelling. Transmedia storytelling in the technique of telling a story across a dispersed range of channels, media, storytellers, platforms, and time. This includes telling bits of stories via snackable content. And here’s my insight: bite-sized content are best used only for bite sized storytelling.
Here’s what I mean:
Do not use snackable content or SC (I’m using SC starting now because repeating it again and again gets tiresome even in your mind’s ears) to convey anecdotes, definitions, or basically non-narrative content. Those types of content are not self-contained and can only be appreciated when they’re part of a larger story. What this means is that it will take more cognitive energy from its audience to understand, plus, since they’re non-narrative, it also takes more emotional force to be cognitively invested in them. It basically means they’re both bored and tired at the same time.SCs that are non-narrative is junk food. They’re empty brain calories that does not do much for the story. They trick the audience to thinking they are energized when they’re actually not.
Think about this when you’re bored
I see two ways to do it better:
- Make them self-contained narratives. — They can independently tell a full story with a beginning, middle, and end that the audience can get invested in and can get satisfaction from. This type of SC can energize them in just a few moments. There is an urban legend that Ernest Hemingway once won a challenge to write the shortest short story. Spoiler alert, somebody might have died? This is an example of an effective SC.
- Create dedicated communication efforts. — If the message is really important and you need the audience’s full attention and mind for it, it’s better to create dedicated time, spaces, and programs for it. Prepare a full-course meal, not a snack. Organize town halls, meetings, or training sessions to teach and cement the ideas. The medium and the message; and the message is: “this is so important that we carved time off from all our schedules to know this.” This is know a swiss knife hacking a tree. This is a machete.
Self-contained narratives satisfy us and can end the snacking; while dedicated communication efforts focuses us and emphasizes the activity. Both allows us to go back to being bored and creative; only this time we go back with a new story to ponder about. And maybe, just maybe, discover something. We just need to wait for an apple to fall on our heads.
