Consequently, event and information need to be excessively exaggerated to get the appropriate attention and emotionally packaged to get the expected assimilation.
I think this is true, but rather depressing. When you excessively (as in: more than is warranted) exaggerate to get attention, you might succeed in the short term but ultimately you just breed cynicism. You also desensitise your readership - think of it as crying wolf. If your emotion (anger, enthusiasm, whatever) is always dialed up to 11, what do you do when something actually important happens?
While the odd rant and rave can be entertaining, I find the cumulative effect rather draining. When a blog goes that way, I just stop reading it. The more emotional noise I find, the more I appreciate quite mature reflection.
Also, to comment on the experiment - that blog post should have been more along the lines of "Arrington is a censoring Nazi" to really investigate whether excessive exaggeration gets more hits. It was really too reasonable to prove the point :-)
I think this is true, but rather depressing. When you excessively (as in: more than is warranted) exaggerate to get attention, you might succeed in the short term but ultimately you just breed cynicism. You also desensitise your readership - think of it as crying wolf. If your emotion (anger, enthusiasm, whatever) is always dialed up to 11, what do you do when something actually important happens?
While the odd rant and rave can be entertaining, I find the cumulative effect rather draining. When a blog goes that way, I just stop reading it. The more emotional noise I find, the more I appreciate quite mature reflection.
Also, to comment on the experiment - that blog post should have been more along the lines of "Arrington is a censoring Nazi" to really investigate whether excessive exaggeration gets more hits. It was really too reasonable to prove the point :-)