We're building a new way to save, share, and search—an approach that goes beyond text to encompass images and audio, videos and games, places and projects, products and services, concepts and memes, people and organizations, objects and experiences, activities and opportunities, methods and practices and protocols. If not those things in actuality, then proxies for them. But what is it about those things that causes them to catch in the net of our awareness? What leads us to save them, to share them, to search for them? The answer: engagement.
We interact with these items and that interaction exceeds a threshold. There's a concept from forensic science called Locard's exchange principle. It states that every contact leaves a trace. We are connected to these things in proportion to the trace they leave upon us, and that trace is a function of the depth of our engagement.
Below, we bucket depth of engagement into seven tiers. We use examples from a social media feed but they can be adapted to other contexts, such as the experience of a city. Each tier includes a description, an example and an estimate of the time and energy involved. The seven tiers of engagement:
None engagement
An imperceptible exposure
Scrolling past a post
<1 second, negligible energy
Weak engagement
A passive, minimally attentive pause
Glancing at a headline or lede
1-3 seconds, low energy
Moderate engagement
An exhibit of slight interest
Consuming a full post and liking or reacting to it
3-10 seconds, low energy
Strong engagement
A brief scan and implicit/explicit annotation
Opening a linked article, surveying it and deciding to come back to it later
10-60 seconds, medium energy
Deep engagement
A deliberate investigation and interaction
Reading a full article
Minutes, medium energy
Total engagement
An immersion into the thing and its surrounding context
Reading the original article, related articles, and talking to the community
Hours to days, high energy
Absolute engagement
An absorption of the thing into one's character and way of being
Adopting a philosophy and changing a core part of one's life
Indefinite, maximal energy
The prevalence of these tiers depends on an individual's default attentional stance overall and at particular moments in time. Typically, each engagement tier is less common by an order of magnitude than the previous. None engagement is the default for most people, most of the time, and occurs many times per day; absolute engagement occurs rarely across one's entire lifespan.
With the seven tiers summarised we can ask the next question: what operations—save, share, search—map to which tiers? Our estimates:
We save items receiving moderate, strong and deep engagement
We share items seeing strong, deep and total engagement
We search items with weak, moderate, strong, deep and total engagement
The extremes of engagement—none engagement and absolute engagement—are excluded from our estimates of what's liable to be saved, shared and searched. That's because absolute engagement is etched into the soul; things eliciting it don't need to be saved, shared or searched because they are ever-present. Inversely, none engagement doesn't exactly leave no trace. It is just that the traces never cohere enough to become a saveable, shareable, searchable artefact of experience.
As we explore new paradigms of saving, sharing and search, it is becoming increasingly clear that the tiers of engagement matter. Not because they offer a legible, gameable framework for moving users from the bottom to the top, but because they make appropriate engagement an accessible reality for more people than ever before. How we save, share and search is instrumental in shaping how we engage, and that, in turn, shapes how we evolve individually and collectively.
Consider your own interactions and the traces they've left. What new interactions would blossom and unfold if saving was simple, sharing was effortless, and search was easy and joyous? That's the question we're asking.
