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RafaelMirandaSecondEssay 7 - 23 Apr 2024 - Main.RafaelMiranda
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It is strongly recommended that you include your outline in the body of your essay by using the outline as section titles. The headings below are there to remind you how section and subsection titles are formatted. | |
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< | Engagement Farming & Lawyers | >
> | Dear Fall 1L Me, | | | -- By RafaelMiranda - 17 Apr 2024 | |
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> | As I conclude my second year of law school, there is one item that ought to be discussed with more disdain to the extent that it should frankly be removed as an option for the 1L Summer: the private sector 1L summer associate. | | | | |
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< | What is Engagement Farming?
A LinkedIn? "influencer" published a short story on his page: | >
> | Background: | | | | |
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< | There was a story about an associate and a partner at a large law firm in Manhattan—the associate constantly used the delayed delivery feature on Microsoft Outlook, setting it so certain emails would send off at 10pm or later. The effect was intended to make him appear to be working harder than other people around him. In reality he wasn't always awake at 1am sending emails as much as it looked like. The effect went unnoticed until he sent an email to a newly elected partner. Interestingly, the partner set up his Microsoft Outlook to auto-reply any emails from associates sent after 10pm with the sentence "Please see me in the morning thx.". The associate woke up to the email and endured one of the most stressful mornings of his year. To the associate's unfortunate surprise, the partner had no idea why this associate was outside his door. If you liked this story, please follow me on Linkedin and comment down below. | >
> | To preface, I worked at a law firm before I started law school for around 3.5 years. Graduating from UC Berkeley in 2019. The firm I worked at focused on complex commercial litigation and white-collar defense (interestingly it was founded by the former lead prosecutor of the Enron Case, John Hueston). I chose the firm because the type of work they did sounded interesting to me (and they offered me a job before the other 2 places got back to me). While the details of the job were somewhat non-transferable, I received a phenomenal insight into the daily lives of low level big law associates.
I felt the firm hired a variety of personalities, there were neurotic meddlers, "nice guys", passive-aggressive types and others who were united in that they were drawn to a boutique litigation firm after working or clerking somewhere else first. My observations that most of the work they did was highly uninspiring and many quit after working for just one year (part of their hiring model for annual recruitment one partner quipped to me). Thus I came into law school pretty unamused with the "BigLaw" career as a substantive category. | | | | |
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< | The influencer's post received over a thousand likes and countless views. By some statistics the post was successful simply because the story gained attention (source needed). In modern terms, this type of action is called "engagement farming". Put succinctly, engagement farming is a blanket term for the techniques entities use to steal your attention in the context of social media usage. Engagement farming is difficult to define because the boundaries that separate posting information in good faith and publishing "content" for the sake of exposure are difficult to identify if you're unaware that your attention is being mined. | >
> | The Private Sector Dynamic in Morningside Heights: The Vault 10 Draft | | | | |
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< | Engagement farming is separate from the relatively older phenomenons of click-farming and content farming as its usage is narrowed to the creating engagement on social media. Click farm creates simulated traffic for pay-per-click web pages and content farming deals more directly with the creation of content to create ad revenue. | >
> | While It would be naive for me to say that coming to Columbia it was unexpected that there was a high amount of institutional reverence to the "BigLaw" legal industry, I was rightly shocked by the amount of people coming into 1L with standing offers from firms they worked at over the summer. | | | | |
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< | Why is it bad? Can it really be defined as bad or good?
Framing the discussion on whether engagement farming is good or bad is difficult because the aims of engagement farming lie in "farming one's attention". On the one hand, its easy to say the practice of engagement farming is harmful because it deceives internet users and robs them of their attention—as Johnathan Haidt has articulated. On the other hand, how do we approach the concept of attention as a quasi-tangible object, one that if treated a certain way should be or could be met with government regulation?
Haidt mentions attention can be thought of as a "public good", which
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