How the Attention Economy Hacks Our Attention

Approximately three hours is the current average daily social media usage among internet users worldwide. That’s six weeks of a single year, and if the rate remains stable over the next 10 years, you’ll sacrifice one year and three months of your life for Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and YouTube.

Old sayings have taken on new meanings in the digital information age.

Stealing your attention seems more literal than figurative.

I’m writing this post about attention in the new attention economy as a call to action—to be selective in what you attend to and what attention you seek because failing to do so can be dangerous.

Attention brings advertising revenue—U.S. $153.7 billion in 2021. Businesses capture your attention by targeting your vulnerabilities to collect data they sell to third parties. The longer you spend on an app or site, the more information you reveal about your interests and preferences. Those "free" services you use to share photos and speak with friends are portals to the contents of your mind, where personal details get transformed into algorithms to manipulate your and others’ choices.

It’s no coincidence you’re clicking this and liking that. Most platforms are built to optimise intermittent reinforcement through the provision of spontaneous rewards in the form of attention. Spontaneity is a factor that keeps you hooked, surrendering minutes to hours on posts, waiting for the notification of new followers or likes that spill euphoric dopamine into your brain—increasingly on account of being unpredictable. You’ll squander your time to be liked to feel good about yourself.

But the promise of an ego boost isn’t always being kept.

Research by the Center for Humane Technology shows people feel worse the longer they spend engaging with their favourite apps. Sixty minutes of Facebook a day makes you unhappy, whereas 40 minutes a day makes you happy. Similarly, over 70 minutes of YouTube lowers your mood relative to 30 minutes, which raises your spirits. Why are we investing our attention where it potentially hurts?

Perhaps vicarious conditioning in the virtual environment is proving to be stronger than learning from direct experience. We see celebs and influencers rewarded continuously for the attention they attract making rewards for attention-seeking seem attainable and desirable even if our online interactions are suggesting otherwise. Whether attention is bad or good seems to matter less as competition for attention increases, raising the question of whether quantity has replaced quality.

Probability of the spread of poor-quality content increases as demands on our attention rise. Social media bombs you with stories in a matter of seconds. Stories at the top of the clutter have a natural selection advantage, so in minutes you can have 50 million people viewing a cliché cat video or fake news at the expense of stories of greater personal or humanitarian significance.

How many top-ranking Instagram posts are of Nobel prize winners? The top post holding the record of 56 million likes is a photo of a brown egg on a white background. Ten days was all it took for this post to trump the previous record holder, Kylie Jenner, showing how seemingly trivial likes can spread virulently once they reach the right fingertips to gain sufficient traction.

A viral egg can’t cause too much trouble. Made-up threats with fabricated statistics or unrealistic body images circulated to millions around the globe ring alarm bells. Such risks demand attention unlike the type that social media encourages. Unfortunately, social media won’t stop luring us to fulfill its agendas, so we must take matters into our own hands by adopting proactive measures.

1. Hide like-counts on your feeds and posts where possible. Instagram introduced this feature to depressurise interaction, hoping to shift the focus from competing for attention to connecting with people and things that bring inspiration.
2. Monitor how you feel. Note feelings of anxiety and shame as signals of the need to disengage. Question critically what possibly motivates the presentation of any content that contributes to making you feel bad.
3. Stop to ask yourself how endorsing or liking this post will affect you and others now and in the future. Will liking this comment or product communicate a message you want to pass on to your family and friends and will it contribute to shaping the kind of society you want to live in?
4. Watch A Call to Minimize Distraction and Respect Users’ Attention by Tristan Harris, former design ethicist at Google, to learn more about the attention economy and its subversive influence on people and social systems.