mapping attention

an investigation on what's keeping us distracted

Hi, welcome to a new issue of Press Pause. It’s taken longer than expected for this letter to be delivered to your inbox, because as I kept wondering about attention, mine slipped away like a bar soap clasped by wet hands. What follows is a chunky missive (my apologies for that), a mishmash of facts and thoughts inspired by recent reads about the Attention Economy. Us and the internet, the internet and us, what’s cooking?

instagram: @nowness

I first read of the attention economy on Twitter—where else, you’d say. Long after that first encounter, last October I was recommended Your Undivided Attention, a podcast devoted entirely to the topic. In the first episode I listened to, which discussed the numerous YouTube algorithms, I found out that the video giant knowingly lets its watch next algorithm operate to its full untamed potential in a bid to keep users hooked at the detriment of content quality. To put it simply, it doesn’t matter to YouTube if the videos responsible for keeping our attention engaged show child violence or conspiracy theories, all is fair as long as our eyeballs are glued to the screen.

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In April 2019 I quit social media. I uninstalled all apps from my phone and only a week later had my fingers unlearnt the involuntary tapping on the screen area where the apps’ icons had been. “We have been hacked, become hooked”, writes Julia Bell in her book Radical Attention. We have indeed. My own relationship with social media and technology at large is ‘non-exclusive’, meaning that I’m known to routinely take long breaks from the digital realm. So, I stayed off Instagram for about a year and Twitter for six months. Since fully resuming my social media activity just shy of a year ago, I have moved all social apps on a secondary device and turned off notifications. I sometimes forget they even exist.

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Whenever we watch videos on YouTube, or scroll through photos on Instagram, we are selling our attention to corporations like Facebook or Google, but don’t earn a single penny from the transaction. Without getting into too much detail, it’s necessary to understand what happens to our attention once it’s spent. Ingrained into these free platforms and services are algorithms capable of transforming our attention into sets of very detailed data. This is commonly referred to as big data, which once submitted to the magical virtual touch of yet more algorithms can reveal a monumentally large amount of information about each of us, the users. Big data is valuable: in 2017, The Economist estimated its value over that of oil. What’s more, Internet corporations also cash in on advertising revenues by selling digital space to businesses that want to promote and sell their products to us, the attention-giving audience. We’re giving up a lot and getting nothing in return.

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I lied. There are times when I am so taken with the day’s business that I forget in earnest to check what’s the latest with my digital friends. However, on those ～other～ days when I’m feeling anxious, or my body is acting up and I am not able to do the things that are good for me, I reach for the scroll and the notification rush. Have you noticed how you feel when you seek shelter into the familiar cosiness of social media? Julia Bell tells us that it’s hardly ever good.

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The devil works hard but Silicon Valley works harder. Or was that Kris Jenner? If the algorithm is the momager getting the job done —i.e. keeping us hooked and extrapolating data from available information, what primes our brains to distraction and fosters our urge to poke at our phones, on average, every 12 minutes? It’s a combination of a neuronal mechanism that makes us susceptible to new things, called novelty bias, and our human thirst for validation, which locks us into a reward cycle, where the prize is incoming notifications. As a matter of fact, the attention machine relies primarily on the notification language, which sets our brain in a state of constant alert.

“The user […] oscillates between anxiety and the alleviation of that anxiety, over and over, and bouncing between these two positions makes it impossible to think”¹

To keep up with the Kardashian metaphor, notifications are the Kim, the magnet which pulls us all into the orbit of the algorithmic vortex. Once caught into the vortex’s empty centre, we struggle to find an exit as our brains are meanwhile reprogrammed to respond to the stimuli activated by notifications and, more generally, the overwhelming potential of the sheer volume of new, shiny things offered by the Internet. If you’ve ever wondered why the addictive relation to social media, let me reassure you that it’s not you, it’s the persuasive design of the apps.

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While reading The People vs Tech, a book about the political implications of modern technology, I find out that even a minimal, and apparently inconsequential, interaction on a platform like Facebook can produce enough data to develop a scarily accurate profile of the user. My own simplification: this is how Donald Trump won the election, author Jamie Bartlett argues, by making large investments in then-niche algorithm programs and using significant results to target the relevant audience with customised advertising. Evidently enough, this is an increasingly problematic aspect of the attention economy. What do we make of the ever expanding shadow these corporations are casting on our collective future?

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Something to mull over: a Microsoft Canada report published in 2015 tells us that the average human attention span plummeted from 12 to 8 seconds between 2000 and 2013. It’s now shorter than that of the proverbial goldfish, which is 9 second.

instagram: @______stereotype

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My one online rule is if you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all. I mostly stick to it —because I hate confrontation, but the vast majority of the internet doesn’t. Aside from cat videos, which are the last bastion of all that is good and right in this world, most content that performs exceedingly well in engaging people’s attention is snark of one sort or another. What drives us to relentlessly churn out take after take after take? The answer is not as straightforward as we’d like, but seems to be connected to the (lethal) combination of two factors: the algorithm’s design and a neuronal response which operates on a limited set of feelings and reactions like fear, anxiety, pleasure, and rage. It’s a common Silicon Valley malpractice for the algorithms behind the screen to be specifically designed to pick up content that receives higher rates of engagement. As a result, these platforms do not encourage constructive, expansive conversations, but promote instinctive primitive reactions instead. This algorithmic ecosystem, which aims to boost engagement and anger, has proven itself highly successful in accomplishing its mission: to make money at all costs.

from this George Saunders interview

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If I could make my luddite fantasy come true and quit the Internet, I’d do it stat. At least that’s what I tell people in conversations about online-ness. I’ve become so accustomed to delivering that line that I often wonder whether is it true anymore, or just something I keep saying out of habit. The way I frame my digital discontent is one of obligation, but truly no one’s demanding anything of me, not least for me to be an active Internet dweller. So what keeps me here? I suppose it’s the fear of missing out —the infamous FOMO— and a desire for a constant stream of new material to read and look at. The perceived duty —or just individual eagerness— to lead some sort of digital life leaves all of us inextricably tied to the demands of capital. Commodified social platforms minutely reflect the nature of a capitalist system that keeps us busy, grinding 24/7 in the hope of becoming the next 30 under 30 or overnight influencers, successful individuals who bring growth and innovation to society or just to scrape by, always producing and never resting.

Over recent years, many initiatives were born out of a genuine concern over the state of human attention, but unfortunately they all seem to carry an underlying belief that attention should be conducive exclusively to productivity. In her book How to Do Nothing, the artist Jenny Odell invites readers to “resist in place,” to disengage from the screen and revert their attention towards the offline, a world that’s already in flames only we can’t see it through these smoke screens. We should invest our attention in imagining and working towards alternative futures, not persevering with supporting a system that has already failed us.

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Luke of Gilmore Girls’ fame keeps a sign behind his cafe’s counter which prohibits the use of cell phones. He often scolds Lorelai for picking up calls and has her leave the diner premises to go about her telephonic fornications. They only had flip phones at the time of filming, but Luke knew.

Twenty years later, miles away from Stars Hollows, Pamela Anderson announced her retirement from social media. “I am free,” she writes and wishes for her followers to find the true purpose and not be “seduced by wasted time.” Her words sound equally cryptic and ominous. The final paragraph of her farewell caption reads:

“thats what THEY want and can use to make money
Control 
over your brain-”.

Pamela knows too.

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What happens when we’re constantly perched over our phones and laptops —aside from fastidious text neck pain— is that we forget to look at what is around us, and by extension we are unable to take in what happens within ourselves too.

“it takes a break to remember that [I’m lumpy and porous, I’m an animal, I hurt sometimes, and I’m different one day to the next]: a break to do nothing, to just listen, to remember in the deepest sense what, when, and where we are”²

Back in December I got off social apps for a few weeks and heavily limited my daily internet intake³. Within that digital break, I read six books. Now, you don’t have to disappear off the face of the earth in order to read and I’m not saying there can’t be a balance between our virtual and analogical lives. But the little experiments I regularly embark on remind me who’s in charge —as I often forget. My self-made void caused by lack of digital access functions as an oxygen tank for me, it restores space within my creative brain and there I can see it: my own reserve of attention intact.

from Strangers by Rebecca Tamás, Makina Books, 2020

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1. Julia Bell, Radical Attention, (Peninsula Press, 2020)

2. Julia Bell, Radical Attention, (Peninsula Press, 2020)

3. I monitor my phone usage through an app called Realizd, which keeps track of time and pickups