The Attention War: Resolutions in The Attention Economy
All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone. — Blaise Pascal
This past summer I realized that I had never been alone.
Sure, I’ve been the only person in a room plenty of times. I’ve also been the only person in my house. Hell, one time I was working so late that I was the only person in my entire high school.
But sitting on the tiled kitchen floor of my apartment in mid-July, I could confidently say that I was experiencing something I never had before — being alone with my own thoughts.
That was scary.
I have always had something to do. Whether it was finishing my homework, playing FIFA, eating dinner, watching Spongebob, sleeping — I was always doing something. Yeah, I frequently complained that I was “bored”. But ultimately, I was either accomplishing a task or something else was holding my attention. It didn’t matter that I was the only person in the room — that I was physically alone. My mind was never solely mine. It was never focused on me.
A lot of that is because of when and how I grew up.
The 2000s were when personal computing became truly personal. The 2000s were also home to my childhood. A lot of my early memories involve my mom cutting off my internet connection by picking up the phone while I was trying to listen to Sexyback by Justin Timberlake. Not too many years after that, though, I had an iPod Touch. In hindsight, that jump was absolutely insane — a solid microcosm of the kind of things that were vying for my attention as a child.
My parents were big on books, and I loved to read. Elementary school was marked by reading and re-reading the Harry Potter series, while in Middle School I questioned my yet-to-be-developed religiosity thanks to the introduction to mythology that is Percy Jackson.
I still love to read, but free time that used to be spent on books is now spent on other things: school, clubs, friends… and the internet. The vast majority of the content I consume today comes from my feed reader, Medium, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and my friends and family that I am always constantly in contact with. It’s the reason that I am never alone.
But everyone is in the same boat that I am.
Enter, The Attention Economy
On average, college students check their phones 150 times per day. Each glance at the screen come from a variety of notifications: text messages, phone calls, Instagram likes, a friend request, news alerts, game check-ins… even just a habitual look at nothing at all. The possibilities are endless. But every time we check, we don’t know exactly what awaits us. So we keep checking… just to be sure.
Ex-Googler and design ethicist Tristan Harris likens this phenomenon to a slot machine. You never know what you’re going to get, but the chance that there will be something good, especially if you’ve “won” in the past, takes over. We’re biologically wired to get sucked into systems like these. That’s why gambling is so addictive. And that’s why we check our phones 150 times a day.
Dr. Mark Griffiths, director of Nottingham Trent University’s International Gaming Research Unit, explains that these rewards are what psychologists call “variable reinforcement schedules” and is the majority of the reason that social media users repeatedly check their screens.
Companies have a financial incentive to grasp our attention and never let go. They have a financial incentive to take advantage of these psychological vulnerabilities. As Mozilla’s former Head of User Experience Aza Raskin puts it:
Behind every screen on your phone, there are generally literally a thousand engineers that have worked on this thing to try to make it maximally addicting
That’s a huge problem. A lot of people are talking about it. But the implications have yet to be fully realized by the vast majority of people, including myself.
The Casualties of The Attention War
In my mind, the war for our attention is being fought on three different fronts: work, self, and relationships. Let’s see what’s happening on each of those.
Deep work.
Cal Newport writes one of my favorite blogs on student productivity and digital minimalism. One of the big ideas that he hangs his hat on is Deep Work: “Professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit.”
To explain Deep Work, we must first explain its counterpart. In my experience, any work that we do while distracted tends to be “shallow”. A distraction could be anything from repeatedly checking your phone while writing a paper, taking social media “breaks” while studying, or just being around and talking to people while trying to get work done. Things like writing emails and attending meetings are also inherently shallow — very rarely is something of substance actually getting done.
Deep Work, then, is the idea of giving your undivided attention to a particular task for an extended period of time. Only then do we actually hit peak performance and get quality work done efficiently.
But the Attention Economy kills our ability to perform Deep Work.
A study from the University of Texas found that simply having your phone in the same room as you can significantly cut your ability to focus on the task at hand. Our usual habits — checking notifications as they come, skimming through feeds and articles, consuming shorter and simpler snippets of information — are totally against the skills that are necessary for Deep Work.
Notifications are uncontrolled interruptions from your real goals. They prevent you from ever getting into a flow state. You should be in control of what you do and when — not your phone.
If you aren’t aware of the problem, then it’s holding you back.
Feedback Loops.
The only way we can improve is through feedback on our decisions and actions. Otherwise, we are never truly learning from mistakes. That’s why everyone from educators to entrepreneurs preaches tight feedback loops — the shorter the amount of time between an action and its feedback, the more effectively you can move. You are less likely to waste time doing something wrong. You are able to dive deep into a topic with the confidence that you are on the right track.
The same goes for our own personal decision making.
With personal decision making, we don’t have someone to tell us whether or not we made the right choice or said the right thing. Unless you have a personal life coach that advises you on every decision you make, there is no consistent source of feedback on most aspects of our life. It’s up to us to sit down, think about our actions, and decide which ones were solid and which need to be changed going forward.
Surprise, surprise: the Attention Economy inhibits our ability to reflect.
Go back to the story I opened with: when was the last time you sat down by yourself and just thought about what you’ve been doing? When was the last time you truly asked yourself what your goals are and whether the actions you are taking are the best ways to get there? When was the last time you considered the impact that everything you are doing has on those around you?
If you’re anything like me, you see questions like that and give them a brief thought. But those are not shallow questions. They’re straightforward, but they take time to digest and reflect on.
Until recently, I never did that. Because my mind was not accustomed to that level of reflection — that level of work.
Relationships
The natural leap from many of the effects discussed above are weakened interpersonal relationships. That’s not to say you have fewer friends, but that the quality of those friendships is often diminished.
Harris’s organization, the Center for Humane Technology, has some thoughts on this as well:
But conversations that are mediated and interrupted by technology create less emotional connection and carry higher risk of misinterpretation. Since tech companies get better engagement metrics for online conversations than offline conversations, they are incentivized to pull people towards digital conversation — and what if that replaces in-person connections?
For me, this has meant less time really thinking about what I can and should be doing for others. For example, Facebook will tell me when someone’s birthday is, so I don’t really need to think about it in advance. If I had needed to, I may have naturally began thinking of gift ideas or ways to make their day more special. But because the necessity of thought is pushed to a notification, I’m led to be less mindful of my friendships.
“Don’t get high on your own supply”
The most infuriating part of all this? Those who are working to keep us hooked know better than to “get high on their own supply”. Consider this quote from the former VP of Growth at Facebook:
I can control my decision, which is that I don’t use that shit. I can control my kids’ decisions, which is that they’re not allowed to use that shit… The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops that we have created are destroying how society works.
Or the late, great Steve Jobs, who told journalists that his children weren’t allowed to use iPads and that they “limit how much technology our kids use at home.”
We need to be conscious of the ways that we are being affected. And then we need to make changes.
Big ones.
We’re losing the battle, but we can win the war.
New Year’s Resolutions are going to be made pretty soon. Most of mine will fail. Hopefully you have a bit more willpower than I do. But making myself a conscious actor in the fight against the Attention Economy is something that I will be trying to stick with this coming year.
A few ideas I have in mind:
1. Take time to reflect and understand your current habits. How much time do you spend scrolling through Instagram? How many times a day do you interrupt work to check your phone? How much more work could you get done if you didn’t do these things? It may take a couple weeks to get a full understanding of the way technology is impacting you, but being aware and conscious of every action you take is the first step. Then write down some goals — specific ones.
2. Prioritize “analog social media”. If you haven’t noticed, I love Cal Newport. A recent post of his explained that the things we go to social media for — entertainment, FOMO, and staying informed — are all problems that can be solved through real world interaction. It’s just that social media is so much easier to pick up. It’s right in our pockets. However, getting up and grabbing coffee with friends, joining a basketball league, or attending a talk is always far more rewarding for us that the digital counterpart. Quality over quantity is the key rule of social interaction — don’t treat your digital interactions any differently.
3. Make it harder to relapse. A lot of my friends delete all social media from their phones during Finals Week. I’ve done the same. But then we relapse immediately afterwards as if we were missing out on something important. Deleting these apps off of your phone puts up a huge barrier to entry. Nobody likes using their phone’s web browser to get on Twitter. And if you really want to check something, you still can — you just have to type in the URL and login on your laptop or phone.
4. Block out time for focused entertainment. My attention span is shot, and it has taken a lot of work to start building it back up. One thing that I’ve been trying to do is read for 1/2 an hour every day. I’ve always read pretty regularly, but I’d skip days when I wasn’t in the mood and might pick up my phone in between chapters. Forcing myself to sit, just me and a book, every single day has helped me slowly rebuild the attention “muscle” so that I’m slowly removing the urge to do something else.
5. Be alone. For me, the best thing that has come from all of this is that I’ll actually spend a few minutes every day in total silence just to think about whatever is on my mind. Some call this “meditation,” but I don’t really have a routine or do anything formal. I just sit for 2–3 minutes. Sometimes I’ll go in with a specific question to think about, and others I’ll just sit and let my thoughts flow. I definitely feel like my decision making has gotten a lot better. I can articulate concrete goals. I’ve started and quit a lot of things as a result of actually thinking about their impact. I can’t stress enough how important this has been.
I don’t think any of this information is new. But it definitely took me a while to go from thinking I was doing these things to actually doing them. This new year, I hope you become a little more mindful of the actions you take and the impacts that they have on you.
Make some resolutions in the Attention Economy. Every little bit counts.
