The currency of the modern world: Your attention

Forget about paying for your goods and services. When it comes down to it, the currency of the modern world is your ability to pay attention to something — and it’s highly valuable.

Download me, swipe me, dismiss me — it’s all that our world consists of anymore and I am guilty for contributing to it. Your attention span has become a commodity to be fought for and traded because it can be exchanged for cold hard cash.

All of the Products and Services you interact with on a daily basis are set up to increase your usage. It’s a really simple equation:

Increased Attention = Increased Usage

Increased Usage = Increased Revenue

It has becoming increasingly impossible to stay focused in the modern world because everything you interact with exploits the attention drawing methodology. In fact as I was writing the 3rd paragraph of this article, I looked to my phone after being notified by my Amazon App about special offers. I couldn’t even get 3 paragraphs in before I got interrupted and my attention spent somewhere else. Even as I write about out the issue I am affected by it.

The fight for attention has become so intense that us Product Managers employ psycho-graphic needs to our product design. We’ve employed the powers of addiction to get your brain to release dopamine when you interact with the things we create. If I can get you hooked onto a Product I manage — it ultimately means I make the business more money. Everyone wants to create the new Amazon and stop you going anywhere else.

However so much of this is starting to damage us, Instagram is now linked to depression in young female teens. Most of us are showing severe signs of addiction to our smart devices and the services we interact with. Personally I’m a sufferer of feeling phantom notifications, the sensation of feeling my device vibrated or sound off and then finding that it hasn’t.

But is this a bad thing?

I think this can be looked at in 2 ways and it’s all in the way that it’s utilised and whether that is ethically applied.

The Good:

1. I can access and consume content without paying cash:

Almost daily I visit The Verge and Tech Crunch to keep up with the world of tech. I am a repeat user of these websites because the content is right for me plus I enjoy the written style. These websites appeal to me because I have a love for tech but I also visit them to keep ahead in my job — I work in the industry, so I need to be aware of how the world is changing.

Both of these websites are free for me to visit. I can type the web address in or hit my bookmark and I land on the website whilst the page renders for me. But they’re not really free, there is still a cost and I potentially just don’t realise it. To access these ‘free’ websites I have to pay with my attention. These websites have ads in them — they are hoping that if I consume enough content from their site I will eventually click through on their advertising. When I do this they’ll make a small amount of money.

When you do this for thousands or even millions of users — these small bits of money start to add up. You turn a small blog into a high profit business.

For me as a user —I access this content without paying cash to access it. I could probably access similar content from magazines. However I have not bought a magazine in nearly 14 years, I’ve changed from paying cash over the counter to paying in ads that I consume. That ad revenue is revenue for the companies running those websites. In essence they profit from me visiting their website, consuming their content and clicking their ads.

I am totally fine with this — it’s the main reason why I refuse to use any kind of adblocking technology. I want to be able to access this content and I don’t want to have to trade my cash to do so.

2. Family units are spending more time physically together

Over the course of the last 30 years where television and computing technology have become more affordable, it became normal for there to be 2 televisions or computers within a household, causing the family unit started to spend less time physically together.

However — with the advent of a recent behaviour known as second screening, where someone consumes information off 2 devices at a time family units have started to reconvene within single spaces again.

Now little Timmy can play games on his iPad whilst his Dad catches up Netflix and Mum scrolls her Facebook feed. Families are spending more time physically together, even if they’re not spending time mentally together.

The Bad:

1. You are constantly manipulated because your attention is so valuable

Services want you to use them more often — but sometimes they do it in such a way that isn’t ethical, or employ ways to learn about you in an unethical way.

In 2012, Facebook carried out an experiment where it manipulated the news feeds of a very small percentage of their users. In this experiment they wanted to see if they could incite an emotional response out of their users by changing the kind of content they were presented with. Facebook is powered largely by user generated content and not all of it is pictures of peoples pets or meals, sometimes people post their upsets and anguish on there. At the time of my fathers death I posted about it on the platform.

But Facebook wanted to learn how their users were influenced, they could do this with experimenting with a tiny proportion of their user base . So their teams built a method that altered their newsfeeds to show mostly negative sentiment content by looking for and matching typically negative words. The result was that the users who consumed negative content posted negative content themselves.

That small percent of users was 629,000 people, thats more people than live in the city of Manchester. Statistically around 6% of the general population have depression so that is 56 people who — potentially already struggling could have been made worse. There’s no way of telling but perhaps it pushed one person over the edge.

This is an extreme example, but there’s plenty of other ways you are being manipulated into providing more and more of your attention that sit in a grey area at best. Stuff like this is constantly happening.

2. The data gathered from your attention has such a high value, a lot of companies sell more than you realise.

The reason things like adblockers originally came into place is because certain adnetworks were unetically tracking behaviours and then selling it on.

This is reasonably easy to do so too — most use some form of tiny image placed within a website that when loads adds a file into your computer that sends back information. But some place files on your computer that send back even more information about your habits and can be quite difficult to remove. Some are so bad that they can drastically slow your internet connection down because of the volume you have on your computer.

When used ethically — I don’t mind the application of tracking browsing behaviour, if I’m going to be sold to I’d rather be shown products and services that are relevant to me. Yet when used unethically it can cause serious harm. Russia have recently been found to employing this kind of tech to influence the American election.

3. The constant fight for attention is so demanding that mental health is at an all time worst

We like to think of ourselves as smart creatures but we haven’t evolved physically in thousands of years. Our society has evolved around us and our mental evolution hasn’t kept up.

Due to this mental health issues are at all all time high — many of us cannot mentally keep up with the modern world anymore and it’s taking a toll. What makes it worse is that due to the way everything we interact with is set up it’s also very hard to apply a balm to cure the problem.

When the things that are stressing you out are the things you have been addicted and accustomed too, separating yourself from those can leave negative consequences in of it self.

I spend my full day at work, quintessentially trading my attention for cash to the business I work for so they can be profitable. When I come home — I then want to interact with services and I have to constantly spend attention to interact with the world. It’s very hard to disconnect from it all.

This has gotten so bad for myself that I’ve now completely stopped wearing a smartwatch and my phones ringer has been disabled for 2 years. A personal goal this year is too spend more time outside and this year I’m looking to purchase a camper van along with adopting a rescue dog to force myself away from the attention vampires.

So what does this mean for the future?

Look, the fight for attention certainly isn’t new. A lot of the digital methods of acquiring your attention are taken from physical ways of doing it. Billboards have been around since the 15th century, the physical equivalent of a pop up modal. Old school marketing gurus said you had 2 seconds to impact a customer — which is very similar to how page load speeds severely impact on conversion rates.

But in the digital and tech world, I think it falls onto us as Product Managers to start building our products more ethically and be more conscientious of how we are designing our products for people to consume and interact with.

This is very difficult when so many companies, products and services exist independently. All of them with goals to achieve. I work as a Product Manager and I could be trying to increase engagement with an app that I manage and I could do this by coming up with a notification strategy. But for me as a user I have 58 apps on my phone that I’ve chosen to download, that is potentially 58 of us Product Managers with these sets of these engagement campaigns fighting for my attention.

I think the way that we improve on this is treating attention a bit like how we treat diamonds.

The price of diamonds is dictated by the amount currently in supply. They have value due to their rarity, however the ground is full of them. They are made rare by the fact we force them to be rare. We could chose to open up more mines and flood the market with more glorious and beautiful stones. However the end result would just mean that their value would greatly diminish and they could potentially become worthless.

We could flood our users with attention drivers — but we should treat it as a commodity that has limited volumes. We have to build things that are that are ethical and are intended to be of benefit primarily to the users and secondarily to the businesses we work for. If we get this right, this is how we build the right things for everyone.

We, the people who build products have a responsibility— put your users needs first.

During writing this article I received four notifications from four different apps, I checked by phone nine times and I visited twitter twice.

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