Pay Attention
What might seem more like an excerpt from a cheesy soap opera is the reality of the tech and media industry for the past decades — everyone is fighting for our attention. But further inquiry demonstrates why that’s no easy feat at all — and the unlikely consequences that come with it.
The Culprit and its History
The range of conundrums that climate action faces in attempting to change the course of humanity is manifold, complex and often interconnected — funding gaps, lobbyists and political shortsightedness are just a few to mention. Seldomly, however, have the driving forces behind such inaction been scrutinized beyond the strive for political power and economic profit. An alternative perspective reveals an obvious, yet overlooked aspect of human irrationality — and how a group of stakeholders have mastered its exploitation.
The path of scrutiny commences with the history of economic pursuits, which explains how certain types of resources would determine corporate or individual success through competitive edge at a given point in time, within a distinct environment. Land, for instance, would define a person’s economic standing a few centuries ago. Labour and capital were the land’s equivalent during the industrial revolution. Once those were plentifully available, access to information and knowledge, sparse just over a century ago, were means that led to economic superiority. Throughout the last few decades, however, information and knowledge have remained everything but sparse, the abundance and ease of access of them — in many cases at the click of a finger — marking a symbol for the age of rapid technological progress.
But such abundance in the context of information soon meant overload. With up to 4’000 advertising messages reaching an individual every day, the human capacity to process and pay adequate attention to every single point of information swiftly reached its limits. As a consequence, the need to efficiently allocateone’s attention budget to selected pieces of information and knowledge arose, and with it, one of the present day’s most prevalent scarcities was born: attention.
As is commonly seen in the case of scarcities, the realisation of such rapidly turned into deliberations on the extent to which such attention can actually be controlled and its allocation steered to desired pieces of information and knowledge. What seems farfetched and on the borderline of morality is a stark reality and just a blunt definition of what in the 1960s was coined the novel phenomenon that is the “attention economy”.
Academia subsequently showed interest to advance the discord on “attention” beyond the basic human function, employing detailed behavioural analysis and swaths of data to gain quantifiable insights on the mechanics of what was previously understood to be a soft science. The resulting psychological constructs were accompanied by the first ventures into real-world application of the attention scarcity phenomenon, such as Davenport and Beck’s 2001 study that suggested the commodification of attention, effectively submitting it to economic laws, modelling and optimisation by economic participants.
Governments, corporations and politics were quick to realise the potential that would loom in such a complex discipline and shortly after found themselves at crossroads on the possible use cases of such knowledge — on one hand, the list of options to employ it for good seemed near endless: societal sensitization, political participation, eradication of misinformation — the list goes on. On the other hand, the opportunity to increase economic profits and power was undeniable.
The Crossroads
It is of little surprise that, ultimately and once again, the sweet temptation of profit and authority won in lieu of the greater good.
Fast forward to contemporary times, the pervasiveness of the “attention economy” in all aspects of the global economy has become inarguable, whereby technology and media conglomerates see themselves as winners,engulfed in a new multi-billion dollar industry — the former monopolising the data needed for insights, the latter drawing conclusions from such and providing vehicle for delivery of information.
With the incentives to further accelerate the information overload and the consequent large-scale “dullification” of the human mind, volume-driven sensationalism, extremification and polarisation of content haveincreasingly become a requirement to be seen as relevant and win any of an individual’s attention whatsoever, whilst behavioral designs revolving around reward systems, instant gratification and reality distortion based on experience-dependent neuroplasticity have been widely implemented to enable exorbitant yields even from the smallest fractions of one’s attention.
Such dynamics form the baseline of what we now witness as a shift away from informational exchangesrevolving around reason and collective interest, towards unconscious motivations, emotions and biases — eroding control over what is seen, what is believed, what is focused on and how humans relate to the physical world around them. As a consequence, rather than paying attention to what matters, humanity has become glued to a comfortable flow of nonsensical, power-and-profit-oriented information at extreme speeds and unparalleled degrees of availability, where cat videos take precedence over calls to climate action.
Information on the latter finds itself very far off from matching such characteristics, if not at the exact opposite, and with it, far off from being considered “relevant”, let alone “threatening”. Natural cycles, geological rhythms and ecological systems move slowly, which is not least why human environmental destruction is termed “slow violence”, but makes the evident unwillingness or inability to “act” less of a surprise. Notwithstanding a certain measure of existing awareness around the threat and spheres around climate action assimilating, becoming more extreme to gain attention — think of the linguistic switch from climate “change” to climate “crisis” and the extraordinary ways in which Extinction Rebellion and other climate activists make their cause known –, the topic catapults an individual far off their comfortable flows of information.
With the constatation that control over what an individual pays attention to largely being driven by parties other than the individuals themselves, the question arises whether or not humanity has any effective freedom — other than small-level diplomacy and grassroots efforts — to choose a conviction and to genuinely care at all — as individuals and as a collective.
A Way Forward
The answer to this question proposes, once more, a linkage to the strive for short-lived political power and economic profit above anything else. For as long as the gain of attention serves solely for short-term gains, humanity will be tied to short-sighted interests, seeking instant gratification and speed of information at the extremes of content, unable to challenge the status quo.
But humanity faces a threat that cannot wait for governments, corporations and politics to change. The pretext for a shift has to come from within — a shift in which the slowing of humanity’s window of attention can enable an escape from impoverishment through the lack of contemplative moments, where the appreciation of downtime without the compulsion for the extreme, the new and instant sets the individual back in control, where humanity as a collective pays attention to what they pay attention to and where a re-focusing allows for the building of meaningful and deep relationships once again.
To do so, humanity must escape the technological enclave and acknowledge itself as a whole, rather than fragmented pieces of gratification, narrow excerpts and “clients” of the attention economy. It must face outwards and build contemplative tools and commons for a more regenerative, stakeholder-centric economic model — away from the individual towards the collective, to pause, reclaim and take care of things around us.
