Paying with our attention

While listening to the professor lecturing on one of my favourite subjects, economics, I sensed the buzz of my phone in my pocket. I tried to ignore it at first but the longer I resisted the more I was tempted toward checking my phone. My brain was continuously generating hypotheses on what that notification could be. What if it is an important message? What if you miss an event by not replying? And many other possibilities. Finally, I took out my phone and it was a reel sent to me on Instagram by my friend. Maybe you can imagine the rest. I spent literally the rest of class scrolling on interesting but useless reels. Because I had shifted my focus from the lecture and returned after 2 minutes, I had lost so many of professor’s words that it was hard to get following what he was saying and so I continued scrolling.
The next lecture professor was talking about how human labour is exchanged for money in the current economy. Suddenly, it made me think of a similar pattern. I was thinking of how human attention is being exchanged for money these days. Many companies are making money by keeping your attention on their platform. Our attention somehow has become a kind of currency for them. As it is in the phrase “Pay Attention” I think we are also paying these companies with our attention. Billions of dollars are in the budget of companies to attract your attention to their advertisement or developing new tricks to capture your attention. Many other companies’ monetization strategy is trading users’ attention for advertising revenue. Which makes our attention the product they sell to advertisers.
Nir Eyal, author of the book “Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products”, argues “When you’re feeling uncertain, before you ask why you’re uncertain, you Google. When you’re lonely, before you’re even conscious of feeling it, you go to Facebook. Before you know you’re bored, you’re on YouTube. Nothing tells you to do these things. The users trigger themselves.”
Just to clarify, I am not arguing that social media is useless, and we should avoid it. But we should rather choose consciously what our brain consumes. We can have a healthier brain diet by taking simple baby steps, like unfollowing unimportant pages or even turning off notifications.
So, if you haven’t yet thought about it, maybe it is time to give your attention more value and therefore be a more valuable person. After all, if you don’t decide on how to spend your attention, others will decide for it.
Before you move your attention from this article, can I ask you what would you buy next time?