Introduction
Facebook. Instagram. Twitter. YouTube. Tiktok. Pinterest. Tumblr. Snapchat.
Today, the internet is working overtime to get you on their programs, scroll their apps, and share content on their website. All of this is done in the name of profit.
All of these companies have one thing in common: they are free to the user. You aren’t charged a membership fee to access it, although for some you can pay one for premium access. You don’t pay per click, or per view, or per share. Instead, these companies typically generate revenue through advertising. Ads are mixed in-between content to ensure they reach your eyes, paid for by advertisers desperate to get their new product or service in front of hundreds of thousands or even millions.
It’s a simple proposition: social media companies are, when it comes down to it, companies. And companies have one single prerogative that ranks above all: profit making. Most, if not all, social media companies are publicly traded, meaning they have a fiduciary duty to provide increasing value to the shareholders. So how do companies like Facebook and Twitter make sure they’re maximizing revenue? By keeping your attention.
Doing the Math
According to uswitch, adults spent an average of 3 hours a day on social media in 2020. Now, I think it’s pretty clear that there were some... extenuating circumstances that may have led to such a high number. But even in 2017 the average use time was over two hours.
Your attention is precious. You have 24 hours in a day. That’s 1,440 minutes. Take away eight hours for sleeping. That’s 960 minutes left. Let’s say that overall, we subtract 8 hours for work and another hour for unavoidable reasons throughout the day that occur. Of course, 8 hours of laser focused, undistracted productivity is unrealistic but let’s go with it. That leaves 420 minutes left in the day for yourself.
Those remaining 420 minutes are precious resources that you control, and every social media company on this planet wants them. They want you to be scrolling day in, day out, constantly. The more time you spend on their platform, the more money they make. Every extra minute you spend scrolling is another ad they can show you, which is more money they can put in their pocket. That’s why every 2-3 posts on Instagram is a sponsored post, and every 4th story is an ad. By keeping you scrolling, they show you more of what fills their pockets and (hopefully) empties yours. But how much do they make by keeping you on an extra minute?
Let’s take Facebook as an example. In 2018, Android users in the US spent an average of 58 minutes a day on the app. Facebook made around $35 per user in the US & Canada in Q4 2018, with a total user base of about 1.5 billion active users, 186 million of those from US & Canada. With some incredibly dubious math, we can come up with a rough estimation of how much FB made per minute from users.
There are about 90 days in a quarter, meaning that the average user spent about 5,220 minutes on Facebook. Divide $35 by that and you get $0.0067 a minute, or about 7 thousandths of a cent per minute. Multiply that by the 186 million users, and you get about $1.25 million a minute, just in the USA & Canada. And that is exactly why it’s so important for you to spend as much time as possible on this app. While one extra minute and one person may not matter so much, the sheer quantity of people make up massive numbers.
That is the attention economy.
The Attention Economy
The attention economy proposes that attention is a limited resource that consumers will use in a way that benefits them most, much like dollars. The goal of a supplier is to provide an enticing enough product for you to spend your hard-earned attention on, and the goal of the buyer is to find something worthwhile to look at.
So, at its simplest form, the attention economy is this:
Human beings have a limited amount of attention that they can give to any given stimuli at any given time.
Companies are competing with each other and other environmental stimuli to get your attention on their platform.
We know though that you’re not always paying attention to things you want to be, but rather things you find yourself sucked into. How many times have you been caught in the endless doomscroll of Instagram until the condescending “you’ve viewed all the posts” message pops up at the bottom, reminding you of the time sink that was the last hour? How many times have you found yourself in a YouTube rabbit hole, jumping from video to video until you end up watching conspiracy theories on FEMA death camps and Obama’s nefarious New World Order?
Companies spend billions of dollars to refine and refresh their User Experience model. They make it easier and easier to scroll or swipe or tap or whatever. They play with timelines to show you content they think you’ll like. Everyone’s complained about the removal of chronological timelines and the invasiveness of random posts that Instagram “thinks you’d like”. The reason why is to keep you paying attention. They use the massive library of data they have on you to try and curate something perfectly tailored for you and your consumption habits. They trap you in a little bubble, filled wall to wall with pictures of cute kittens, videos of makeup artist tutorials, and clips of political figures from whatever affiliation you associate with to keep you watching.
They’ve hijacked the system and used it against you. So how does that work?
Origins of the Attention Economy
The term “attention economy” was coined by Herbert Simon, a psychologist, economist, and Nobel Laureate. Simon, in Designing Organizations for an Information-rich World, said:
“[I]n an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.”
That was in 1971. Simon suggested that attention was a bottleneck that limits our perception and ability. Going against the idea of multitasking, he also said:
“a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”
Explaining that an overabundance of information in a stimulating environment actually results in decreased focus and attention. Today, we live a world where information is at
Script Draft: The Attention Economy & Its Consequences 3
your fingertips, accessible by nearly anyone and at anytime. We, however, have not evolved to keep up with this new environment. After all, human evolution takes place on the scale of thousands, tens of thousands of years, and our info-rich society has only really been around since the late 20th century. And what we see today has only really been around for a decade.
And in our case, as a result of these two truths, companies will work to maximize the amount of attention they can generate towards their platforms.
The Cycle of Addiction
How do they do that?
Attention is maximized by using our biology against us. In general, we chase pleasure and avoid pain. This principle is exploited by social media companies by making these platforms provide constant feedback.
By taking away the barriers to continue engaging and creating barriers to keep you from leaving, they make it easier and easier for you to waste your day away.
Addictive. We often hear that social media is addictive. It hijacks your dopamine system to provide an easy, steady flow of it. As dopamine rises in your system in anticpation of something, it creates a craving, desire, pain for it. Only when you fulfill it does that pain go away, momentarily. Social media creates a feedback loop that entices you to engage: you post something, which is liked and commented. These likes and comments notify you, which you feel compelled to check, and then you feel good about it. Repeat ad infinitum.
This creates a feedback mechanism that eventually wires itself into your brain, creating a habit.
Other ways to maximize the amount of attention a platform gets:
1. Endless scrolling: this one is a favourite of every platform. By making it easy to keep going and keep seeing content, they’ve removed a barrier for you to stay engaged. No more pressing “next” to see another result, no more pausing after you hit the bottom of a page to decide if you’ve seen enough. Just a swipe of your finger or a flick of the scroll wheel and you continue happily down the rabbit hole.
2. “We think you’d like this”, or how I learned to love the algorithm: Facebook, Google and Twitter have enough data on you to create a comprehensive profile of who you are, your personality, and your likes/dislikes. It uses that the best it can, suggesting content that is always relevant to you based on what you’ve watched before. It gets a lot harder to say no when the algorithm is reading your mind for what you want. It doesn’t always work, but who here hasn’t had an experience where they’ve thought about something and it magically appears on their feed the next day?
3. Notification hell: no, there wasn’t really anything worth looking at. But Instagram just told you your friend posted something! Might as well go give it a like, right? Next think you know, you’ve been on your explore tab for twenty minutes. These random notifications offer no benefit and very little worthwhile information. You would have seen your friend’s post anyway. But it served as a trigger to get you back on the app.
So keep that in mind when you wonder why you can’t seem to get off Instagram or Twitter: they’ve been finely tuned for a single purpose, and that is to keep you there. Don’t feel bad that you, a single human being with a human brain, fell into the bottomless pit that was dug out by billions of dollars of venture capital money and the latest research into abusing that poor frontal lobe of yours.
Consequences of Social Media
A lot is still unknown about the consequences of social media and its ever growing desire to suck up every last minute you have left. Studies conducted about social media and mental health have swung from negative to positive to neutral.
It can be hard to wade through the muck to find credible research on the effects of social media. While reading through papers, it seemed that the results were mostly negative or neutral. Some positive effects came with very specific caveats, using platforms to connect with others in a safe space to discuss a specific issue. For the vast majority of people, it seemed that social media either had no impact on mental health, or that it worsened it, amplifying anxiety and depression. Again, it comes down to how you use it.
I don’t think there has been enough time in our current state of the internet to determine whether there is an effect. The internet as we know it has only really existed for a decade, and with the prominence of virtual reality, AKA the “metaverse”, and the more refined social engineering practices of today, it doesn’t seem like studies conducted from the late 2000s/early 2010s could accurately capture the world we’re in today.
While the advent of the internet seemed to mark a new age where the world becomes smaller, and people from anywhere can connect to create a global community, it seems that the trend has been the opposite. Social media platforms spend money and time making sure that everyone is trapped in their own bubble of information and content, that they only interact with people they already would agree with, that the news articles or videos that they see match closely with the hidden algorithms used to determine a user profile. The conglomeration of massive tech companies that control the internet have led to the atomization of communities, where gates have been quietly put up to keep the “other” out, and more importantly keep you in. Who knows what you might do if you come across something you don’t like?
Personally, social media has had a clear negative effect on my life. As someone with ADHD, the kind of “brain hack” platforms employ to keep me on their app works really well. I can’t count the number of times I’ve intended to do something, only to scroll through Reddit or Instagram or YouTube before finally coming to my senses. It’s left me anxious and frustrated, and affected my ability to focus on tasks at hand. I recognize this is anecdotal, not empirical. But I’m hardly alone in feeling this way. My sentiments are echoed by thousands.
Systems of Exploitation
Regardless, the social engineering employed to maximize their share of the attention economy has led to some interesting niches, which I want to highlight here.
Something came to my attention in a drunken rage one Tuesday night, and I’d like to subject you all to it as I did the people that, I have to stress, I barely knew in that bar.
While I was yelling at about how agriculture ruined our lives and left us with nothing but these rent-seeking tech companies desperately trying to con us out of every hard- earned cent we had through their attention economy schemes, I realized that lately, there’s been a real abundance of apps designed to calm your mind, monitor your mental health, and help you focus. Apps like Calm or Balance promise to teach you mindfulness and reduce anxiety. Pomodoro timer apps promise to help you reclaim your productivity against a world with more distractions, as does a program called Moment, which purports to act as an AI planner to keep you distraction-free and in deep work. New productivity and wellness apps pop up with venture capital money or the backing of some “tech guru” from Silicon Valley.
With our attention becoming scarcer and more valuable in a world that is filled to the brim with information- advertisements staring you down in every corner of the internet and in real life, workplaces demanding more of your time and productivity, TV shows, movies, influencer content, everything and anything under the sun is begging for your attention. And that’s where the rise of these apps come in.
Promising to simplify your life and restore balance, the “Wellness App” industry is not exactly a solution, but a symptom of our modern lifestyles. With tech companies stealing your precious attention and focus away from you, these other, good tech companies promise to give it back to you at a low monthly price, so long as you keep paying forever and actually make sure to use it instead of getting back on Instagram. These companies advertise themselves on Instagram, Twitter and the like, using the sophisticated targeting algorithms in place to find their ideal target market, keywords, and take advantage of the digital crumb trail you’ve left behind. If you visited Facebook and then later googled “how to wake up on time”, the cookie that follows you from Facebook to every corner of the web relays that information back, and you’ll get an ad from Rise App, with science backed methods of tracking your sleep, finding peak times to work, and eliminate sleep debt.
The advice of eliminating distractions, staying off social media, turning on do not disturb have all the trappings of the “personal responsibility” argument. It’s your fault that you can’t pay attention to the task at hand. It’s your fault that you’re on Instagram instead of reading a book, or scrolling through Facebook at work. It chalks up the allure of social media as a failing of discipline and ability, rather than acknowledging that the profit motive combined with advanced social engineering have created a beast so dangerous that we don’t even know its long term effects. Is it entirely the fault of companies for creating an addictive product? Did they know what they had on their hands? If they didn’t when they started, they surely do know, and that is as good as culpability. How can we ask people to be responsible individuals when we craft an environment that defaults to irresponsibility?
So instead of recognizing that social media is an industry that is addictive, potentially dangerous, and designed to maximize ad revenue by squeezing out every last second of your focus, we assume that people are just weak. Instead of regulating what these tech giants can and cannot do to earn money, we ask the market to regulate itself. Instead of addressing the mental effects that social media has, investigating it thoroughly, and recognizing the value of our limited attention, we allow the rise of another market designed to sell our focus and wellbeing back to us. The system works
together, almost synergistically. You’re bombarded with stimuli so overwhelming and craftily designed you can’t resists, and then you are offered a guiding light, a saviour in matte design language and questionable quasi-science.
Closing Thoughts
The internet was supposed to be a revolutionary new technology that would make our world smaller, a tool we could use to maximize productivity, bridge gaps in communication, and create a better world. I remember being a child and hopping on the internet to watch funny videos on YouTube or try to play multiplayer games with friends. Instead, it’s become an overwhelming behemoth that is impossible to avoid and crucial to living in the modern world. It stopped becoming a tool and started to seep into every crack, every breath, every moment of our lives.
These apps are a symptom of a world where your mind has become a hyper-precious commodity rather than something that is yours. Where taking your dollars first comes by taking your attention. Where the environment is one that guides you to forget and be distracted instead of developing your own life. No wonder none of us can stand the quiet anymore- why would we have to when we could have The Office playing in the background while we read the latest Twitter trending? Maybe we need to start holding tech companies accountable for how they use our data, and begin placing higher importance on the attention economy and how we’re exploited.
Yes, I think it’s a good thing that there are ways for people to discover mindfulness, and to monitor their mental health, and to improve their focus and productivity so they can do what they want instead of what the architects of our environment guide us toward. But I also think it’s an indictment on the society that we live in today, where hyper- capitalism rules, fragmenting our mind, attention and focus only to sell it back to us later in subscription format. I don’t like that world or where it’s heading.