Distraction and The Attention Economy
The antidote to impulsiveness is forethought
You are listening to your favourite music artist/podcaster on a streaming service and an ad interrupts you. Although, it’s a 10 sec ad but it’s surely an irritant and a distraction. The platform indeed offers you an option to opt for a ad-free experience, but there is a cost involved.
This is a common phenomena, be it on a radio station, TV channel, music streaming platforms, video platforms or digital newspaper. Depending on how important it is for you to have an uninterrupted experience, the decision whether to pay or not is made.
“Please pay attention”
All of us have heard the statement, “Please pay attention”. It literally means that your attention is precious and you need to be judicial of its use. When we “pay” attention to one thing, we deplete our budget of mental resources so that we have less attention available to spend elsewhere.
While reading this essay, there are various things which are vying for your attention — the chirping of birds, notifications on your phone, etc. On any given day, we are flooded with information, but have very less time to process it.
Similar to money, you exchange attention!
So, how do we define attention? Attention is a concept which is studied in psychology. It can be defined as a selective focus on some of the stimuli that we are currently perceiving while ignoring other stimuli from the environment — information trade-off.
Think of attention as a highlighter.
Rise of the “Attention Economy”
From an Economics standpoint too, the focus is on allocation of scarce resources. In today’s digital age, attention is the most scarce resource considering the wealth of information available in the digital realm. That is the reason, this resource is also valued by businesses, political campaigns, media outlets, and many more organisations that try to lure us to spend time.
We are living in an “attention economy.”
The term “attention economy” was coined by economist and Nobel Laureate Herbert A. Simon in the year 1969. He wrote that attention was the “bottleneck of human thought” that limits both what we can perceive in stimulating environments and what we can do.
Then in the year 1997, author and scholar Michael Goldhaber wrote a seminal essay which focused on the “internet economy”. In which he described the shift of the global economy from a material-based economy to one based on human attention.
“Attention has its own behavior, its own dynamics, its own consequences. An economy built on it will be different than the familiar material-based one.”
- Michael Goldhaber from the essay, “Attention Shoppers!”
A lot of companies understand the scarcity of our attention and are calibrating their business models to capitalise on this. If you relook at the instance at the beginning of the essay, music streaming service such as Spotify have developed two revenue streams — you can either pay money for ads to disappear, or pay with your attention and listen to the ads.
Reclaiming attention
If you watched the show, “The Social Dilemma”, you will understand how the technology companies leverage one’s attention (anticipation). There are a lot of instances in our daily life, which manifests this.
When you are uncertain about something, you quickly Google it. When you are just idling, you start browsing Instagram or Tik Tok. No one really tells to do these things — our inherent behaviours are being used as triggers.
The recent spate of pandemic-induced lockdowns made the digital mediums indispensable en masse, as they were the only source of entertainment, communication, learning and our bridge to the outside world. This also has had consequences, as people have been more prone to getting distracted by their devices and going deeper down the rabbit hole. Are we at a point of no return?
Nir Eyal in his book Indisctractable says we can take steps to “retrain and regain our brains” in order to reduce the impulsiveness of reaching out to our mobile devices. The problem, he says, is not technology, it is our desire to escape what we don’t enjoy in real life — be it a difficult task we’re putting off, or a dealing with a bad relationship.
“The antidote to impulsiveness is forethought”
— Nir Eyal
If you look at the way the smartphones are marketed these days — the entire focus is on the number of cameras. There is seldom, any mention of any other features. This can also be attributed to the changing user behaviour and the rise of image/video sharing platforms such as Snapchat, Instagram and Tik Tok. It’s up for debate in terms of what happened first.
Quantifying usage
To be fair to the technology companies, they are indeed taking steps to help people monitor and measure their device usage. Android’s ‘Digital Wellbeing’ app is a case in point. It provides a summary of the overall usage and also provides user with the ability to restrict usage of an app beyond a specified time limit. And, it also assists users in classifying which notifications be prioritised and which ones can be muted. These are nifty features and improving its efficacy requires discipline.
Closing thoughts
At the moment, we are witnessing a lot of buzz around privacy, with Apple leading from the front. Since last year, Apple has kept user privacy at the crux of all its efforts — through its ‘privacy by design’ approach.
Can we foresee a phone company, a technology company or any other company come out with a product/solution which is built around the proposition of ‘reclaiming attention’?
In my opinion, that day is not far. Below are some potential directions which I can think of:
- Rewarding users who curtail their impulsive behaviour and stick to a rigour. This can be something on the lines of health points or karma points being offered by insurance or healthtech companies.
- Network operators charging users based on their usage — less is cheaper (discounted), more is expensive. I know it sounds ironic to the way they operate presently :). We have seen insurance companies rewarding individuals who follow a healthy lifestyle in the form of discounts on premiums or providing rewards.
- Loneliness and depression is on the rise and there is a renewed focus on mental wellbeing. An invite only group/community which is completely focused on in-person/physical activities and encourages members to reduce their device usage. This can be an extension of the special interest groups which exist such as running, cycling, biking, mountaineering, team sports, etc.
What do you think about this? Would love to hear your thoughts.
Until next time!
~ Sajid
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