Likes, shares, friend requests, emails, notifications, updates, alerts, tweets, advert, advert, advert, adverts in schools, adverts on police cars, adverts on every screen, endless scrolling, emotional headline, CAPITALS – stop – must detach – must go for a run, must run further and faster than yesterday, must relax, watch a film, a tv show – which one – endless scroll – email from work, email from Auntie Linda – STOP – meant to be relaxing – play a game – play Tetris – STOP – Uber Eats 50% off? Let’s watch this short first, will only take 30 seconds – STOP.
Welcome to the attention economy. It’s a world where our attention is currency, where our capacity for concentration is competed for, bid on, captured and grabbed, where corporations spend billions on the latest tricks to draw our eyeballs, to perk our interests. The attention economy is everywhere – stress, anxiety, frustration are on the rise worldwide – is it the attention economy that’s draining us of our energy to resist? Are attention merchants draining us of our will power? Is the constant noise detrimental to our mental health? Shrinking us down into insignificant nubs in a chaotic world?
Maybe it’s time to resist. I want to show you how the attention economy developed, the tricks that it uses, what privacy used to look like, why it’s important to carve out space, and how to do that.
Because privacy was once sacred – the sanctity of the self once important.
Now, companies compete in a race to the bottom of tricks to grab our attention – targeting emotions, feelings, words, and ideas – triggers – that are increasingly difficult to resist.
You might think you’re immune, but are you? A study of 100 million articles on Facebook found the most common headlines included phrases like “this will make your cry”, “people are freaking out”, “you’ll be shocked to see”.
When radio became popular at the beginning of the 20th century, people were SHOCKED to even contemplate the thought of advertiser’s voices in their homes.
In 1922 President Hoover said, “It is inconceivable that we should allow so great a possibility for service, for news, for entertainment, for education, and for vital commercial purposes to be drowned in advertising chatter”.
Printer’s Ink – a magazine about advertising for advertisers – recommended that “the family circle is not a public place, and advertising has no business intruding there unless invited”.
But radio and television execs found it difficult to resist the profits. CBS executive Frank Arnold once said, “here you have the advertiser’s ideal—the family group in its moments of relaxation awaiting your message. Nothing equal to this has ever been dreamed of by the advertising man”.
Arnold was a man in the middle of a great shift in history – between newspapers and the nascent radio and television revolution – and onwards to computing and the internet. It was a revolution in technologies to capture our attention.
First, what is attention?
This guy – William James – was the father of psychology in America. He wrote about the importance of attention in 1890. Attention, he pointed out, is central to everything.
He said attention is a “taking possession of the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought, localization, concentration, of consciousness are of its essence”.
It also implies, he said, ‘withdrawal’ from some things to concentrate on others.
Attention, in short, is focus.
Today, psychologists have expanded on this,
We have attention resources – the capacity we have to pay attention, how we pay attention, what we pay attention to, the strength we have to pay attention, and so on.
And there’s a concept called attentional capture – how we shift attention, why we shift attention, what captures our attention, at what times, and for what reasons.
What’s interesting about attention is it gets to the core of a lot of issues – free will, emotion, persuasion, experience, concentration.
Think about fear – if you’re walking in the woods and see a bear – your attention will be captured – by emotion, by your nervous system ramping up, by memories of what to do.
Some attention is conscious and purposive – we engage our prefrontal cortex. Thinking, concentration, and other attention is ‘passive, reflexive, non-voluntary, effortless’ – it’s drawn.
What does all of this mean? There are some important take aways:
- First, attention is limited, quite strictly – we can only really focus on one or possibly two things at once, and only a finite number of things through the day, and even through our lives. We ‘pay’ attention – suggesting ‘paying’ a cost for our time.
- And second, we can both control our attention and it can be captu-
*Phone rings*
Harold Innis summed the question up neatly: “Why do we attend to the things to which we attend?”.
The concentrating or capturing of attention can, of course, take many forms. We might listen to someone we want to learn from, watch something with good reviews, log on to social media to connect with friends, and choose to attend to something present, but the idea that attention can be captured using specific tricks, words, ideas, methods, is relatively new.
Tabloids – notably the New York Sun, founded in 1833, and its rival, the Herald – were some of the first commercial enterprises to feature stories designed to capture attention through the emotions – they featured murder, scandal and sensationalism.
One report said that in the Herald’s first two weeks the paper featured “three suicides, three murders, a fire that killed five persons, an accident in which a man blew off his head, descriptions of a guillotine execution in France, a riot in Philadelphia, and the execution of Major John André half a century earlier”.
A few decades later, during the 1860s, giant colourful posters began appearing all over Paris. Some were seven feet high, and they used new printing methods that could produce sharp lines and bold colours. One journalist wrote that they were “luminous, brilliant, even blinding”, using “vivid sensations and intense emotions”.
Their designer, Jules Cheret, was called “A master of blazing modernities”. He was awarded the Legion of Honor and had imitators across Europe, leading to a continent wide ‘poster craze’.
One writer said that Paris was “hardly more than an immense wall of posters scattered from the chimneys down to sidewalks with clusters of squares of paper of all colors and formats, not to mention simple inscriptions”.
A group called the Society for the Protection of the Landscape and Aesthetics of France was formed. They waged war on what they described as the ugly posters that you couldn’t get away from.
The authorities banned many billboards, regulations came in, and the posters were taxed and curtailed.
Back in the newspapers of America, those new headlines and cheap newspapers were used to sell a craze, ‘patient medicines’, as commonplace as the posters in Paris – treatments to cure you of all of your ills.
Clark Stanley was the most famous. He started selling a popular snake oil liniment – made from, snake oil. He described it as a “wonderful, pain-destroying compound” and the “strongest and best liniment for cure of all pain and lameness”.
And these medicines were everywhere. “Elixirs of life” – made up of secret ingredients by doctors and scientists.
In 1905 Colliers published a now famous report on the snake oil salesmen called “The Great American Fraud”.
It said:
“Gullible America will spend this year some seventy-five millions of dollars in the purchase of patent medicines. In consideration of this sum it will swallow huge quantities of alcohol, an appalling amount of opiates and narcotics, a wide assortment of varied drugs ranging from powerful and dangerous heart depressants to insidious liver stimulants; and, far in excess of all other ingredients, undiluted fraud. For fraud, exploited by the skilfulness of advertising bunco men, is the basis of the trade”.
The Collier’s reporting led to the first Food and Drugs Act in 1906, banning misleading claims and cracking down on the con men.
But admen had learned that targeting ailments and illness and existential fears, using bright poster colours and emotive language, was key to grabbing attention.
And the advertising industry flourished.
James Rorty, once an adman himself, wrote a bestseller on how those trying to grab attention had to degrade themselves in doing so. He wrote that the adman, “inevitably empties himself of human qualities. His daily traffic in half-truths and outright deceptions is subtly and cumulatively degrading. No man can give his days to barbarous frivolity and live. And ad-men don’t live. They become dull, resigned, hopeless. Or they become daemonic fantasists and sadists”.
Another bestseller, Vance Packard’s The Hidden Persuaders (1957), warned that, “large-scale efforts being made, often with impressive success, to channel our unthinking habits, our purchasing decisions, and our thought processes by the use of insights gleaned from psychiatry and the social sciences. Typically these efforts take place beneath our level of awareness; so that the appeals which move us are often, in a sense, “hidden.” The result is that many of us are being influenced and manipulated, far more than we realize, in the patterns of our everyday lives”.
Richard Stolley, founder of People magazine, had a method for capturing attention. He said the faces on the cover of People had to be recognizable to 80% of the public. After that, “Young is better than old. Pretty is better than ugly. Rich is better than poor. TV is better than music. Music is better than movies. Movies are better than sports. And anything is better than politics”.
Further into the century, cable television made grabbing the attention of more subgroups possible – ESPN, MTV, Fox News, the History Channel.
The instruments of attention capture – the medium, the technology, the paint, lights, sounds – all contributed to an improvement to hyperreality in such a way that made the immediate world less appealing to the dream-like world claiming to be able to take the consumer elsewhere – to a sale, to an article, to a video of an exotic land. Attention idealises the world – idealises the good and the bad.
But with the internet, data and personalisation fundamentally changed how our attention can be captured.
What was new? Instant feedback. Attention grabbers could use data vacuumed up from as many sources as possible – keystrokes, searches, your location, what your friends were doing, your purchases, where you’ve been, what you’ve watched – to finetune precise ways to grab your attention, to suggest the most ‘relevant’ articles, adverts, takeaways, tweets, posts, and videos – personalised attention capture.
You might be thinking so what? The more personalisation, the better. The more relevant the offer, the better. We live in an abundant modern landscape – surrounded by good things – products, information, social networks – so why is this a problem? Choice, after all, is a good thing. How can we think through the downsides?
First, most obviously, our attention is sometimes captured by things that we want – a good film or article – but often it’s captured by things that we know are bad for us. And second, can our own attentional resources – our capacity to attend to the things we want to attend to – be drained or captured or stolen with such ubiquity, with such all-encompassing frenzy, that we become lost to what our true needs are? And to what our own sense of self is, our own personhood?
Imagine that you live in a polygon, surrounded by doors and windows. One door has our friends in, another is full of windows into different parts of the planet, even space, another full of people talking about the news, another shops, another movies. What a wonderful thing – a good thing. But were evolutionarily wired to want more of a good thing. And like doors full of sugar, these doors knock, calling us, enticing us.
Corporations spend billions of dollars trying to improve and decorate those doors and windows. They try and make them seem like theirs are better, more urgent to attend to, than the others.
Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflix, said “at Netflix, we are competing for our customers’ time, so our competitors include Snapchat, YouTube, sleep, etc”.
One obvious problem with living in the polygon is that you’re surrounded by constant knocks, stimulation, notifications, emails, requests for your time.
And distractions not only distract at the moment the distraction happens. Studies have shown that your brain trains itself to predict distractions and so will distract itself in anticipation before the distraction happens. Like knowing a friend is about to knock on the door, or predicting this is about the time you get an email from your boss.
So the more you surround yourself with distractions the more your brain will interrupt itself from what its doing, and the harder it becomes to concentrate on the things that matter. It takes 10-15 minutes to get into a state of deep focus – a flow state – and only a second for your attention to be grabbed away from it.
One study found that being in a distracted environment lowers IQ scores by about 10 points.
When we’re trying to concentrate in the polygon – whether that’s reading, working, watching a film, spending time with family – the temptation to look to the windows is enormous.
The average person looks at their phone 150 times a day and touches it – that includes it picking up, touching it in pocket, and swiping it – around 2500 times a day.
Our attentional resources are drained. We are pulled this way and that by powerful magnets, temptations, siren songs. By sugars, by drugs, by the use of red, by BOLD emotional language, by the need to keep up, by the need to be liked – the attention economy is an overdetermination, a dizziness, a promise of freedom to pursue desires that ends up as a new type of slavery to our deepest desires.
So distraction, in itself, is corrosive.
And the methods of attention grabbing are only getting better, more persuasive and enticing – the game is rigged against us. I want to talk about how the psychological tricks attention grabbers use are linked to modern addictions in the next video – but for now, why is it important to escape from the constant competition for our attention and the pathways that leads us down? And how can we do that?
There’s two solutions – leave the polygon or attend to the polygon.
The centre of the polygon should be where your personhood thrives. Instead, essayist William Deresiewicz points out, “you are marinating yourself in the conventional wisdom. In other people’s reality: for others, not for yourself. You are creating a cacophony in which it is impossible to hear your own voice, whether it’s yourself you’re thinking about or anything else”.
The Global Emotions Survey – taken every year – reports that levels of sadness, worry, anger, and stress, particularly stress, are increasing year on year, and by almost 50% since 2009. Of course, a lot of things have likely contributed to this. But is the increasingly prevalence of smart devices, of being always online, causing overstimulation that leads to a new type of stress?
The term stress, after all, comes from physics – the amount pressure on an object, the stretching of an elastic band, that might be about to break.
Is the attention economy the cause of ‘quiet quitting’ – not doing all the extras a job demands of you? The dropping out of the rat race? The moving out of the cities? A response to power lunches, to always being available, to responding to emails and doing one more bit of work at 10pm, of tweeting about the latest news at 1am, of constantly keeping up with every friend?
Ethicist James William writes:
“We experience the externalities of the attention economy in little drips, so we tend to describe them with words of mild bemusement like “annoying” or “distracting.” But this is a grave misreading of their nature. In the short term, distractions can keep us from doing the things we want to do. In the longer term, however, they can accumulate and keep us from living the lives we want to live, or, even worse, undermine our capacities for reflection and self-regulation, making it harder, in the words of Harry Frankfurt, to “want what we want to want.” Thus there are deep ethical implications lurking here for freedom, wellbeing, and even the integrity of the self”.
As James William points out in his book, Stand Out of Our light, technology should function like a GPS for our goals – guiding us, showing us the latest information on our interests, keeping us updated with what’s important. But imagine if our real GPS took us down wrong paths instead of to our destination – to a sale at a department store rather than to Grandma’s.
Should we just turn off the satnav?
The painter Agnes Martin – talking about the hippy lifestyle – disagrees. She said “A lot of people withdraw from society, as an experiment… So I thought I would withdraw and see how enlightening it would be. But I found out that it’s not enlightening. I think that what you’re supposed to do is stay in the midst of life”.
Instead, In her book How to do Nothing, Jenny Odell talks about why we should be protecting spaces for non-commercial, non-instrumental, independent self and communal thought – places to maintain ourselves, to care, to think about the local.
She writes “What is needed, then, is not a “once-and-for-all” type of quitting but ongoing training: the ability not just to withdraw attention, but to invest it somewhere else, to enlarge and proliferate it, to improve its acuity”.
It’s not just about switching off, but finding the time free from distraction, to attend to things that we value. It’s about using technology in the right way. If the attention economy draws us away, the correct response is to return to the direct moment.
One of the most transformative features of modern life is the separation of space and time. We live in multiple time zones simultaneously – from one space. We have clocks, maps, calendars, timetables – all modern inventions – that are used to take us out of the moment – they allow us to plan with one another in different futures, different geographies, different spaces. Pre-moderns were focused on the plough, modernity dis-embeds us from local experience.
This, of course, has been revolutionary. But when we’re too distracted, too dis-embedded from what’s directly around us, the pre-moderns might have some good suggestions about how to detach.
Philosopher David Abram writes that, “direct sensuous reality, in all its more-than-human mystery, remains the sole solid touchstone for an experiential world now inundated with electronically generated vistas and engineered pleasures; only in regular contact with the tangible ground and sky can we learn how to orient and to navigate in the multiple dimensions that now claim us”.
Paying attention to the immediate informs things in surprising ways.
And paying attention is an act of discipline. We must train ourselves to switch off when we need to. Creating our own polygons – bookshelves, habits, and turning off notifications – and instead listen, watch, and think.
I think one of the issues with the attention economy is that it leaves us no time to truly think for ourselves – to not to be drowned out in conventional wisdom.
To attend carefully to what’s around us – to think problems through and let the mind run on its own – is lost when our privacy is encroached on so much we become part of the bigger machine.
Paying attention to the moment can lead to surprising insights. William Blake said of attending to the moment that it can lead you to “see a world in a grain of sand and a heaven in a wild flower, hold infinity in the palm of your hand, and eternity in an hour”.
This isn’t just romantic – it’s scientific. In looking to understand, to study, to find the causes of a grain of sand, a wild flower, your hand, an hour – you extrapolate outwards. Knowledge is not just endless information, it is learning how to think – and that requires disconnecting. Pay attention to how you’re paying attention.
Sources
Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy
James Williams, Stand Out of Our Light: Freedom and Resistance in the Attention Economy
Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads
Adam Alter, Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology
Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism
Mark Andrejevic, Automated Media
Brian McCullough, How The Internet Happened: From Netscape to the iPhone
