How Many Minutes Have You Lost To The Attention Economy Today?

First published on September 30, 2020

About five minutes ago (before the 'now' in which I am writing these words), I sat down to write this piece. I picked up my phone to set the 12-minute timer that dictates how long I'll write for... and yet that's not what I did.

Instead, I wrote a message to some of my friends on WhatsApp. And suddenly five minutes had gone by. In some ways, I'm lucky it was only five minutes. Many times over the last decade (although thankfully less often recently) I have lost 15, 20, 60 minutes, maybe even more in one go to the devices and social media platforms that I am surrounded with. How many minutes have you lost to the attention economy today?

Ironically, I was writing to my friends about the documentary, The Social Dilemma, which has recently launched on UK Netflix. The contents of the documentary mostly wasn't new to me, as I had already watched Tristan Harris - the man who features most prominently in it - be interviewed by Rebel Wisdom on their YouTube channel and listened to him speak to Tim Ferriss on Ferriss's podcast. Depending on how you most like to consume media, I would probably recommend those interviews above the Netflix documentary, but the documentary does bring it together neatly.

The message of the documentary, in essence, is this: that the business models of many of the apps and platforms that we use every day mean that they are competing for our attention. So all the algorithms of Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and more are designed not to show us what we want, or even what we like. They are simply designed to keep get our attention as quickly as possible and keep it for as long as possible. By any means necessary.

There are worrying stories about how this actually shows up. Ferris relays one in his interview with Harris about what reportedly happens with the YouTube algorithms, which gradually guide people from (if I remember correctly) a steamy video on YouTube to videos featuring younger and younger people, all the way to children in their swimming costumes. A memorable comment from Harris explains that it seems that fake stories travel around Twitter six times faster than true stories.

The reasons this matters are many, but perhaps three in particular are worth pointing out. One is that they give us a strange and distorted view of the world. If truth matters, then how we see the world matters. Secondly, as Jonathan Haidt explains in the Social Dilemma and his most recent book, The Coddling of the American Mind, there is a worrying and extreme rise in self harm and suicide rates among young people happening at the moment, and those mental health problems may only be the tip of the iceberg. And thirdly, the way the technology fights for our attention is incidious and almost impossible to resist, and - like the five minutes I lost here - many of us will lose minutes or hours to infinate scrolling or YouTube recommendations before we notice.

I'm relieved that I started turning off the notifications on my phone years ago - that's one of the strongest recommendations given by esperts at the end of The Social Dilemma. And I've only noticed benefits since I stepped even further back from Facebook and Twitter at the end of last year when trying to look after my mental health.

For those of you, like me, who want to be more productive or spend more time as their higher selves. Understanding and seeing what is happening with these technologies and platforms is vital in choosing how we use and respond to them. For those who have children, the imperative to understand how these things work is even greater.

No one, least of all me, is suggesting that our technology does not create amazing opportuntiies. The fact that I am writing this and you are reading it shows us that. And, if we want to be skilful in the midst of the maelstrom of complexity that is the modern world, it's vital that we understand how things work. The attention economy, as outlined by Harris on Rebel Wisdom and The Tim Ferriss Show, and on the Social Dilemma, is worth paying attention to.