After thinking about second screens, behavioural targeting and the success of Buzzfeed, marketers are at last coming to terms with the attention economy: the battle for monetising ephemeral interests. Facebook and Tinder may be leading the race, monopolising users for 15 minutes per day, but what are we doing the rest of the time?
Google reckons that we spend 4.4 hours of our daily leisure time in front of screens. Computers are mostly used for productivity and search, smartphones for connectivity, and tablets for entertainment. Multi-screening is, however, the new norm, with as many as 77% of consumers watching TV while on other devices.
TED talks are threatening to replace books and lectures, turning learning into “edutainment” and celebrating performance and storytelling over factual accuracy. Netflix invites us to spend more time selecting a movie than actually watching it and YouTube provides an infinite cascade of videos to procrastinate in style.
The 341 songs on my main Spotify playlist should take 24 hours to play, but I can usually go through them in one, while answering no fewer than 20 emails per hour. This excludes my social media time, which I leave for when I’m stuck in traffic, or riding my bike. And, unlike most people, I find text messaging and WhatsApp too distracting. Some nations have been far more affected; in South Korea a man died after reportedly playing a 50-hour video game marathon.
Crisis of attentiveness
Unsurprisingly, there is a crisis of attentiveness. When information is bountiful, attention is limited and precious. Unlike our evolutionary ancestors, who were probably rewarded for absorbing as much of their sensory surroundings as they possibly could, what’s adaptive today is the ability to ignore our distracting environments. Indeed, in times of information overload and non-stop media bombardment, distraction is destruction and the only recipe for focus is discipline and self-control.
A one-time theoretical physicist, Michael Goldhaber, defined the attention economy as a “system that revolves primarily around paying, receiving and seeking what is most intrinsically limited and not replaceable by anything else, namely the attention of other human beings”. However, it seems more appropriate to describe our era as the distraction economy. Indeed the real war revolves around interrupting consumers’ focus and concentration, even for a few seconds. An integral part of this economy is measurement, since digital media allows us to quantify attention via clicks, likes, views and tags, allegedly improving our ability to understand and influence consumers. But if attention is the new currency of the digital economy, what are consumers getting in return?
What’s the value for consumers?
Not much. In fact, attention is valuable precisely because it is consumed by information overload, producing a vicious circle: we bombard you with content so that your attention becomes more valuable, which in turn justifies yet more content bombardment. “Attention here becomes the scarce quantity which is ‘consumed’ by that which is abundant, that is, information,” says Tiziana Terranova in an insightful essay on this subject. The result is a degradation of attention that causes ADHD-like behaviours, such as impulsivity and boredom. These symptoms are best evidenced during digital withdrawal: those 20 minutes on the tube, or the six hours of downtime while flying over an ocean.
As early as 1971 Herbert Simon observed that “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”. Thus instead of reaping the benefits of the digital revolution we are intellectually deprived by our inability to filter out sensory junk in order to translate information into knowledge. As a result, we are collectively wiser, in that we can retrieve all the wisdom of the world in a few minutes, but individually more ignorant, because we lack the time, self-control, or curiosity to do it.
There are also psychological consequences of the distraction economy. Although it is too soon to observe any significant effects from technology on our brains, it is plausible to imagine that long-term effects will occur. As Nicholas Carr noted in The Shallows: What the internet is doing to our brains, repeated exposure to online media demands a cognitive change from deeper intellectual processing, such as focused and critical thinking, to fast autopilot processes, such as skimming and scanning, shifting neural activity from the hippocampus (the area of the brain involved in deep thinking) to the prefrontal cortex (the part of the brain engaged in rapid, subconscious transactions). In other words, we are trading speed for accuracy and prioritise impulsive decision-making over deliberate judgment. In the words of Carr: “The internet is an interruption system. It seizes our attention only to scramble it”.
Some scientists take a fatalistic outlook on this, lamenting our inability to assess the long-term damage the attention economy will have on our minds. Professor David Meyer, a leading multitasking scholar, compares the damage to the glory days of the tobacco industry: “People aren’t aware what’s happening to their mental processes in the same way that people years ago couldn’t look into their lungs and see the residual deposits.” Although this may be an overstatement, it is clear that our typical patterns of focus have changed dramatically in the past 15 years. To borrow the words of tech writer Linda Stone, we are living in an age of “continuous partial attention”.
Thank you for giving me yours.
Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic is a professor of business psychology at University College London and vice-president of research and innovation at Hogan Assessment Systems. He is co-founder of metaprofiling.com and author of Confidence: Overcoming low self-esteem, insecurity and self-doubt.
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