Taking Charge of Ourselves in the Attention Economy
In the battle for your "screen time, "We compete with (and lose to) Fortnite more than HBO," Netflix told its shareholders recently. The computer game has 200 million players (vs. 139 million subscribers for Netflix) who on average log on 6-10 hours a week. Who wins the competition for our time, however, should be of no concern to us. What should concern us is that technology is capturing too much of it.
A 2018 Pew Research Center report revealed that 45 percent of U.S. teens are online "almost constantly." An article in the Harvard Business Review (HBR) revealed that 46 percent of computer users say they are "hooked" on email, that a typical knowledge worker checks e-email 50-100 times a day, and that 60 percent do it in the bathroom (and 15 percent in church). Some people check their smartphones up to 150 times a day.
Clearly, many like spending time this way. They stay connected to people and things they care about, keep up-to-date, and have fun. It facilitates participation in everything from political movements to local and global improvement efforts. These are pluses, to be sure.
But there are minuses. The same HBR article reported it takes on average nearly 25 minutes to return to a task after stopping to read an email. Knowledge workers spend 20 hours a week just managing their email and change tasks about every three minutes.
More important is the question: what don't we do when we are attending to our technology? As business consultant Stephen Covey noted years ago, we often give first attention to things that seem urgent but are not really important, while those that are truly important but not urgent get put off.
Advanced technology brought us the "information economy," which is transitioning to the "attention economy." Netflix, HBO, Frontline, smartphones, and the Internet are competing for our attention. When we give it, we take it from something else. As James Williams asks in his provocative book, Stand Out of Our Light: Freedom and Resistance in the Attention Economy, "what do you pay when you pay attention?" His answer: "[W]e pay attention with the lives we might have lived."
Williams, a former Google ad strategist with a doctorate in philosophy, is concerned with our freedom to think about how we want to live our lives. This requires thinking about our values, goals, and life stories. It means thinking about what we want, not what online sites want us to want. It means having uninterrupted time to dream, and time for planning to reach that dream.
Yet, in the attention economy, the trap is our capacity for distraction. "Clickbait" exemplifies the problem. With catch-phrases such as "bombshell report...," "breaking news," "major announcement ...," and "worst nightmare," we are enticed to click and read. Allowing this, we cede control over our attention.
Frequent, seemingly unending "notifications" of just-arrived texts, emails, and tweets are another example. "[E]xposure to repeated notifications," Williams argues, "can create mental habits that train users to interrupt themselves, even in the absence of the technologies." Not only is our attention captured, but our attention spans are shortened.
In more devious hands, distractions can be used strategically. The Chinese government, Williams notes, creates over 440 million social media posts a year to get people to pay less attention to stories it does not want them to read. American political life has not been immune from this technique.
Williams freely acknowledges his own proneness to distractions. "In my own life I saw that pettiness . . . in the way the social comparison dynamics of social media platforms had trained me to prioritize mere "likes" or "favorites" or to get as many "friends" or "connections" as possible, over pursing more meaningful relational aims."
Williams likens the pursuit of capturing our online time to when hackers flood a website to shut it down. "The competition to monopolize our attention is like a DDoS [Dedicated Denial of Service] attack against the human will."
Asking online designers to fix the problem is unlikely and insufficient. Their economic incentives are too powerful. Leaving the solution to them abandons our responsibility to take charge of our thinking. Williams would have us ask ourselves a question. The next time you find yourself captivated by information technology, with your attention pulled into short-term tasks or pleasure, are you really living the life you want to live?
""It's my firm conviction," Williams concludes his book, "that the degree to which we are able and willing to struggle for ownership of our attention is the degree to which we are free."
Photo Credit: John Biehler
