The Attention Economy: Why You Cannot Put Down Your Device (Part 2)

December 4 2020

digital control, Social Media, the attention economy

In the first part of this article, I tried to explain what the attention economy was and how it worked. In this second part, I will be looking into how the attention economy is affecting our lives and how we can regain digital control.

Let us look at what consequences the attention economy can have on us-the consumers.

An Everlasting Distraction

Think about how many times you check your phone per day. It’s hard to keep count, isn’t it? According to recent statistics, the average smartphone user unlocks their phone 150 times a day. With the different notifications, pop-ups, and messages, it becomes very difficult to get back to your workflow once interrupted. The continuous distraction deprives us of creating the conditions for concentrated deep work, which brings satisfaction and effective results.

A Toxic Relationship with Devices

On average, we use a gadget for 10 hours and 39 minutes each day. Not many of us are happy with how much we use our devices during the day and a lot of the time we are aware of how they affect our productivity, our social interactions, and our mood. Will this realization make us regulate the time spent on our devices, particularly our phones? No, we pick up our phones again to distract us from the uneasiness of our realization or to cheer ourselves up by sharing and getting likes.

Mindless Scrolling on Social Media

The infinite scroll is a built-in feature of social media feeds whose basic function is to automatically generate content the more the user scrolls through their feed. There is no bottom for a Facebook or Instagram feed, even if you have seen all the content shared by the profiles you follow. There is always some suggested content that might interest you.

“The scrolling doesn’t draw us in, but it keeps us there for much longer than we might be if the feeds ended, or if we had to click buttons to reveal new content,” says Adam Alter, author of Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked, and a professor at NYU, speaking about the infinite scroll. “People tend to function on autopilot until something inside their heads or in the world around them subtly or explicitly suggests it’s time to move on. Reaching the end of a feed is one such cue; removing the endpoint short-circuits that cue.”

The bottomless feed plays a major role in creating a mindless scrolling habit. The designer of the infinite scroll in 2006, Aza Raskin, said to the BBC that the innovation kept users looking at their phones far longer than necessary. “If you don’t give your brain time to catch up with your impulses, you just keep scrolling.’, said Raskin.

Developing an Addiction

According to an article published by Harvard University researcher Trevor Haynes, during positive interactions on social media, like receiving a notification or someone liking your picture, the brain releases dopamine, a neurotransmitter that makes you feel good. This chemical is associated with recreational drugs, food, sex, exercise, etc.

Behaviorist psychologist F.B Skinner explained in the 1930s how rewarded behavior is likely to be repeated. In the case of our use of social media, positive interactions are random rewards, and checking for them is easy. This makes the dopamine-triggering behavior a habit that we repeat ‘to feel good.’

A social media addiction involves broken reward pathways in our brain exactly like a gambling or substance addiction. According to TED, 5 to 10 percent of internet users are psychologically addicted. The immediate reward that social media provides is the attention we get from our network for little effort. The brain then rewires itself and makes you crave likes, comments, reshares, etc. Brain scans of social media addicts resemble those of drug addicts. There is a noticeable change in the areas of the brain responsible for attention, decision making, and emotions.

What Is the Future of the Attention Economy?

Companies will continue to design for attention in the future. Instagram, Facebook, and Snap, for example, are testing augmented-reality advertisements.

It’s not all doom and gloom, however! After receiving complaints from its users about attention-grabbing design and distraction, Apple responded by removing multiple notifications in quick succession on iPhones. It also introduced screen-time statistics which allow users to keep track of the time spent on electronic devices.

Can We Regain Digital Control?

I personally remember intentionally staying without internet during my freshman year at college. I would limit the time of my social media and internet usage to the time I go home by the end of the week. That had helped me be more productive, make time for my hobbies like reading and writing, and be present at every moment with a clear mind and not so much anxiety. I have then noticed over the years how my increased presence on social media had made me more anxious and affected my attention span. However, it did help me find many opportunities for personal and professional growth. So I do not think that complete isolation from social media platforms is the best option. There is a lot you can benefit from these platforms, but moderate use is crucial for a more meaningful and stress-free life.

Here are some suggestions to gain back control:

Becoming aware of how much time you spend on these platforms is an essential first step to get back control over your focus. Many of us may not realize how much time we are wasting on Facebook or Instagram through mindless scrolling, and there are specific applications and programs that help you keep track of your activity and the time you are spending on your devices.

By monitoring your digital activity, you can make sure that you have control over your time, remain focused and create space for more productivity and quality work.

Being mindful of your digital time is a great first step that will allow you to choose where to spend your time more and what is worth having your attention. You can remove apps that are not adding any value to your life or your time. Unfollowing accounts and profiles that may make you feel more anxious or depressed is also very helpful for a clearer mind. You can also consider using anti-distraction apps when you want to remain focused on your work for a long period of time.

There are also people who choose to set availability hours for email and Slack, so others know when to contact them and when they can receive a response.

It all comes down to creating the perfect conditions for yourself both online and in real life so that your work, creativity, mental health, and overall well-being do not get affected and you get to make the most of your time and your most precious commodity: your attention.

Conclusion

The responsibility does not only fall on the consumer to regulate their use of these platforms, but companies should also take into consideration how their products are affecting the well-being of their users. Some companies have taken these matters into consideration, but it is very important that we as consumers take matters into our hands and prioritize our well-being over all else. Technology keeps evolving and changing over time and we need to be more mindful of how this change is affecting us and shaping our lives.

Author: Meriem Saoud

Sources:

Timely Blog:https://memory.ai/timely-blog/the-attention-economy

Now.:https://bit.ly/37Pxev9

Psychology Today: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/highly-functioning-is-highly-dangerous/202009/my-name-is-dana-and-im-addicted-mindless

Inc.:https://www.inc.com/john-brandon/these-updated-stats-about-how-often-we-use-our-phones-will-humble-you.html

The Attention Economy: Why You Cannot Put Down Your Device (Part 1)

October 19 2020

Social Media, the attention economy, The Social Dilemma

When going about your daily tasks and responsibilities, you do not intentionally add a 2-hour Facebook browsing to your to-do list. The 2-hour scrolling up and down your newsfeed most likely happens out of habit, to see what is going on, and not to feel like you are missing out.

You decide to take a break during your work and probably use that time to browse social media. Then without noticing you realize that you had exceeded the time of your break. The constant flow of news and posts that keep coming up grab your attention and sometimes make you lose track of time. They also give you the feeling that you are ‘hooked’ to that platform. The latter was in fact designed to keep you engaged for as long as possible. The big tech companies spend millions to keep you on their platforms and capture your attention. This is known as ‘the attention economy’.

What is Attention?

Let us start off by defining attention and why it may be your most valuable commodity in the digital age.

Attention, according to William James, the American psychologist and philosopher, is “the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what may seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought. …It implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others.”—”The Principles of Psychology,” 1890

This means that while you are reading this, there are sounds, sights, and sensations happening in your environment that you are not paying attention to simultaneously. You narrow down your attention to focusing on these words while leaving out everything that is happening around you. Author Russell Rivlin explains in his text Cognition: Theory and Practice that “in order to sustain our attention to one event in everyday life, we must filter out other events. We must be selective in our attention by focusing on some events to the detriment of others. This is because attention is a resource that needs to be distributed to those events that are important.”

Although attention is a valuable resource to individuals, it is also highly valued by businesses. In his article ‘The Attention Economy and The Net’ published in 1997, Michael H. Goldhaber wrote that ‘the global economy is shifting from a material-based economy to one based on the capacity of human attention. Many services online are offered for free. In the attention economy, attention is not only a resource but a currency: users pay for a service with their attention.’

What Is the Attention Economy?

According to Tristan Harris, an ex-design ethicist at Google and co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology, the attention economy is shaping everything about contemporary life. In the Social Dilemma Netflix documentary, he says:

‘A lot of people think that Google is just a search box and Facebook is just a place to see what their friends are doing… but what they don’t realize is that these companies are competing for their attention.’

To make it simple, companies target people’s attention to make money. They have a business model that keeps people engaged on their screens for the longest time possible. Companies like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube place ads they know might interest the user and try to grab their focus ‘to increase the inventory of ad space a company can sell.’

You don’t pay to use Facebook. It is a free service. But, in fact, the service is not really free. Advertisers pay for it. That is why these companies care more about their revenue. Their ultimate goal is to keep you hooked on their product, scrolling, and browsing, choosing to use their product over the products of their competitors.

Why is Attention Fought for Today?

In his article,’In the Future, Our Attention Will Be Sold’, Mark Manson speaks about how economic scarcity changed throughout human history.

He writes: ‘The scarcity in our world is no longer knowledge. There’s an abundance of knowledge, just as there’s an abundance of labor and an abundance of land.

No, the new scarcity in the internet age is attention. Since there is a surplus of information, more information flowing through our society than any of us could ever hope to process or understand, the new bottleneck on our economy is attention. We now live in an attention-based economy.’

How Are They Trying to Get Your Attention?

Designers who design apps and sites realize that there is a highly competitive market that targets users’ attention. This is why they create some catchy designs in the hope of capturing attention.

Here are some of the trendy designs according to the Nielsen Norman Group website:

–Eye-catching animations to grab attention to a certain piece of content.

–Crowded designs where there is so much information shown at once in the hope that one piece of information would catch the user’s attention.

-Advertisement campaigns that force users to pay attention to the ad displayed. Some free games or free versions of YouTube and Spotify, for example, usually display ads where the close or ‘skip ad’ icons do not appear until the ad has displayed for a certain amount of time, forcing the user to watch the ad.

–Sites and apps are designed to send frequent and often unnecessary notifications to boost engagement.

How Is the Attention Economy Affecting You?

In an article in the New York Times, one of the first software engineers hired at Instagram, Greg Hochmuth said:

’The endpoint makes you reflect, do I want to keep browsing and clicking and being obsessed? Or do I want to do something else?’

Popular Social Media platforms are easily accessible and are designed to keep you engaged. This could make you wonder about how this engagement is affecting your life and shaping the future. Find the answers in part 2.

Author: Meriem Saoud

Sources:

-Timely Blog: https://memory.ai/timely-blog/the-attention-economy

-Mark Manson’s Website: https://markmanson.net/attention

-Nielsen Norman Group: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/attention-economy/

-Michael H. Goldhaber, ‘The Attention Economy and the Net’: https://firstmonday.org/article/view/519/440

How the Internet Works

June 24 2020

internet, technology

The internet is unquestionably one of the most influential innovations that shaped our modern lives. This massive network of computers had an extraordinary impact on our culture, economy, and everyday lives. It offers us instantaneous communication with loved ones and strangers alike across continents as well as endless hours of entertainment in all its digital forms. This network is able to transmit ludicrous amounts of data simultaneously between billions of devices across the entire planet.

So how did we manage to create such a reliable and automated system?

All data is a set of binary digits regardless of what type of information it represents. Images, audio, and all other file types are only differentiated by metadata which is a set of binary digits describing the nature of the data that follows. Therefore, transmitting data requires at least two signal states representing the ones and zeroes. The most common physical data transmission technology are voltage variations across a copper cable, modulated electromagnetic waves, and light pulses through optical fiber [1].

Transmitting one signal across a wire is insufficient. Therefore, multiple signals are modulated into different frequency bands that can be separated on the receiving end. The range of available frequencies defines the bandwidth and is mostly limited by hardware quality and the surrounding environment.

These physical technologies only enable the transmission of data between two devices uniquely connected to one another. So what happens when you have a network of billions of devices?

How does the data arrive at the correct destination in an acceptable time frame?

To ensure data reaches its proper destination in a complex network, data is split into packets of a specific size then preceded by more metadata according to specific protocols. The protocols that govern the internet fall into a hierarchy described by the OSI model. Each protocol appends specific information onto the data to be sent then the protocol below it on the OSI model appends more information and so on in a process known as “encapsulation”.

First, when an application running on a device decides to send data across a network, it structures the data according to a specified protocol like HTTP for web browsers or RTM for streaming audio and video. Compression, encryption, and other important operations are done after this step. Then the operating system allocates one of its ports to that application. Then either the UDP or TCP protocol is used in the transport layer to create a datagram specifying the port of the intended receiving application. TCP is the protocol responsible for resending requests if the previous ones are lost on the network and reorders data packets if they take different routes and arrive in the wrong order. UDP on the other hand is the simpler faster approach to sending data at the cost of part of it being lost.

More data is then appended to the TCP or UDP datagram by the network layer protocol which is almost always the Internet Protocol or IP which specifies the IP address of the recipient creating an IP Packet. Lastly, the data link layer protocol adds even more data to the IP packet. The protocol on this layer is usually either Ethernet or WiFi which specify the MAC address of the next device on the network.

After all those protocols are applied correctly, the data is transmitted across a physical medium to a gateway router. It then reads the metadata then checks its internal routing table which is a rough map of devices on the network and sends the data onward to what it calculates to be the next step in the optimal route. The next router on the network does the same until the data packet reaches its destination or gets lost on the way. But luckily it won’t just keep hopping endlessly since the routers would check its number of hops and eventually discard it if it exceeds a preset number.

If a device does not know the exact IP address of the device it wishes to communicate with and only knows a website name, for example, it sends a request to a DNS server. This server communicates with a central register of addresses that responds with the required IP address.

This way routers can efficiently understand millions of packets and send them properly to their destination. In addition to all these operations, each device on the network checks for random errors by verifying a CRC sum, and the final recipient checks for data integrity from tampering by verifying the Hash value. These operations are done in mere milliseconds in billions of devices without anyone noticing. The internet truly is a fascinating web of complexity.

Author: Wail Rimouche.

The New Age of Automation

May 3 2020

automation, new age, technology

Humanity has witnessed through its eventful history several industrial revolutions. The first one, created by the invention of the steam engine, is the most well known. The second emerged with the introduction of the assembly line and electric power. Afterward, the third industrial revolution was a result of advances in robotics and computer technology. And now we find ourselves again at the dawn of a fourth industrial revolution. Or as the Germans like to call it: “Industry 4.0” [1].

The upcoming wave of innovation would definitely create more economic prosperity and make even more products accessible to the general public just like the ones before it. But unfortunately, it will also create a new crisis of redundancy. Industry 4.0 technologies are rapidly growing and expanding to different industries and even several other economic sectors such as agriculture, construction, and even banking. This new revolution is different from its predecessors since it does not only automate physical labor but also automates mental, and to some extent even creative [2], labor.

This new age of automation revolves around extracting ludicrous amounts of data from every source possible, vibrations, and temperature variations in a power plant to online shopping habits. The obtained data is then fed into Artificial intelligence able to extract useful information from it. This enables predicting and optimizing systems but most importantly simulating them. This makes the AI capable of learning how to perform many tasks that seemed impossible to perform by a computer merely a decade ago.

Machines will no longer be automatons that can only perform basic mechanical tasks. With the advances in AI technology [3] made possible by the immense processing power of modern computers and cloud data centers, many tasks will soon become more efficient and cost-effectively performed by intelligent machines. A very good example of this is the emerging technology of self-driving cars that threaten the entire transportation job market [4]. Complex security systems have already begun to reduce the need for security guards. Administrative jobs are also at risk of being replaced with far more efficient software as bureaucracies are shifting towards a more digitized format.

Many more examples could be given for the vast array of tasks AI has become superior in performing than ordinary humans from medical diagnostics to proofreading. But this does not mean that all jobs are going to be replaced. In fact, most of the jobs available nowadays would not simply disappear but become AI-assisted. The adoption of ATMs and digital payments did not kick bankers out of business but pushed them to more specialized roles with the assistance of technology. The same would probably occur in other professions. Unfortunately, because AI-assisted workers are vastly more efficient than their conventional counterparts, the number of workers in a specific field would be drastically reduced.

The vast unemployment that will soon be created by these new technologies will not only be devastating on an individual scale but on a macro-economical scale. Trying to force companies to maintain unnecessary workers by legal means is simply kicking the can forward. Fighting against market forces, as history has shown us, is futile. Workers will have to adapt to this new job market that demands hyper-specialization, Human-machine cooperation, and life-long learning.

Supervising new highly complex machines and software would certainly require a very highly skilled and adaptable labor force. Creating a labor force fit for this new age is unfortunately impossible with the current outdated educational system. The solution is ironically what caused the issue in the first place: AI.

Online learning has already begun to emerge as a valid alternative to conventional classroom learning models. Pairing online learning with an advanced AI [5] that can learn the user’s thinking pattern and common mistakes and remedy them using feedback far better than a teacher ever could. This AI can, therefore, customize the learning experience of each student and optimize their learning efficiency and even answer their questions. It can also further enhance their learning experience by using interactive tools such as animated maps, graphs, diagrams, and simulations.

Online learning would also allow workers to hyper-specialized since the logistical constraints the classroom educational models suffer from are no longer a concern. Creating specific educational models for each specific profession is impossible in any university but in online learning, it’s easier than ever.

Finally, the accessibility of online learning would enable everyone to acquire the skills they need to cope with the demands of an automated economy. It would also allow workers to keep up with a rapidly changing profession and specialization when necessary without having to commit to a learning program full time.

Today, we find ourselves on the edge of a new era of technology and with the benefits of these technologies comes challenges we must overcome. We must reform our obsolete educational system to avoid the devastating outcomes of this new era of automation. This is an urgent issue that needs to be addressed before an entire generation becomes redundant in mere decades.