Time and attention. In my mind/book it's where you give your time and attention. I really enjoy a couple of radio shows, where I need to download the mp3 from their websites (they host/share a coupld of hours after their shows), and SecurityNow podcast.
The good thing about it, is that I only listen when I want to listen, and IF I want to listen.
Social media, slow and steady, absorb you into giving, increasingly, more time to them. Either by creating an echo chamber, or creating passions, promoting things you love/hate. Anything to get you hooked more.
Majority of the people do not filter/reduce the alerts on their phones. Good luck working on a project when you get 10 beeps per hour from Twitter, CNN, BBC, FB, IG, YT.
You say that like reading and signal-boosting an article takes meaningful effort. You sit on the toilet, you look at stuff posted by people you follow, see something curious, then you hit retweet or whatever. Modern social media is literally the art form of making this engagement maximally low-effort.
Trawling through the hundreds of actions of thousands of individual employees in a search for subversive contrarian views is a qualitatively different thing with respect to the notion of someone “having the time”.
It depends who the audience is. I definitely listen more attentively to less talkative people. I think the quality of social media would improve if they built that into their algorithms.
Also I think it may explain why people like me don't spend much time on social media. Too much BS. It's like watching too much TV; it dulls the mind.
When people spend most of their time expressing their ideas instead of forming and researching their ideas, their ideas are just not as good.
I think the broader issue is just engagement metrics, financial and non-financial, that reward wasting time. I think there's a very achievable alternate equilibrium, where social media companies see themselves as stores to browse for great content rather than TV-style engagement factories, although I don't have a great story for how to get from here to there. If some people spent hours every day aimlessly wandering around Walmart, everyone including Walmart would see the problem - they can't find what they're looking for, the store must be laid out poorly!
It's great for creating network effects / getting popular.
I understand that some people can't handle attention well, but people who can use it well clearly benefit from it by creating a business out of it, connections, or getting a job.
I think discounting entertainment as not having value is where you're going wrong. This may be precisely where the value is for the constant update, interruptions interrupting interruptions, hyper-flow of information.
Other uses might be traffic information, black-friday sales, tornado tracking/response, stock trading, organizing and coordinating civil protest, and rapid response for brand managers.
Because the majority of social media users subscribe to more people/companies posting more things than the user could ever possibly read. Rather than users being overwhelmed with noise, getting frustrated, and possibly logging in less, social media companies come up with a way to show them enough content to keep them engaged and happy (and visiting the site/using the app) as long as possible.
To an extent, because attention is a limited (albeit renewable) resource. But I had in mind something closer to terrain, in the strategic/military sense. For example I think Musk bought Twitter not to make money off it but to have strategic control of a piece of near-realtime digital broadcast infrastructure. See also this paper on the structural nature of digital echo chambers: https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.14501
Yeah, and if you look at all the engagement tactics that the NPR, NYTimes, or the CNN apps use, they are basically saying: spend your time here and not there.
Most of the internet is vying for your attention and asking you to spend more time on their site than the others.
To truly come up with meaningful solutions, we need to look at the entire problem. Otherwise we're just moving marbles around.
An efficient allocation of attention would be the exact opposite of the goal of basically any social media company(or any attention based company). The problem of attention allocation comes down to the individual deciding not to participate in the never ending cycle of bite sized clips of information. The companies are unlikely to make this easier for you.
That is an issue, but the real fundamental issue is algorithmic timelines and recommendations that bias content to maximize engagement. What maximizes engagement? Hate, fear, and bombast.
human attention has always been a commodity. Look at historical FM, AM, broadcast TV advertising.
companies like nielsen made attempts to quantify and measure actual viewership, hard to do in the 1-way-analog-broadcast era.
Big difference now is that every social media thing has its own app that can specifically track ever click, every scroll, every like, viewing time per image and page, on an extremely granular basis.
Look at why reddit is trying so hard to steer people into using their app rather than use it through a browser.
ultimately the revenue stream for these app based social media things comes from the company selling advertising to you, of course. it's just much more targeted now than in the analog broadcast era.
Regarding attention monsters, I didn't found mention in the article about the effort required to maintain a certain level of attention (over time). Please point it out if I missed it.
Reading a book and dealing with abstract thinking clearly requires more effort than loosely scrolling Instagram. It costs less and the (lower or higher) gratification is immediate.
On the other side, Instagram and games have a bidirectional interaction. Receiving a like or upvotes, prices and lootboxes make the attention grabber even more grabbing.
The good thing about it, is that I only listen when I want to listen, and IF I want to listen.
Social media, slow and steady, absorb you into giving, increasingly, more time to them. Either by creating an echo chamber, or creating passions, promoting things you love/hate. Anything to get you hooked more.
Majority of the people do not filter/reduce the alerts on their phones. Good luck working on a project when you get 10 beeps per hour from Twitter, CNN, BBC, FB, IG, YT.
Time and Attention.
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