Is Our Attention for Sale? (from RSA)
Do you think our attention is for sale?
Is the technology (we carry in our pockets) distracting us from pursuing our life goals?
Have we woken up to the scale of the attention-capturing and persuasive powers being held by a small number of big tech companies?
In the latest RSA Short, James Williams warns of the dangers that digital distraction poses to us individually and collectively.
Herbert Simon made an observation in the 1970s that when information becomes abundant, attention becomes a scarce resource.
The confusion about the role of digital technologies in the world today
comes from the lack of taking this observation into account, and because
attention is the scarce resource now, it is now the thing that technologies mostly compete for.
*The environment (to compete for our attention in scientific systematic ways) is often Called the attention economy.
Think about the goals you have for yourself and the goals the technologies have for us.
There is a deep fundamental gap between them, so there is this inconvenient truth that the attention economy is by and large not on our side. Its goals are not our goals.
A CEO of the Netflix said,” At Netflix, we are competing for our customers’ time, so our competitors include Snapchat, YouTube, sleep, etc.
We call Facebook a social media company, but they are not selling social media. They are selling our attention. They are in the business of persuasion.
Technologies should help us reach our goals, not distract us from them.
There’s more technology around us than ever before,
but it’s harder somehow for us to do what we want to do.
Maybe we have all made the same mistake of failing to take into account
man’s infinite appetite for distractions.
If we’re serious about protecting human freedom and democracy,
it’s time to assert and defend our freedom of attention.
