In 1830, Benjamin Day, a newspaper publisher, had a radical idea. You see, up to that point, newspapers were expensive. The paper was the product and the general people were consumers. Thus, publishers tried to squeeze every penny out of the consumers as possible. However, Benjamin Day wasn’t having it.
Day created the New York Sun, a new paper that revolutionized the economy. To my knowledge, the Sun didn’t report anything special — it reported the same things as all other newspapers. However, it did have something new, something Bolshevik, even (well, maybe not quite). It had advertisements.
It seems a bit strange that this was such a novel idea. Advertisements are ubiquitous today and there were probably some before Day’s paper. However, this new paper changed the paradigm. Day charged much less than his competitors and quickly claimed a wide audience of readers. With this readership, he then sold advertisements.
So, what did Day do that was so revolutionary? He made the reader into the product and the advertisers into the customers. This was the attention economy.
I am sure you realize that you are also a product now. And I bet that you aren’t even bothered by it. Day’s economic model provided quite a few benefits to the average Joe. YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, Twitch, numerous newspapers, etc. can all be provided to you at no cost.
But does it come with no harm? In Digital Minimalism, Cal Newport argues that it has ample harm. So, let’s take a deeper dive into the dangers of the attention economy.
Your time, their money.
The more you scroll, the more you like, and the more time you spend on their services, the more profit these companies will make. So, although the services that are provided to you are technically free, they are only so in terms of cash. Your time, on the other hand, is their profit.
The founding president of Facebook, Sean Parker, revealed the tactics of the attention economy: “The thought processes that went into building these applications, Facebook being the first of them … was all about ‘How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?’ And that means that we need to sort of give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while, because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever.” (19)
Uh-oh. So all those notifications about my friends liking my new photo and commenting on my status update (are status updates still a thing?) are designed to keep me hooked? Yes. These products are designed to consume your time. They appeal directly to your need for social approval.
Even when you try to escape social media, you are brought right back in. You get off of TikTok only to receive a notification that someone liked your post and then promptly realize that you just spend two hours on your “For You” page.
Social media, the new fast food.
The innovation of fast food came with several benefits. You could quickly get food on the road and then keep driving or you could pick some food up when you are too tired to make something at home. Alas, these companies don’t make maximum profit when you don’t consume their food all their time, so they ramp up their marketing and get you hooked on their tasty flavors.
And where are we now? An obesity epidemic. That’s not good for public health, but it is good for these companies. Businesses of the attention economy use similar tactics — appealing to evolutionary desires to keep you hooked.
Cal Newport outlines this danger: “Much in the same way that the ‘innovation’ of highly processed foods in the mid-twentieth century led to a global health crisis, the unintended side effects of digital communication tools — a sort of social fast food — are proving to be similarly worrisome,” (136). We didn’t intend for fast food to cause a “global health crisis,” but we also didn’t intend for social media to take up hours of our time each day.
And what are the unintended consequences of social media? How about a lack of real social interaction, a lack of solitude, a lack of thinking for yourself, a lack of learning?
I am not arguing, and Newport does not argue in his book, that social media is inherently bad. In the same way that we can use fast food as a good thing to get some calories in when we don’t have other options, we can use social media as a good thing for getting social interaction with people across the globe in when we can’t travel to them. However, the way many of us are using isn’t good. It’s in excess. And it’s time to reclaim our attention and take a step away from these apps and websites.
Sources:
Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World by Cal Newport (2019)
