Units of attention
Good stuff from Jay Springett, who also links to a 60-page PDF called Paying Attention that I… haven’t paid attention to (yet!)
The attention economy rewards the same behaviours regardless of whether the content being spread is a coordinated disinformation campaign or a genuinely interesting essay. The platform does not distinguish between the two. It just measures the engagement.
There is a practical implication buried somewhere in the above though I think.
That if the first units of attention are the ones that change behaviour most, then being liberal with the like button actually matters. dLeaving a comment, sharing a post, replying to something you found worthwhile are small acts that actually work. In the face of “the firehose” the modest counter-move is to be deliberate about where your attention goes, and cultivating the things that you want to see more of.
This is interesting when juxtaposed with something Nita Farahany says in the transcript of a conversation posted on The Exponential View:
This gets at a fundamental question about what it means to act autonomously. Are you acting in a way consistent with your own desires, or are you being steered by somebody else’s desires? There’s very little we do these days that is steered by our own desires.
I’m teaching a class this semester at Duke on mental privacy, advanced topics in AI law and policy. I ran an attention audit on my students. They recorded how many times they picked up their devices over three days, and what they spent their attention on. Day one: record it, don’t change your behaviour. Day two: no apps that algorithmically steer you — which meant basically nothing was allowed. Day three: do whatever you want, record it again. Day two was remarkable. Somebody read a book. They couldn’t remember the last time they’d done that. These are students. Someone finished a puzzle they’d been convinced they didn’t have time for. And day three? Worse than day one. Utterly sucked back in.
I was flicking back through my notebook, which I have not used enough in the last 18 months or so, and came across a note I’d made while reading Oliver Burkeman’s excellent book Four Thousand Weeks. He quotes Harry Frankfurt as saying that our devices distract us from more important matters — it’s as if we let what they show us define what counts as “important”. As such, our capacity to “want what we want to want” is sabotaged.
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Image: Marcus Spiske