When you pay attention, who gets paid?
If you've watched the movie Ready Player One, you might remember that one scene where the villain explains that gaining control over the Oasis means that he'll be able to pretty much cover the visual field in advertisements. If you've been on any video streaming website (e.g. Kissanime, 123movies), you might've experienced the most annoying pop-up and banner ads that cover as much of your screen as possible. If you've watched videos on platforms like Twitch and YouTube, you've definitely had to sit through 30 second ads that they won't let you skip. They even buffer sometimes.
Advertisements are just one product that try to get you to pay attention, and for good reason, too. For every second that your eyes are on the ad, the company behind it might just convince you to buy their product, whether it's a really weird Old Spice advertisement or a really sick Smash Ultimate trailer (the latter actually worked on me). Here's the interesting thing: you pay attention to the ads, but you never get anything back. It's the company that benefits from your time.
Social media and video games are designed with this in mind. Mobile games like Candy Crush and free-to-play games like League of Legends, despite the vast gap in quality, have a very similar fundamental structure. The beginning is easy. An infant could beat the first few levels of Candy Crush by taping the screen at random, and there are many monkeys that play League of Legends at much higher levels than the beginning ones. The goal is to get you hooked on the first few surges of excitement that come with beating a level or winning a game, especially when considering how easy it is. Only later does progress slow down and the game becomes more difficult. At that point, people tend to want to spend more time getting further for those same surges of excitement that were so easy to get at the beginning. Some people even spend money to do so. Social media algorithms are designed to keep you interested in what you're looking at. Quora (a place where people answer questions in blog-like format) is my favourite example: it keeps track of what you like to read and what you don't like to read, then gives you what you like to read. Sometimes, they'll throw in sponsored messages or advertisements, but only after you've been hooked.
What social media and video games are doing is making you sign a contract, where you willingly pay attention for a certain amount of time each day (aka addiction). It's an investment, where companies give you a surge of excitement or an inflated ego in return for your valuable recurring attention. This attention is slowly transferred to advertisements, where the game or website can function as a platform (letting others advertise on their site/game) or a marketing tool for their own products (G+ sponsoring android phones, Clash of Clans asking you to buy more gems, etc.).
Modern technology has shaped the market for attention. Spectator sports like baseball are dying because five hours of one's attention isn't worth what the athletes are giving back to the viewers; fast paced video games have been booming because one can get so much more entertainment out of just a few hours of one's attention. Same with advertisements. Those used to be billboards by highways, where people had nowhere else to pay their attention to; the opportunity cost of paying attention to those ads was zero. Now, with so much at our hands, platforms are forced to shove advertisements in our face so we don't have a way to spend our attention elsewhere. People read fewer books and watch more YouTube. People prefer automation over manual effort. Our attention budget is shrinking because we have so many attention contracts to fulfill.
Our supply of attention has gone down as well. ADHD has been growing more present in youth due to the advent of handheld technology and entertainment; where people were once able to just sit and wait at a bus stop, we now flip back and forth between iMessage, Snapchat, and Facebook Messenger to whittle the time away. On top of that, our attention is becoming more valuable. Menial labour, like moving boxes, may become fully automated in the near future. Why would a human spent their attention on something that even a machine could do? Repetitive intellectual work, like transcription, image analysis, data analysis, and the like may also become fully automated in the near future, forcing us to spend our attention on something more worthwhile, like developing better automation. Wasting your attention may put you way behind the rest of the crowd.
Review your attention contracts. Put your attention where it can be used well, and budget it wisely.
Sources:
https://medium.com/@dailyzen/the-value-of-your-attention-705f950196c8
Advertisements are just one product that try to get you to pay attention, and for good reason, too. For every second that your eyes are on the ad, the company behind it might just convince you to buy their product, whether it's a really weird Old Spice advertisement or a really sick Smash Ultimate trailer (the latter actually worked on me). Here's the interesting thing: you pay attention to the ads, but you never get anything back. It's the company that benefits from your time.
Social media and video games are designed with this in mind. Mobile games like Candy Crush and free-to-play games like League of Legends, despite the vast gap in quality, have a very similar fundamental structure. The beginning is easy. An infant could beat the first few levels of Candy Crush by taping the screen at random, and there are many monkeys that play League of Legends at much higher levels than the beginning ones. The goal is to get you hooked on the first few surges of excitement that come with beating a level or winning a game, especially when considering how easy it is. Only later does progress slow down and the game becomes more difficult. At that point, people tend to want to spend more time getting further for those same surges of excitement that were so easy to get at the beginning. Some people even spend money to do so. Social media algorithms are designed to keep you interested in what you're looking at. Quora (a place where people answer questions in blog-like format) is my favourite example: it keeps track of what you like to read and what you don't like to read, then gives you what you like to read. Sometimes, they'll throw in sponsored messages or advertisements, but only after you've been hooked.
What social media and video games are doing is making you sign a contract, where you willingly pay attention for a certain amount of time each day (aka addiction). It's an investment, where companies give you a surge of excitement or an inflated ego in return for your valuable recurring attention. This attention is slowly transferred to advertisements, where the game or website can function as a platform (letting others advertise on their site/game) or a marketing tool for their own products (G+ sponsoring android phones, Clash of Clans asking you to buy more gems, etc.).
Modern technology has shaped the market for attention. Spectator sports like baseball are dying because five hours of one's attention isn't worth what the athletes are giving back to the viewers; fast paced video games have been booming because one can get so much more entertainment out of just a few hours of one's attention. Same with advertisements. Those used to be billboards by highways, where people had nowhere else to pay their attention to; the opportunity cost of paying attention to those ads was zero. Now, with so much at our hands, platforms are forced to shove advertisements in our face so we don't have a way to spend our attention elsewhere. People read fewer books and watch more YouTube. People prefer automation over manual effort. Our attention budget is shrinking because we have so many attention contracts to fulfill.
Our supply of attention has gone down as well. ADHD has been growing more present in youth due to the advent of handheld technology and entertainment; where people were once able to just sit and wait at a bus stop, we now flip back and forth between iMessage, Snapchat, and Facebook Messenger to whittle the time away. On top of that, our attention is becoming more valuable. Menial labour, like moving boxes, may become fully automated in the near future. Why would a human spent their attention on something that even a machine could do? Repetitive intellectual work, like transcription, image analysis, data analysis, and the like may also become fully automated in the near future, forcing us to spend our attention on something more worthwhile, like developing better automation. Wasting your attention may put you way behind the rest of the crowd.
Review your attention contracts. Put your attention where it can be used well, and budget it wisely.
Sources:
https://medium.com/@dailyzen/the-value-of-your-attention-705f950196c8
Comments
Post a Comment