Trapped in the Digital Maze: How the Attention Economy Hijacks Your Mind and Life

We are living through different times now, and there is no sign of slowing down. On the contrary, things are speeding up, heading towards singularity. The rise of the digital economy and the internet have fundamentally changed how we consume media. Information, once a scarce resource, has now become so readily available in high quantities that it is impossible to keep up with all the information we encounter daily. Companies in the digital space?—?social media, online advertising, entertainment, etc.?—?must now compete for limited attention to find success. This system is what is known as the “attention economy.”

The most valuable resource in a world overflowing with information and content is the consumer’s attention; this has shifted the economic landscape where once economic models focused on physical goods to one where human attention is at a premium. This shift in the business economy is known as “attention economics”; these models aim to re-wire and reshape our habits. Companies and designers strive to capture and hold user attention at any cost through business and design implications, regardless of ethical and social norms. They often reward those adept at capturing attention, disregarding whether the information is true or false. The goal is to engage users for extended periods, as this can directly translate to increased revenue through advertising revenue and brand impact.

The Many Benefits of User Retention

The customer lifetime value (CLV) is a term and metric measuring success, generating more revenue over time as someone uses a service for longer. The higher a company’s CLV, the greater its success. Social media companies can increase CLV by changing the habits of the individuals on these platforms. Customers habitually programmed to use a particular platform are much less likely to switch to a competitor, as learning a new interface system requires more effort than sticking to familiar ones. Thus, successfully creating user habits can give services a significant advantage over their competitors. In forming user habits, a service or product subtly manipulates users to compulsively return to it by turning something convenient and practical into something necessary.

For example, let’s look at the phone and its design.

The Phone and Slot?Machine

I am proud to say that I have never used a slot machine or gambled my money at casinos. I don’t play games where the probabilities (some may call it luck) are not in my favor, but I have been in casinos, and the slot machines at these establishments resemble what we have in our pockets today. The design of smartphones, particularly their apps and notifications, draws from the same psychological principles used in slot machines to create addictive behaviors.

Smartphones, much like slot machines, employ variable-ratio reinforcement schedules; this involves providing rewards (like notifications or social media likes) at unpredictable intervals, which is a powerful method to reinforce behavior (this is how I train my dog, or at least I try; still a work in progress, lol). Users keep engaging with their phones, hoping for these sporadic rewards.

Then there’s the pull-to-refresh mechanism. This app feature mimics a slot machine’s lever, creating a moment of anticipation and uncertainty before revealing new content or notifications (Now, on some platforms, there is no need for this because the introduction of endless scrolling means you never run out of content to watch). This suspense and the potential reward can be psychologically enticing, encouraging continuous use.

Just as slot machines can induce a state where worries and social pressures seem distant, smartphones, through their immersive experiences, can create a similar psychological state; this can be particularly alluring and can lead to extensive usage as a form of escape. Which can frequently lead to decreased attention span, disrupted sleep patterns, and heightened anxiety or depression. Big tech business models have sidelined ethical questions raised in the past because they do not align with their interests. The lack of interest has led to a mass disruption in people’s attention and led them to believe in false information.

The smartphone is the gateway to social media, where companies can establish habits among their user base.

How Companies Keep Users?Hooked

In Hooked, Eyal presents a four-step model he calls the Hook Cycle. The four phases are as follows: Trigger, Action, Variable, Reward, and Investment. The cycle exploits human psychology to keep users habitually using a service without requiring external influence.

Trigger Phase

The first step, the Trigger phase, is the initial “call to action” that encourages people to use the service. These triggers can be external (like a notification) or internal (like a thought or emotion). These “external triggers” may consist of an ad, a recommendation from a friend, or similar products that explicitly suggest the use of the service, or “implicit” triggers, which consist of prompts that subconsciously cue the user to return to the service without explicitly requesting them to.

The hook cycle aims to create “internal” triggers in the user. As Eyal explained, “Internal triggers tell the user what to do next through associations stored in the user’s memory.” These associations cause users to browse YouTube when bored or check Instagram messages when lonely, for example. Most of us can’t stand negative emotions and use social media as a distraction from facing the reality of our feelings and constantly avoiding fixing or even acknowledging the root causes of our internal emotional landscape. By this constant avoidance of moving away from what is deemed painful, designers exploit our emotional states and get many to compulsively check social media to be drawn to the desired product or service subconsciously.

Action Phase

Following a trigger, the user takes an action. This action is typically straightforward and often involves using the product or service. Eyal points to Dr. B.J. Frogg’s Behaviour Model, which poses three requirements for any action to occur: sufficient motivation and ability from the user and a prompt for the user to take that action. For example, after receiving a notification (trigger), a user might tap on the notification to check a new message.

Variable Phase

After taking the action, the user receives a reward, also known as a variable reward, but the nature of this reward varies. The randomization of the reward prevents the product from becoming too predictable, which ensures that it stays compelling to users and keeps them coming back for more. The variability is crucial as it creates a sense of unpredictability, which can be more engaging and motivating. Much like slot machines, the result is initially unknown, which keeps each cycle exciting and interesting. There was a point in time where infinite scrolling was not a thing. You could scroll through your news feed, and at the end, it will prompt you with “You’re all caught up.” There was an end. Now, infinite scrolling pages ensure a constant stream of new content, ideally tailored to the user’s interests, which encourages them to reengage with the service repeatedly.

Investment Phase

In this phase, the user puts something into the product, such as time, data, effort, social capital, or money, increasing the likelihood of returning. The increase in investment is known as escalation of commitment, a psychological phenomenon that ensures the user becomes increasingly committed as they invest in said product.

There are three main factors of escalation commitment: self-justification, psychological factors, and social and institutional pressures.

Self-justification states that we irrationally value our efforts. We tend to associate greater value with products we work on ourselves, known as the IKEA effect. By having the customer assemble the product, the customer deems the furniture more valuable than it is.?

Psychological factors include cognitive dissonance, where people try to maintain consistency in their beliefs and actions. People often seek information supporting their decisions and ignore contradictory information once they choose. Because of these tendencies, people will engage in a process known as rationalization, wherein they justify their behavior and decisions, even if these are dictated or influenced by external agents. Thus, the more time and effort users put into a service and the more valuable it appears to them, the more likely they are to return to said service. They tell themselves that their investment in the service is worthwhile to rationalize it; otherwise, it would mean their previous investments were wasted.

Social and Institutional Pressures: External pressures, such as expectations from others, social norms, or institutional policies, can drive continued commitment. For example, a study showed that homeowners who agreed to put a small sign that read BE A SAFE DRIVER in their windows were later much more likely to agree to put a larger sign that read DRIVE CAREFULLY in their garden than those who hadn’t previously been asked put up the smaller sign.

Big tech companies have exploited these mechanisms in many ways. The user has invested time and effort by getting the user to create an account and gradually building it step-by-step. It’s not meant to be an overwhelming process but a constant progression toward the accomplishment of building out our profile. All these methods are used to steal our attention and focus, not toward realizing our goals and dreams, but toward profiting by distracting the user, stealing their focus and time.

To understand how the attention economy affects us, we must first build a framework to understand attention and distraction on a deeper level.

James Williams’s “Light” model of attention

James William is a former Google advertising strategist; in his book Stand Out of Our Light: Freedom and Resistance in the Attention Economy, he seeks to understand these three forms of attention. He argues that the goals set by digital technologies do not coincide with real human goals and work against our best interests as members of human society. The company’s goals and values do not align with those of the individuals. The goals and values of tech companies are to persuade and encourage people to spend more time on their platforms. They measure these metrics by social engagement, targeted advertising, user retention, views, watch time, etc. Attention takes three different forms, all of which are being stolen.

Let’s begin with the first one.

Spotlight Attention describes focusing on doing and concentrating on immediate actions; this involves narrowing down your focus. Distractions or disruptions prevent you from carrying out near-term actions. An example is walking to the fridge to get some food. This type of attention is affected by functional distraction, which includes things like smartphone notifications or clickbait, which prevents people from focusing on the task ahead of them. These distractions may seem small and harmless, but they have more profound implications than you think. A 2015 study found that simply receiving a notification on their phones affected participants’ performance to the same degree as if they had actively been using the phones, which means that even if we ignore these types of distractions, the mere knowledge of their presence may be enough to distract us meaningfully.

Starlight Attention: Focus you can apply to your longer-term goals (projects over time). Starlight describes our ability to adhere to our higher values and live our lives following our long-term goals. It’s called the “starlight” because you look up and remember your destination whenever you feel lost. This kind of attention allows us to focus on what we want to achieve and what we view as truly important in the long term. In the face of distraction, we lose sight of these longer-term goals and must remember our sense of direction. For example, the drive for social interaction and status offered by likes and followers on social media platforms may overshadow our desire for real, meaningful connections with our peers.

The author suggests that this can go as far as devaluing democratic ideals, citing a growing indifference towards the importance thereof among modern democracies:

Consider that across many liberal democracies, the percentage of people who say it’s “essential” to live in a democracy has, in recent years, been in freefall. The “starlight” of democratic values seems to be dimming across diverse cultures, languages, and economic situations. However, one of the few factors these countries do have in common is their dominant form of media, which just happens to be the largest, most standardized, and most centralized form of attentional control in human history, and which also happens to distract from our “starlight” by design.

Daylight Attention: What are your longer-term goals in the first place? How do you know you want to write that book? Or start that business? Without being able to reflect and think clearly, you won’t be able to figure these things out; only when it’s seen as flooded with daylight can you see the things around you most clearly. The “Daylight” pertains to knowledge and intelligence. This includes our capacity for reflection, reasoning, and metacognition, particularly our ability to “integrate associations across many different experiences to detect common structures across them.” Only when we let our minds wander and contemplate our most important tasks and goals can this integration of association across many different fields happen; we would use each pressing moment for deep thought, mind wandering, and reflection. Still, checking our phones, social media, YouTube, and the internet replaces these precious moments of mental cognitive energy. Reflection is gradually made impossible, resulting in impulse behavior as we stop using our rational minds and revert to following our primal drives instead.

Slowly, our sense of self starts to fade into the abyss of endless scrolling, YouTube watching, and the noise of social media and the internet. You need to maintain your sense of daylight to figure out who you are, what you want to do, or where you want to go. Lossing your daylight is the most significant source of distraction; you start to lose your sense of self because you don’t have the mental space to create a story about who you are. You become obsessed with petty goals or dependent on simplistic signals from the outside world (the likes, comments, reshares, and re-tweets). You lose yourself in a cascade of distractions. Lossing the ability for reflection, mind wandering, and deep thought. Our attention crisis is depriving us of these three forms of attention.

Technology conflicts with our interests and goals by reducing our willpower; you must break free from the shackles of media that have infiltrated the deepest parts of your mind and rethink your relationship with technology, no matter its benefits, we should never accept that technology is working against us, but for us. Use it wisely and with a purpose to aid you in pursuing your most pressing goals.

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