Attention economy !!!: How they addict us?
Imagine that you are reading a book. A message from your phone ding! You saw that message, and a friend of yours posted a photo on Instagram, a new follower for you on facebook, a person had put a like to your post. Messages from your family whatsapp group. It has been already 25 minutes when you realise the time spent on the device.
We all know that it's going to happen again and we don't feel great about it.
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The Attention Economy
Internet has no scarcity in information and it's overloaded with information and it can answer all our questions like... 'Which is the best restaurant near me?? Which food is best in that restuarant?? Which is the best place to live?? Which car should I buy? A Maruti car or a Tata car??
No one would put anything on the Internet without the hope of obtaining some. It's nothing but *attention*. And the economy of attention - not information - the natural economy of cyberspace.
And the above statement is damn right. Information consumes our attention and it is making it a scarce resource. We are living in a attention economy and we want people to allocate their attention towards us or on our product. And we dominate this attention economy when people spend their time hours on social media apps.
This is why YouTubers have thumbnails that attracts people' attention and this is why social networks are having endless scrolls and this is why traditional news sources are struggling and buzz feed is successful and this is why politics is no longer about policy and it is all about who can bring more attention towards the people.
This constant distraction has a drastic effect on our day-to-day life. A study found at Gloria mark at UC Irvine states that it would take about 23 minutes to resume focus after any interruption. That sounds scary because we are not doing the important stuff done; we are not necessarily living our life and we are not able to make choices. We are just living for the quick burst of dopamine that comes from swiping, scrolling and refreshing. We are not completely happy or completely sad we are just satisfied with the product.
The attention getters and the attention engineers
The attention getters and the attention engineers. We are the attention getters and the attention engineers are the ones who are behind every social media platform they make people addictive towards their product. They have gone through behavioral psychology of humans and their product is designed in a way that attracts and addicts people. The perfect ding sound, the red colour notification are considered as small things but these small things are making us addictive towards their product.
But what about my problem during the beginning of this blog post lost in the sea of notifications, scrolling at FB and IG but mostly they are unfulfilled content, what can we do to solve this problem??
We can solve this problem by shutting our phone down. But we would be not caught up with our friends, not knowing the latest news first etc. then we would fall into FOMO the Fear of Missing Out.
The Flip side of it
But internet allows us to share our view on something independently. It allows us to connect us with our friends faster than ever before. Talk with our families and friends across the world. Telling your closed one that you are in danger with a single click.
Should any of this technology should be replaced by traditional face to face conversations?? To answer that question we should ask an another question ..Will the attention engineers can see human as a human not as a source to make money and not to use us as an commodity to eternal power. This will help us to save our time and do what we want to do in our lives. We want to read beyond headlines, long form journalisms, read different books.
If we don't we are easy pickings of this attention economy. And it's also important to shut down our phones once in a while as we should spend our golden times in the offline world.
Yes, just now I too realized that I lost some minutes in pop up.
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