What is the Price of our Attention?

At first, the child totally ignores some signals we would immediately react to, like the noise of an object falling on the ground, or the sound of a door opening. The doctor in charge of him progressively understands that the child only responds to signals that announce food in his environment. He then teaches him how to pay attention to things that matters in our society. This shows that children need to experience the attention of others to understand that they should pay attention to their peers. They also need to understand what draws the attention of others to define what should matter. The attention we pay to things that draw the attention of others is called joint attention, and is essential to learn how to focus and how to socially behave. As Bernard Stiegler explains, a child who is mostly ignored all the time won’t understand that he should pay attention to otherness, and will be more likely to have what we diagnose as attention deficit. Since attention is learned and depends on the environment we live in, the fact that it is considered as a tradeable object threatens the way we learn it and the way we pay attention to the world and to otherness.

While attention is an individual experience, it is also organized and drawn collectively. Yves Citton shows that this collective attention provokes “striking effects of synchronicity”6placeholder. This synchronicity of attention allows us to act collectively, by being drawn to the same issues at the same moments. This is how the agora worked in Ancient Greece, and this is how information in newspapers, on television, on the radio and on the internet works today. Visibility always gave power since it makes one exists to the others, his messages can be spread and he can influence them. That’s why the ability to draw (and hold captive) attention has always been a valued capacity.

In ancient Greece, Plato was worried about a group of people that prized the ability to convince over truth. Those were the Sophists. People would pay them in order to learn their knowledge about attention grabbing. In a way, we could say that at that moment, an economy of attention already existed. This is not exactly how the contemporary economy of attention works, though. The economy of advertising really emerged during the industrial revolution, raising competition between companies, leading to a new need to be more visible than others. On 16 June, 1836, for the first time, Émile de Girardin included ads in his newspaper in order to lower its price. It allowed information to become more accessible for collective attention. Advertisers then produced more and more mediatic contents until some doubts were raised concerning the influence of those producers on the information displayed in wide-audience media. As we saw earlier, the environment we live in shapes our attention. If we mix this idea with the fact that attention is organized collectively, we can deduce that a mediatic environment has an impact on the way we see the world as a group of people.

In a text called “Mediology of attention regimes”7placeholder, Dominique Boullier tries to determine, what mediatic environments exist and how they affect us. He defines four main mediatic regimes which are always mixed together but in different proportions; those are immersion, projection, fidelity and alert. An immersive environment is an environment in which we let our attention be grabbed because we don’t know what matters, like when we visit a country and don’t want to follow the tourist paths. On the contrary, projection would be an environment made readable by projecting what matters for us onto it. For example, we could turn on the GPS and look at a video of the top 5 things we should visit to know exactly what matters and what we should pay attention to. The fidelity regime would be an environment that keeps directing our attention toward a chosen subject, it could be a religion, political communication… Finally, the alert regime, which Dominique Boullier defines as the most important nowadays, is a regime in which our attention keeps being grabbed by newness and surprise, putting us in a position of uncertainty leading to stress and discontinuity.

The fact that our attention is more and more solicited by more and more content creators that transform it into money makes this statement quite convincing. Harmut Rosa comes to the same conclusion by analyzing the effects of acceleration8placeholder (which is a necessity in a capitalist system) on our relation to the world we live in. He argues that by occupying and dividing our attention more and more, the economy makes us lose the feelings of continuity and meaning since we feel like we need to keep moving to follow the acceleration of the world. He defines it as a state of “hyper accelerated immobilism”9placeholder that prevents us from reflecting upon our life and our true desires because we need to constantly act in the present to keep our professional and social position made unstable by acceleration and competition.

Even if we share the same mediatic regime collectively, each of us has a unique experience which defines a unique way of paying attention to the world. The invasion of the economy in our personal lives threatens the uniqueness of this experience, by standardizing the way we connect to the world, to information, and to others. According to Bernard Stiegler, a unique attention to the world allows us to interiorize collective information individually10placeholder. By ‘interiorizing’, he means that even if several people look at the same thing, they won’t retain the same information from it, because they will pay attention differently and confront what they see with what they already know. Interiorization is a long process which distinguishes information and knowledge; it implies reflection upon what we pay attention to and real comprehension. Acceleration and the attention-grabbing economy threaten interiorization: in an accelerated world, we can’t take the time to reflect upon what we see and read, since news ceaselessly keeps coming, and we need to follow these if we don’t want to run late11placeholder. The issue is that this interiorization is what allows us to individuate ourselves, to become more unique and complex while we go through time. It may explain why we feel like we are less and less in control of our attention and why we pay attention to things without really caring. A striking demonstration of this quick attention paid without caring is our reflex to “google it” when we don’t know something. We rarely do it to actually learn, we only fly over some information (the same as everyone else) that we don’t verify and don’t interiorize, just to be able to speak about something we don’t really know much about. Information soon to be forgotten. Individuation is a complex idea that defines an everlasting evolution of beings and it is quite hard to put words on what makes it possible, but we can see how the economy of attention could threaten this evolution by standardizing and accelerating our relation to the world.

Capitalism and the economy of attention

The twentieth century gave birth to the coordinated universal time and Taylorism. The famous quote from Benjamin Franklin, “Remember that time is money”12placeholder, became more relevant than ever. Progressively, every action was timed in order to valorize productivity and competition between workers. Humans began to adapt to this machinic rhythm. This adaptation that dispossessed workers of their uniqueness (since it made them act like replaceable machines) and that made them lose the feeling of self-realization in their work, created a massive feeling of alienation. We all experience time subjectively, it can go fast or slow depending on the context we are in. But a whole economy progressively seeded in our mind the idea that time equals money. This idea mostly concerned the way we worked and the quest for an evergrowing productivity, but with the economy of attention, it began to invade our personal lives. With the rise of a continuous connection to this economy through our multiple devices, we made ourselves potentially productive (which here means “able to generate money”) all the time.

Jonathan Crary studied this invasion of an economical idea in our lives as a logical evolution of capitalism13placeholder. He shows how this economy progressively merchandised all the aspects of our lives, even those which had nothing to do with consumption, like sex or friendship. Through social media, websites and the multiple digital services that we seem to be using for free, we are actually offering our time via attention to those “free” services that can then sell it. Hannah Arendt defined that a balance between private life and public life was necessary for self-development14placeholder, the private part of life being cut off from any economic signals. Human time, as understood by the economy, must be productive in an economic way. The concerns surrounding the economy of attention may be directly related to two opposed conceptions of time and what we should do with it:

1. an individual understanding of time as a kind of “space” in which we exist and develop ourselves (we all question ourselves about what we should be doing with the amount of time we have on earth, and thus, what we should pay attention to);
2. an economical conception, in which time becomes an objective value that determines how much money we can produce (here the question would be, with a given amount of time, what should we pay attention to in order to generate as much money as possible?)

Nowadays, anybody can create content and post it on the web. It generates a great diversity and it emancipates creation from mass-media rules and limitations. The internet is an empty vessel filled by users who are independent from companies. Google and Youtube don’t make the content, they organize it and therefore have the power to make it visible or not. While there is no censorship, the way the content is organized tends to standardize what we see on the internet. This standardization finds its roots in the algorithmic systems that automatically organize content that has become too important to be managed manually by humans. The algorithmic system used by Google, Google PageRank15placeholder, is directly inspired by the Science Citation Index designed to promote theses that obtained the most attention (on the basis of quotations in another theses). It follows a circular logic; the more attention you get, the more visible you are made, and the more attention you get. The idea behind this is that attention demonstrates a real interest from the users and that what receives a lot of attention should logically be interesting and relevant.

But the truth is that attention is not drawn by pure interest, but also by novelty and by what is most prominent. Algorithms shape the internet on the basis of users’ navigation data, which is then collected and analyzed. Based on this data, it ranks the contents and make them more or less visible independently of their inner quality. What drew attention once will surely continue to do so, that’s why despite the diversity of the web, only a few websites tend to be visible by most people and thrive. Algorithmic logic is inherently a logic of standardization. Paradoxically, the web is becoming more and more personalized. Everybody tends to go to the same websites, but these websites present different contents based on individual user data (Timofei Gerber wrote a more in-depth essay on this subject). This individualization of content doesn’t contradict standardization, it is just a second step of algorithmic organization. First, the web is shaped on the basis of collective attention, then individually. This individualization of content doesn’t make individuation easier, while individuation consists in confronting with otherness to shape who we are, individualization consists in shaping the content we see based on what we already think. Individuation is a constant evolution, while individualization aims at a stagnant state where everything we see reinforces our pre-conceived ideas. The individualization of content, through the collecting of personal user navigation data, allows a better understanding of individuals, and a more efficient way to sell their attention to the most relevant buyer. It allows the economy of attention to understand how to make us give more of our time by giving us what we want individually.

It doesn’t explain why we are so inclined to give this much time and attention to digital media. The economy of attention doesn’t make breaks, it functions permanently and can generate money at any given time through advertising or direct sales. It needs us to be “hooked”, to come over and over to the same apps or websites regardless of the actual interest of the content we are presented. Nir Eyal wrote the book “Hooked: how to build habit-forming products”16placeholder in order to present a product design method to create some kind of addiction towards apps and websites. Nir Eyal denies encouraging addiction, and differentiates it from habits, but his arguments are pretty vague. For Nir Eyal, in order to create habits, the product designer needs to identify what will trigger it. He shows how this trigger consists most of the time in an “itch” or a “pain” that the app will allow to eliminate for some time. Those triggers can be feelings of loneliness, of boredom, or a need to get some social recognition from our peers. For Hartmut Rosa, competitiveness and permanent acceleration define our contemporary society17placeholder; in this context, we can see why most people would need social recognition and would fear boredom. Competitiveness and quantified attention progressively enter our lives through “likes”, “shares” and “views”, and make it important to follow the trends in order not to “stay behind”18placeholder. Our need for social recognition, amplified by competitiveness could be one explanation as to why we are so inclined to give our time and attention to digital media. As we saw earlier the more we use those media, the more they collect our data and learn what effectively grab our attention. Knowing what triggers the use of apps and websites and what grabs our attention the most, the economy of attention can progressively create a space that is shaped for our individual convenience, but makes us stagnate in a comfort zone more than making us evolve as individuals.

What is worth our attention?

The economy of attention occupies and deviates our attention towards objects that are shaped and organized to temporarily fulfill our needs and desires in order to generate money. If what we pay attention to is pre-determined by our digital identity, it makes us less active in our research of what we should pay attention to. What is worth of our attention? This is, of course, a complex question that cannot have an objective and definitive answer, since it has to be a personal one. Each one of us must define what they really care about and what they really want to pay attention to. In a short essay called The importance of what we care about 19placeholder, Harry Frankfurt shows how what we care about is essential to our development 20placeholder; for him, it is an important part of what makes us unique. Hartmut Rosa uses this idea and shows how the acceleration and the occupation of our time and attention by the economy of attention makes it harder to take the time to search for and find what we care about, and thus, to have a fulfilling life. He writes: “We can’t function as humans if we don’t have an idea of where to go and of what constitutes a good, meaningful life”.21placeholder Without lecturing about what we should pay attention to and about the danger of digital media on our attention, it seems important to at least think about the best conditions to fulfill oneself. One of these conditions seems to be found in times of isolation from the media; Yves Citton describes those as “attentional vacuoles”22placeholder. In order to define a meaningful life, we need to question it ourselves, we need to pay attention to what we care about and to what we really want to pay attention to. By fleeing boredom23placeholder and isolated times with constant distractions, we put ourselves in a position where we don’t really have control over our lives. “Attentional vacuoles” seem particularly important for children, since they are learning how to pay attention, and developing their uniqueness.

Another issue worth of our attention is the way our media consumption invisibly impacts our environment. Most of the time, when digital media is mentioned, a lexical field of immateriality is used: cloud, virtual, wireless… The internet seems to be everywhere and nowhere at the same time. A simple phone allows us to connect to a whole world of entertainment so easy to access and so ubiquitous that we naturally tend to forget that this world isn’t disconnected from our physical environment. The economy of attention is actually very material: hundreds of thousands of kilometers of cable spread around the world connect every user, thousands of servers made of thousands of computers hold our files online, billions of computers and smartphones are used and replaced every two or three years and allow us to access the internet. In 2012, Sy Taffel wrote an article about the material cost of the economy of attention24placeholder: this article shows how we can make direct connections between our media consumption and child labor, ecological disasters provoked by unreasonable mining or underpaid workers. Another way the economy of attention impacts our environment is by its economic logic based on advertising and consumption, made continuously accessible. While we shall not blame the economy of attention for every known woes of our world, we should certainly keep an eye on the reasons behind our increasing media consumption and on the ecological costs it has.

In a context of overgrowing competition to grab consumers’ attention, designers are asked to use their knowledge in a way that contradicts the original purpose of graphic design, which was to make the world more readable. By creating addictive and competitive experiences of friendship, media and advertising consumption, shopping services, design tends to put users under the pressure of acceleration dictated by capitalism. As Annick Lantenois reminds us in Le vertige du Funambule 25placeholder, design comes to life thanks to three entities; the commissioner of the project, the designer, and finally the viewers/consumers, design must respect both the client desires, the consumers privacy and attention, but also the designer’s vision. Ethics are personal and it is absolutely understandable that designers need to make a living, but putting ethics behind and participating in an economy that doesn’t respect consumers’ rights, privacy and attention doesn’t seem right and only makes those things progressively acceptable.

As a graphic designer in the field of new media, this research on the economy of attention made me question myself on the way I might impact others’ lives. Will my creations provide something for them, or just occupy their time and attention? What will be the ecological cost of my work? Will it be used to hijack and sell viewers’ private information? In more personal matters, it also made me question my media consumption, the time it occupies in my life, what it provides me with or not, the reasons behind this consumption and the degree of free-will or persuasion that provoked it. I don’t think we shall censor any kind of content, some creations are made to bring joy and laughter, some allow to inform about serious matters, some don’t really make any sense but end up finding their audience… But I argue that we must respect and defend our attention as a unique, personal way to pick information and see the world, as opposed to a bland, measurable traffic promoted by the economy of attention.