Driven to Distraction - The Arms Race for Your Attention

This article is the first in a series exploring the relationships between a fast-evolving digital environment, the demand for our attention, and our well-being. In this installment, I will discuss the “arms race for attention” -- a term I have used for many years but which was popularized by Tristan Harris -- and some research into how it affects our minds.

It’s Sunday morning, and you have a deliverable due in 24 hours. A steaming cup of hot coffee in hand, you sit down with your laptop. You open PowerPoint and Chrome, ready to start generating your presentation. About halfway through a respectable title slide, your phone buzzes. It’s just a promo email but, while in your inbox, you notice a two-day-old email from your cousin to which you neglected to respond. You spin around to your laptop and begin cranking out a quick response when there is a chime as a notification slides onto your desktop: A comment on a Facebook post from a few days prior. You’re not sure why, but you spend a few minutes going through the comments, after which you finally catch yourself and return to your title slide. You take a sip of your coffee, which is now cold. Twenty-five minutes have passed.

Have you experienced anything like this?

Yes? That shouldn’t surprise you. Nowadays, attention is one of the most sought-after economic resources on the planet.

It is difficult to overstate the fundamental importance of attention in the economy. Transactions do not happen without attentional engagement. And thanks to the ubiquity, speed, and interactivity of modern connected devices, as well as the proliferation of personal data, digital footprints, and microtargeting, the ferocity and granularity with which companies now compete for our attention is unprecedented. Given the adoption of advertising-driven business models, it is, therefore, safe to assume that the notification tones, color schemes, interface layouts, content selections, and so forth are all algorithmically optimized to maximize our engagement with an information channel. As AI-driven tech firms vie for dominance in today’s attention economy, our minds are the battlefield and it often seems as though it is our ability to stay on task that bears the cost.

References to the looming consequences of a fast-evolving digital environment are easy to find -- reports on the effects of smartphones in a variety of health contexts seem to constantly pepper the media. While the results found by these investigations are often mixed, there are some areas in which the literature points toward some emergent trends. Per the anecdote above, it may not be shocking to learn that these trends often have to do with our attentional capabilities. For example, a recent literature review, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reviewed studies examining the link between media multitasking and various measures of cognition -- that is, brain processes having to do with thought, perception, and information processing -- in laboratory-based tests as well as some self-reported measures (Uncapher & Wagner, 2018). The authors highlight that media multitasking has a negative effect across a variety of basic cognitive functions; specifically, they suggest that more frequent and disruptive failures in attention may explain a pattern of findings that range from a reduced ability to suppress or ignore cues unrelated to a current task - such as a notification or being reminded of one’s phone - to memory failures and impulsive behavior (Uncapher & Wagner, 2018). On the whole, the authors concluded that the studies examined in the review found that negative effects of media multitasking were present more often than they were absent on a range of laboratory-based measures and they found even more consistency between media multitasking and self-reported measures of impulsivity (Uncapher & Wagner, 2018).

Impulsivity is an especially interesting phenomenon to consider given that it has both motivational (i.e., an impulse or desire) and cognitive (e.g., attentional control/resisting impulsive shifts of attention and the behaviors that ensue) components. That is, measures of impulsivity in daily life are those most likely to capture situations that feature realistic motivational contexts (e.g., stimuli relevant to one’s life such as a Facebook comment) and their cognitive and behavioral consequences (e.g., interrupting a current task to satisfy the urge to respond to motivationally salient information). This is consistent with the arousal theory of motivation, which revolves around the dopamine system and reward sensitivity in the brain. Essentially, it asserts that individuals seek to maintain an optimum level of physiological arousal or “excitement” (think: Higher heart rate, higher blood pressure, faster rhythms of electrical activity in the brain), and they do so through behavior. If an individual has arousal levels that are chronically low, they will seek out stimulating and rewarding environments and behaviors. That said, over time, individuals habituate -- that is, develop “tolerance” -- to both these stimuli (e.g., a notification of new Twitter followers) and their consequence (i.e., higher arousal levels). This means that firms must innovate increasingly effective (read: stimulating) methods by which to capture the awareness of the consumer -- hence, the “arms race” for your attention, a phenomenon I first wrote about in a [quite informal] tumblr blog back in 2014. Given that media multitaskers are constantly exposed to physiologically arousing stimuli -- the means by which companies compete for our attention (e.g., social information in the form of a Facebook like) -- it stands to reason that, over time, impulsive behavior may emerge as stimulation is sought out more and more aggressively in order to maintain higher and higher arousal levels.

So it seems that technology may have some consequences and, accordingly, there is a public conversation emerging around its relationship with well-being. Unsurprisingly, leading firms have taken notice. The same year as the review from above was published, 2018, both Android and Apple introduced screen time management tools, dubbed Digital Wellbeing and Screen Time, respectively (Gartenberg, 2018). While it’s unclear how effective these tools are at helping a user curb their own device usage (set controls can be overridden relatively easily), they do reflect an awareness from the two major mobile operating system providers that this is not a conversation that is going to simply blow over. Of course, neither of these tools does anything to prevent one from having multiple tabs open on their laptop.

Beyond Big Tech baking tools into mobile operating systems, other up and coming players are capitalizing on opportunities created by the [possible] erosion of our cognitive abilities. As the subjective experience of stress and distraction grows along with the surrounding public conversation, more and more attention – and money – is being spent on Apple’s hottest trending non-game app category for 2018: Self-care (Perez, 2018). It seems like something more than coincidence that self-care is trending just as the public conversation around problematic technology use heats up; it’s natural that just as we become aware of how technology may be detrimental, we might turn our hopes toward the ways in which we might harness it to benefit our minds and bodies. In my next article, I will offer a deeper dive into a trending wellness behavior and the players driving the self-care app category.

#meditation #technology #attentioneconomy #attentionspan #distraction #adhd #stressreduction #stress #attention #psychology

References

Gartenberg, Chaim. (2018, Jun. 5). How do Apple’s Screen Time and Google Digital Wellbeing stack up?. The Verge. https://www.theverge.com/2018/6/5/17426922/apple-digital-health-vs-google-wellbeing-time-well-spent-wwdc-2018

Perez, Sarah. (2018, Dec. 4). Apple Announces its ‘Best of 2018’ lists across apps, games, music, podcasts. Techcrunch. https://techcrunch.com/2018/12/03/apple-announces-its-best-of-2018-lists-across-apps-games-music-podcasts-and-more/

Uncapher, M. R., & Wagner, A. D. (2018). Minds and brains of media multitaskers: Current findings and future directions. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 115(40), 9889-9896.