“Our self-appointed disrupters have opened up a new frontier of capitalism, complete with its own frontier ethic: to boldly dig up and monetize every bit of private head space by appropriating our collective attention.” - Matthew B. Crawford

If your attention weren’t valuable, companies wouldn’t be working so hard to mine it.

The complexity doesn’t stop there. Let’s take this discussion outside of the gas station example and into social media platforms – particularly, Facebook. We crave digital experiences that facilitate community. The ability to access information from family and loved ones near and far in one place is what draws us in. What keeps us actively engaged on the platform is the notification button. 

Come for the sense of community. Stay for the instant validation.

This phenomenon is known as classical conditioning - when a biological stimulus (belonging, self-esteem) is paired with a previously neutral stimulus (seeing the notification button light up). Belonging and esteem are part of our psychological needs, according to Maslow. Facebook was built with this psychology in mind to provide addictive hits of dopamine and thus retain users. The colors themselves are meant to adjust our psychology. Red, the color of the notifications that you see, creates a blood-rush and sense of urgency which screams "Click me!" Blue, the primary color of Facebook's brand, creates a sense of calmness and trust. 

Facebook makes conscious efforts to affect our subconscious. They want us to trust them with our data and remain dependent on them for feelings of belonging and esteem.

Here’s what Facebook’s first president, Sean Parker, said about Facebook’s objective: “How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?” Parker went on to answer his own question by saying Facebook gives users “a little dopamine hit” in order to create “a social feedback validation loop… exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like myself would come up with, because you’re exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology.” 

Why does Facebook use our own psychology to keep our attention? Our privacy is wildly profitable. The social media giant builds digital profiles of us based on every like, comment, and friend request - information of such wide depth and breadth that they know what you want before you want it. You pay Facebook your attention, Facebook churns this attention into data, sells data to advertisers at incredible margins, and then advertisers come for more of your attention by targeting you - your location, your interests, your social norms, your tastes, your closest friends - down to the smallest of details.

I've created the model below to synthesize "Free" Digital Platform Revenue Models. Platforms have three goals: get you on the cycle (step 1), get you to move around the cycle fast (repeat steps 2-6), and never get you to slow or even stop the cycle (step 7). Why? Every time you pass step 4, the platform profits.

While it is certainly the most well-known and the easiest example, Facebook is not the only platform using our own psychology to keep our attention and shift our behavior. There are a plethora of digital media businesses built on the this same model, and the results are dystopian, according to Tristian Thompson, the President of the Center for Humane Technology:

"Why did this happen in the first place? Because of the advertising business model. Free is the most expensive business model we've ever created. We're getting “free” destruction of our shared truth, “free” outrage-ification of politics, “free” social isolation, “free” downgrading of critical thinking. Instead of paying professional journalists, the “free” advertising model incentivizes platforms to extract “free labor” from users by addicting them to getting attention from others and to generate content for free. Instead of paying human editors to choose what gets published to whom, it’s cheaper to use automated algorithms that match salacious content to responsive audiences -- replacing newsrooms with amoral server farms. This has debased trust and the entire information ecology.” - Tristian Thompson

The platforms that consume our attention aren’t free. They’re actually quite expensive because they manipulate our psychology and harvest our private information.

Where there are immense, unnecessary expenses, there are great opportunity costs - losses from the potential gain if we paid our attention elsewhere. Consider the gap in potential knowledge gained between paying 20 minutes of your attention on social media vs. 20 minutes of your attention on a book. How about the disparity in stress levels between paying 20 minutes of your attention on social media vs. 20 minutes of meditation? 

Now let’s consider differences even more abstract than that. What is the opportunity cost of a significant other who is physically present with their spouse at dinner but chooses to pay attention to their phone instead? Is this hypothetical scenario all that far-fetched in today’s society? You cannot measure a fractured relationship, but you can feel its cost. Whether it’s partner-partner, parent-child, sibling-sibling, friend-friend, we must not lose sight of creating meaningful experiences in the present moment.

In addition to relationships and well-being, our own creativity could suffer as a result of the attention we pay to social media. People are much more likely to consume than create. Consumption is easy. You sit. You scroll. You passively consume. While it is passive, it is not relaxing. We’ve all scrolled for longer than we should. I personally have never felt energized or excited after scrolling for too long. By consuming so much, we drain ourselves of energy and we leave little room for creativity. 

Creation for creation’s sake or learning for learning’s sake is no longer as prominent. Social media users spend an average of 2 hours and 23 minutes per day on social media, but there’s no more time for hobbies. If you have a talent, or if you want to cultivate a talent, it must be monetizable. It must be scalable. It must be related to a trending topic. We're too busy consuming what's trending for us to engage with anything else that's more long-lasting.

Our ability to be present and sit with ourselves is gone. We reach for our phones without realizing it in the midst of any sort of downtime. Let's turn back to Crawford for the effects of silence on our creativity.

"And just as clean air makes it possible to breathe, silence makes it possible to think. The benefits of silence are off the books. They are not measured in the gross domestic product, yet the availability of silence surely contributes to creativity and innovation.” - Matthew B. Crawford

To build on what Crawford said, silence doesn't just contribute to creativity and innovation, but also to civil discourse. We are simultaneously more connected and further apart than ever because of our intolerance for opposing views and our inability to facilitate in-person communication. We don't generate our own views anymore. We merely consume them. What makes our thoughts "ours" is critical thinking - something absent in the age of salacious headlines written to trigger emotion and retain user engagement. When in-person disagreements occur, we don't have deep reserves to think through a respectful response or an open mind to consider the other side. We only have a shallow reserve of anger which we consumed online. Our inputs become our outputs, so we angrily regurgitate headlines and quick-hit pieces of information.

As I write this, most of the world remains in quarantine. With endless consumption at our finger-tips and more time than usual on our hands, it’s time to ask this question: am I capable of being with myself – with no digital distractions - for a day? 

Make the decision to prioritize which signals you will listen to and which ones you will ignore. Take the gas station example - amidst all of the auditory and visual signals, there was only one that mattered - the fuel gauge. Responding to this signal made total sense. The cost of spending time/money to fill up the tank is much smaller than the cost of spending time waiting for a pickup truck and the money required to have your car towed. 

Treat social media like the gas station, and only respond to the signals that matter. If you’re on Facebook or another platform because the group pages, event pages, and messaging platforms allow you to stay in touch with people who matter, then that is great! If you find yourself spending hours scrolling through a news feed of content that does not matter, please know that you are paying for it and that someone else is profiting from it. 

If over-usage of social media is an expense for you, then consider the following investments which you can reallocate your attention towards:

• Meditation – increase silence, sharpen focus, reduce stress, & inspire creativity

• Hobbies – create for creativity’s sake

• Actively engage on no more than two social media platforms – keep up with what’s important, but don’t drown yourself in consumption

• Write - refine your ideas

• Journal - refine yourself

• Read or listen to podcasts - gain knowledge

• Call loved ones and ask them to tell you lessons that were crucial to their growth - gain wisdom

• Workout - challenge yourself and feel good

• Cook - learn how to nourish the body without sacrificing flavor

Attention is a limited resource for all of us. We know to budget our money. It’s time to budget our attention. It’s okay to take on a few attention expenses, but we cannot fall into debt and ignore the fact that paying too much to the wrong things puts us underwater. 

Let's invest in protecting our privacy. Let's invest in our well-being and psychological needs offline. Let’s allow our creativity to flourish and empower others’ creativity to do the same. Let’s invest in the relationships that matter. Let’s invest in having hard conversations with one another in a respectful manner, despite our differences. 

Start investing. Limit the expenses. This is your signal - pay attention to what matters.