It’s a patriotic, cowboy rainbow: Glynn Wilson
The Big Picture –
By Glynn Wilson –
COULTERVILLE, Calif. – If people knew how much value grabbing and holding their attention held for media outlets, social media platforms, corporate advertisers and politicians of all stripes, would it make a difference in how people spend their time and money?
Maybe. Maybe not.
But at least some people might spend less time on social media listening and watching and more of their time interacting in person with friends and family, maybe working together to solve problems, and they would be more healthy psychologically and physically as a result. We would also be more healthy and democratic as a state, a country and a society.
Do people even have the time or the attention span to realize they need to spend time on such abstract concepts? Or has that been lost too? This is going to matter even more as the Age of Artificial Intelligence crashes like a tidal wave over us. It’s coming ashore as we speak. You can almost see it on the horizon from here. It’s going to create one hell of a super storm, especially on the economic front.
The Pacific Ocean from Ocean Beach in San Francisco, California: By Glynn Wilson
Clearly many people, maybe the vast majority of Americans at least, are spending so much time listening to and watching some form of talk radio, podcast, television and/or social media platform that their attention span for reading books or even news articles has plummeted in recent years, as a massive amount of recent research shows. Not everyone, perhaps. There is resistance in the hearts of many.
Admittedly, as someone who is in the online media business, I probably spend far more time than most on the web and social media platforms like Facebook. After all, I’m human, and thus not immune from at least some of the trends. But at least I don’t allow sound notifications on apps.
This is true even though when I first went back to college in the early 1980s after five years of traveling around with rock bands, a psychology professor told me I had the longest attention span of any student she ever had. I still feel it’s pretty damn good, only because I’ve set certain limits and concentrate on what seems to be really important. You can’t sweat the small stuff.
Yet the last time I tried to read a tome of a book it was a biography of Teddy Roosevelt, and after consuming the first introductory chapter, which was great by the way, I stopped reading and never went back to the beginning of his life as a sickly child. I still have the book and will get around to certain parts of it when it’s time to tell that story.
Meanwhile, the Saturday New York Times online carried an interesting guest essay on a related subject, under the headline: The Multi-Trillion-Dollar Battle for Your Attention Is Built on a Lie. It’s a bit esoteric for most potential readers, and hidden as it is behind a paywall, I doubt that many people took the time to read it.
Notably, the time people spend viewing digital media surpassed the time viewing traditional media. On average, people spend 400 minutes a day on digital media (6.6 hours) and 275 minutes (4.5 hours) on traditional media, with television making up around 180 of those minutes (3 hours), according to EBSCO. This is way up and has been rising for a couple of decades.
Coming up in the news business back in the 20th century, which some days feels like ancient history, I became aware of public opinion and media research into how people spend their time. Back then, studies showed that on average, Americans spent 30 minutes to an hour a day reading a newspaper. Then it was two hours a day listening to the radio, typically on the way to and from work in a car. Then it was three to four hours a night watching television, and scholars were already worried about that.
When the internet came along, many people began spending even more hours a day online, up to six hours. When social media came along, mainly Facebook and Twitter, some people were spending six to eight hours a day on social media, in some cases because of the push notification systems that fed them adrenaline with every ding and beep. You’ve seen people reaching for their phones, staring at the screen for hours, in public, like rats on cocaine.
In the Times piece, these “random pings, flashing lights and endless interaction” is not described as a simple, personal, peaceful pursuit.
“It’s the war for consumers’ attention that’s being waged on the portable computer in your pocket,” writes D. Graham Burnett, a professor of history and the history of science at Princeton and a co-editor of Scenes of Attention: Essays on Mind, Time and the Senses.
“In our anxious age, increasing attention is being directed to our ATTENTION (my ephasis), and to the extraordinary and seemingly inescapable forces trying to exploit it.”
In a recent survey, he reports, 75 percent of respondents said they have some kind of attention problem. That’s three-quarters of the human population now over 8 billion. We may all need an A.I. bot assistant soon if this keeps up. Or we could refocus our attention on READING for information and entertainment, the best way to retain and collate information in our own internal computer, the human BRAIN. Perhaps that should not be forgotten.
The psychologist Gloria Mark has documented a precipitous slide over the past two decades in our ability to stay on task, even in various screen-based activities.
“There must be a thousand and one articles asserting that the human attention span has dipped below that of the small, orange carp known as the goldfish,” Burnett writes, “which for some reason has come to serve as the interspecies benchmark of distractibility. Goldfish themselves seem to be doing fine, but here on dry land, about 11 percent of American children have been diagnosed with A.D.H.D.”
The implications are vast and troubling, he says.
“Kids can’t read, students can’t think and rates of mental illness are spiking. By some accounts, this phenomenon is endangering democracy itself.”
Clearly.
“We definitely have an attention problem, but it’s not just a function of the digital technology that pings and beeps and flashes and nudges us ever closer to despair. It starts with the way we think about attention in the first place.”
An industry estimated to be worth $7 trillion (in a bubble that will inevitably bust, I might add) views attention in the narrowest possible way: as something that can be measured in terms of device-engaged, task-oriented productivity, then optimized and operationalized and profitably controlled. Old fashioned science fiction mind control as its modern best.
You Can’t Always Get What You Want: The A.I. Bubble Will Burst
“That narrow view of attention has become so dominant that it even pervades efforts at resistance, including the countless well-meaning calls to ‘improve focus’ or ‘avoid distraction’,” Burnett asserts. “Real attention cannot be measured with a stopwatch or an app,” he says, “and real attention — human attention — is far deeper and more complex than the ability to get stuff done.”
We know this, he says.
“The lives we long for involve going for an undisturbed walk in the park with a friend, getting lost in a book or even simply daydreaming. Life is made of these things, and they are made of attention. Armed with relentless, increasingly artificial-intelligence-driven feeds, Big Tech is conducting a successful attack on that richness, that expansiveness, that freedom.
“To survive it, and to build something better, we need to rethink attention itself.”
The mechanical understanding of attention has transformed our world, he goes on, and it is being thrust down our throats, I would add, in an exponentially accelerating pace that makes coping an even harder challenge. Sometimes the only choice seems to be to give up and shut it all out.
This, he says, underpins the sophisticated data surveillance operation that works to monetize tiny movements of our eyes and minds.
“It fuels the six largest corporations on the globe, representing $19 trillion in market capitalization. The recent rise of super-powerful artificial intelligence marks an epochal escalation in this already staggering project. A.I. systems are currently using all their smarts (and all our data, essentially stolen from us) to figure out how to needle and cajole, seduce and suborn, to maximize human “engagement” — i.e., quantified attention.
“And they are winning,” he emphasizes.
The philosopher (and former Google ad strategist) James Williams has called this extractive enterprise the “killer app” of the new generation of A.I.
“Because these largely unregulated systems, at work on children and adults alike, constantly aim to manipulate what we see and want, they constitute nothing less than a bio-hack at the scale of the Earth’s population.”
Many readers will know that the past decade’s most important article in A.I. research, and one of the most cited scientific papers of all time, is entitled “Attention Is All You Need.” Written by eight Google researchers in 2017, this landmark text lays out the fundamental architecture of the machine-learning system now at the heart of the ATTENTION ECONOMY.
What is the “attention” of the title?
“Amazingly, it has exactly nothing to do with our human ability to give our minds and senses to the world,” he says. “Rather, it is the name the authors give to a mathematically precise way of computing and ranking information in complex data sets.”
The French mystic and political activist Simone Weil – a Jewish refugee from Paris, working for the Free French in London – wrote on the topic in her notebook, published after her death: “The authentic and pure values – truth, beauty and goodness – in the activity of a human being are the result of one and the same act, a certain application of the full attention to the object.”
“This is a theory of attention rooted in love, care and commitment, an ethics of attention that cannot be sold or stolen,” Burnett concluded.
Let me go further and explain that this is when we MUST actively WORK to inject and promote “altruism” in the system to counter this “selfish gene” being pumped into human culture by digital means.
My complaint does not just involve the over use of social media and the underuse of traditional media and reading as opposed to listening and watching. These days I find even when I am in public engaged with another human being trying to have a political discussion, it almost invariably involves me trying to cite something I read, and the other person citing something they heard or watched. Most of the time this involves quoting a celebrity talking head from cable TeeVee like Rachel Maddow. Or it could be someone from Fox News. Listening and watching does not result in learning, only the listener or viewer basically repeating what they heard or saw that they whole-heartedly agree with.
Where is the critical thinking? The questioning? It is lost.
For the record, I stopped watching cable television more than 15 years ago when it dawned on me that nearly every story first reported by CNN was wrong, including a key report on a Supreme Court decision that was horribly botched. They daily put stories on the air with no facts to report, maybe just a rumor, or an inexplicable piece of video.
The bottom line is, I don’t give a damn about any partisan commentator on TeeVee, and here’s one reason why. They don’t know any more about what’s happening in the state, the country or the world than I do, because they all find out what’s in the news the very same way I do. By READING the New York Times and other reliable WRITTEN reports by NEWS REPORTERS in the FIELD!
Cable commentators and pundits do not cover news. They read it and talk about it on television, and comment on it, endlessly, with hours and hours of speculation, not facts. They do it to grab and hold your attention, long enough for the ads to kick in and then some.
The same with video clips posted on social media, promoted with ads on social media.
Even though I’ve semi-retired from covering daily news and politics, I still cover some stories better than anyone on the radio, television, the internet or social media. I just don’t pay for ads to promote it on Instagram, Facebook and Google, and I don’t aim a camera at myself and act like a blowhand blogger about it.
If people realized that their attention was being hacked by these celebrity talking heads, paid big bucks by corporations to do things in a certain way to hack their attention, maybe they would go back to reading again. And a better understanding of the world would be the result. Along with a more informed citizenry in a democracy, like we used to say in the 20th century. Not to mention a happier and more peaceful people to put icing on the cake.
But like all addicts, people are already addicted, many don’t even know it and would certainly never admit it. So does that mean we are doomed? Probably. Is resistance futile? I hope not. Let’s vow in the new year to work hard to try to keep the party going a little longer, please. At least until I’m gone from this crazy, mixed up fucking world.
Related Research
Why our attention spans are shrinking
The World Is in Chaos. What Comes Next? Expect Continued Chaos
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Great food for thought, IF I HAD THE TIME! Right on target, again…