How Your Attention is Stolen
like shares friend requests emails notifications updates alerts tweets advert advert advert adverts and schools adverts on police cars adverts on every screen endless scrolling emotional headline capitals stop must attach must go for a run must run further and faster than yesterday must go go go must relax watch a film a TV show which one endless scroll email from work email from Auntie Linda stop meant to be relaxing play a game play Tetris stop ubereats 50 off let's watch this short first it will only take 30 seconds stop welcome to the attention economy it's a world where our attention is currency where our capacity for concentration is competed for bid on captured and grabbed where corporations spend billions on the latest tricks to draw our eyeballs and to perk our interests the attention economy is everywhere stress anxiety frustration are all on the rise worldwide is it the attention economy that's draining us of our energy to resist our attention Merchants draining us of our willpower it's the constant noise detrimental to our mental health shrinking us down into insignificant Nubs in an increasingly chaotic World maybe it's time to resist I want to show you how the attention economy developed the tricks that are used what privacy used to look like why it's important to carve out some space for ourselves and how to do that because privacy was once sacred the sanctity of the self was once important now companies compete in a race to the bottom of tricks to grab our attention targeting emotions feelings words ideas triggers that are increasingly difficult to resist you might think you're immune but are you a study of 100 million articles on Facebook find that the most common headlines included phrases like this will make you cry people are freaking out and you'll be shocked to see when radio became popular at the beginning of the 20th century people were shocked to even contemplate the thought of an advertiser's voice in their homes in 1922 President Hoover said that it's inconceivable that we should allow so greater possibility for service for news for entertainment for education and for Vital commercial purposes to be drained in advertising Chatter's Inc a magazine about advertising for advertisers recommended that the Family Circle is not a public place and advertising has no business intruding there unless invited but radio and television Executives found find it difficult to resist the profits NBC headman Frank Arnold said here you have the advertiser's ideal the family group and its moments of relaxation awaiting your message nothing equal to this has ever been dreamed of by the advertising man Arnold was a man in the middle of a great shift in history between newspapers and the nascent burgeoning radio and television Revolution and onwards to Computing and the internet it was a revolution in Technologies to capture our attention so first what is attention [Music] this guy William James was the father of psychology in America he wrote about the importance of attention in 1890 attention he pointed out is Central to everything he said attention is a taking possession of the Mind in clear and Vivid form of one out of what seems several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought vocalization concentration of Consciousness or of its essence it also implies he said withdrawal from some things to concentrate on others attention in short is focus today psychologists have expanded we have attentional resources that capacity we have to pay attention how we pay attention what we pay attention to the strength we have to pay attention and so on and there's a concept called attentional capture how we shift attention why we shift attention what captures our attention at what times and for what reasons what's interesting about attention is it gets to the core of a lot of issues Free Will emotion persuasion experience concentration think about fear if you're walking in the woods and you see a bear your attention will be captured by Emotion by your nervous system ramping up by memories of what to do some attention is conscious and purposive we engage our prefrontal cortex to think concentrate and other attention is passive reflexive non-voluntary effortless it's drawn away from us [Music] what does all of this mean well there are some important takeaways first attention is limited quite strictly we can only really focus on one or possibly two things at once and only a finite number of things throughout the day and even of course through our lives we pay attention suggesting paying a cost for our time and second we can both control our attention and it can be captured excuse me hello yeah yeah can do yeah yeah sure yeah Harold Innis summed up the question quite neatly why do we attend to the things to which we attend the concentrating or capturing of attention can of course take many forms we might listen to someone we want to learn from watch something with good reviews log on to social media to connect with friends and family or choose to attend to Something in the present in the moment but the idea that attention can be captured using specific tricks words ideas methods emotions is relatively new in history tabloids notably the New York certain find it in 1833 and its rival The Herald and their cousins over in Britain were some of the first commercial Enterprises to feature stories designed to capture attention through emotions they featured murder Scandal and sensationalism [Music] one report from the time said that in the Herald's first two weeks the paper featured three suicides three murders a fire that killed five persons an accident in which a man blew off his head descriptions of a guillotine execution in France a riots in Philadelphia and the execution of Major John Andre half a century earlier a few decades later in the 1860s giant colorful posters began appearing all over Paris some were seven foot high and they used new printing methods that could produce sharp lines and bold colors one journalist wrote that they were luminous brilliant even blinding using Vivid Sensations and intense emotions the designer Jewel Cherie was called a master of Blazing modernities he was awarded the Legion of Honor and had imitators across Europe leading to a continent-wide poster craze as it was called one writer said that Paris was hardly more than an immense wall of posters scattered from the chimneys down to sidewalks with clusters of squares of paper of all colors and formats not to mention the simple inscriptions the group called The Society for the protection of the landscape and Aesthetics of France was formed they waged war on what they described as the ugly posters that you just couldn't get away from in the end the authorities banned many Billboards regulations came in and the posters were taxed and curtailed back in the news of America those new headlines and cheap tabloids were used to sell the craze as commonplace as the posters were becoming in Paris they were called patent medicines and they were treatments to cure all of your ills Clark Stanley was the most famous he started selling a popular snake oil liniment made from snake oil he described it as a wonderful pain destroying compound and the strongest and best liniment for cure of all pains and lameness and these medicines were everywhere elixirs of Life made up of secret ingredients by doctors and scientists in 1905 Collier's magazine published a knife famous report on the snake oil salesman called the Great American fraud it was hugely influential and it said gullible America will spend this year some 75 millions of dollars in the purchase of patent medicines in consideration of this sum it will swallow huge quantities of alcohol and a pooling amount of opiates and narcotics a wide assortment of varied drugs ranging from powerful and dangerous heart depressants to a Insidious liver stimulants and far in excess of all other ingredients undiluted fraud for fraud exploited by the skillfulness of advertising Bunko man is the basis of the trade Collier's reporting led to the first Food and Drugs act in 1906 Banning misleading claims and cracking down on the con men but admin had learned that targeting ailments and illness and existential fears using bright poster colors and emotive language was key to grabbing consumers attention the advertising industry flourished James warty once an ad man himself wrote a bestseller on how those trying to grab attention had to degrade themselves in doing so he wrote the ad man inevitably empties himself of human qualities his daily traffic can have truths and outright deceptions is subtly and cumulatively degrading no man can give his days to barbarous frivolity and live an adman don't live they become dull resigned hopeless or they become demonic fantasts and sadists another bestseller Vance Packard's 1957 the hidden persuaders warned of the large-scale efforts being made often with impressive success to channel our unthinking habits our purchasing decisions and our thought processes by the use of insights gleaned from Psychiatry and the social sciences typically these efforts take place beneath our level of awareness so that the appeals which move us are often in a sense hidden the result is that many of us are being influenced and manipulated far more than we realize in the patterns of our everyday lives Richard Stoli founder of People magazine had a method for his style of hidden persuasion he said that the faces on the cover of People magazine had to be recognizable to 80 percent of the public and after that young is better than old pretty is better than ugly rich is better than poor TV is better than music music better the movies movies are better than Sports and anything is better than politics further into the century cable television made grabbing the attention of more subgroups possible ESPN MTV Fox News The History Channel and more and more the instruments of attention capture the medium the technology the paint lights sounds all contributed to an improvement to hyper reality in such a way that made the immediate World less appealing to the dreamlike world claiming to be able to take the consumer elsewhere to a sale to an article to a video of an exotic land attention idealizes the world idealizes the good and the bad [Music] but with the internet data and personalization fundamentally changed how our attention can be captured what was new instant feedback attention Grabbers could use all this data about us vacuumed up from as many sources as possible keystrokes searches locations what your friends were doing your purchases what you'd eaten where you've been what you'd watched to fine-tune precise ways to grab your attention to suggest the most relevant articles adverts takeouts tweets posts and videos personalized attention capture you might be thinking so what the more personalization the better the more relevant the offer the better we live in an abundant modern landscape surrounded by good things products information social networks why is this a problem Choice after all is a good thing how can we think through the downsides then [Music] first most obviously our attention is sometimes captured by things that we want so good film or article say but often it's captured by things that we know are bad for us and second can our own attentional resources our capacity to attend to the things we want to attend to be drained or captured or stolen with such ubiquity with such all-encompassing frenzy that we become lost to what our true needs are what our own sense of self is our own personhood imagine that you live in a polygon surrounded by doors and windows one door has your friends in another is full of Windows to different parts of the planet the universe even another full of people talking about the news and other shops and other movies what a wonderful thing a good thing but we're evolutionarily wired to want more of a good thing and like doors full of sugar these doors knock they cool us entice us corporations spend billions of dollars trying to improve and decorate these doors and windows they try and make them seem like theirs are better than others more urgent to attend to than others re-tastings CEO of Netflix at Netflix we're competing for our customers time so our competitors include Snapchat YouTube sleep Etc one obvious problem with living in the polygon is that you're surrounded by constant knocks stimulation notifications emails requests for your time and distractions not only distract at the moment the distraction happens Studies have shown that your brain trains itself to predict distractions and so we'll distract itself in anticipation before the distraction happens like expecting that a friend is about to knock on the door in the next few minutes or predicting that this is about the time you get an email from your boss or that feeling of waking up just before your alarm goes off so the more you surround yourself with distractions the more your brain will interrupt itself from what it's doing and the harder it becomes to concentrate on the things that matter it takes 10 to 15 minutes to get into a state of deep focus a flow State and only a second for your attention to be grabbed away from it one study found that being in a distracted environment lowers IQ scores by about 10 points when we're trying to concentrate in the polygon whether that's reading working watching a film spending time with family the temptation to look to the windows is enormous the average person looks at their phone 150 times a day and touches it this includes picking up touching in pockets and swiping as well around 2500 times a day our attentional resources are drained we're pulled this way and that by powerful magnets Temptations siren songs by sugars by drugs by the use of red by bold emotional Language by the need to keep up by the need to be liked the attention economy is an over determination a dizziness a promise of freedom to pursue desires that ends up as a new type of Slavery to our deepest desires so distraction in itself can be corrosive and the methods of attention grabbing are only getting better more persuasive and more enticing the game is rigged against us I want to talk about how the psychological tricks attention Grabbers use are linked to Modern addictions in the next video but for now why is it important to escape from the constant competition for our attention and the pathways that leads us down and how can we do that [Music] now there's two solutions leave the polygon or attend to the polygon the center of the polygon should be where your personhood thrives instead essayist William dershowitz pointsight you are marinating yourself in the conventional wisdom in other people's reality for others not for yourself you're creating a cacophony in which it's impossible to hear your own voice whether it's yourself you're thinking about or anything else the global emission survey taken every year reports that levels of sadness worry anger and stress and particularly stress are increasing year on year and by almost 50 percent since 2009. of course a lot of things have likely contributed to this but is the increasing prevalence of smart devices of always being online causing over stimulation that leads to a new type of modern post-modern stress the term stress after all comes from physics the amount of pressure on an object the stretching of an elastic band that might be about to break is the attention economy the cause of quiet quitting not doing all the extras the job demands of you the dropping out of the Rat Race the moving out of cities a response to power lunches to always being online to responding to emails and doing one more bit of work at 10 pm of tweeting about the latest news at 1am of constantly keeping up with every friend ethicist James William writes that we experience the externalities of the attention economy in little drips so we tend to describe them with words of mild bemusement like annoying or distracting but this is a grave misreading of their nature in the short term distractions can keep us from doing the things we want to do in the longer term however they can accumulate and keep us from living the lives we you want to live or even worse undermine our capacities for reflection and self-regulation making it harder in the words of Harry Frankfurt to want what we want to want thus there are deep ethical implications lurking Here For Freedom well-being and even the Integrity of the self as James points out in his book stand out of our light technology should function like a GPS for our goals guiding us showing us the latest information about our interests keeping us updated with what's important but imagine if our real GPS took a stain wrong paths instead of to our destination to assail as a department store rather than to our grandmas living alone should we just turn off the sat nav there the painter Agnes Martin talking about the hippie lifestyle disagrees she said a lot of people withdraw from society as an experiment so I thought I'd withdraw and see how enlightening it would be but I find that it's not enlightening I think what you're supposed to do is stay in the midst of life instead in her book how to do nothing Jenny O'Dell talks about hey we should be protecting and preserving spaces for non-commercial non-instrumental independent self and communal thought places to maintain ourselves to care to think about what's going on here locally she writes what's needed then is not a once and for all type of quitting but ongoing training the ability not just to withdraw attention but to invest it somewhere else to enlarge and proliferate it to improve its security it's not just about switching off it's about finding time for things free from distraction to attend to the things we value it's about using technology in the right way so it works for us not the other way around if the attention economy draws us away the correct response is to return to the direct moment foreign features of Modern Life is the separation of time from space we live psychologically in multiple time zones simultaneously from one single space that we're in we have clocks Maps calendars timetables we have information Technologies like newspapers and televisions and the internet that transport us all these modern inventions they use to take us out of the moment out of the space that we're living in they allow us to plan with one another in different Futures different Geographics different spaces pre-moderns were focused on the play the sunset the next meal modernity disembeds us from local experience this of course has been revolutionary but when we're too distracted two disembedded from what's directly around us the pre-moderns might have some good suggestions about how to detach [Music] philosopher David Abram writes that direct sensuous reality in all its more than human mystery Remains the sole solid Touchstone for an experiential world now inundated with electronically generated Vistas and engineered Pleasures only in regular contact with the tangible ground and sky can we learn how to orient and to navigate in the multiple Dimensions that now claim us paying attention to the immediate informs Us in surprising ways and paying attention is an act of discipline we must train ourselves to switch off when we need to create our own polygons bookshelves habits local walks local culture local community turn off notifications and instead listen watch and think I think one of the issues with the attention economy is that it leaves us no time to truly think for ourselves to not be drowned out in that conventional wisdom to attend carefully to what surround us what we're thinking about what the people and places around us are doing to think problems through and let the mind run on its own paying attention to the moment can lead to surprising insights William Blake said of attending to the moment that it can lead you to see a world in a grain of sand and a heaven in a wild flower hold Infinity in the palm of your hand and Eternity in an hour this isn't just romantic it's scientific in looking to understand to study to find the causes of a grain of sand a wildflower your hand an hour you extrapolate outwards knowledge is not just about endless information it's learning how to think with what you've got and that requires disconnecting pay attention to how you're paying your attention [Music]
2023-02-03 06:28
