Reframing the “Social Media” Problem As an Attention Crisis

The giving and the receiving of attention are both intimate acts.  These acts are the very basis of all human communications, and by extension, human societies.  Any  tools or technologies that mediate this act need to be designed with great care, to artfully maintain the human elements around this mutual expression of vulnerability

by pulling millions of people into the potential audience for every post or tweet or photo, these companies force everyone to treat every conversation as a potential performance to millions of total strangers.

But conversations  should not  be performances, unless they are explicitly staged as such. Conversations should not be battleground

Attention is one of the most fundamental components of a conscious identity. When something hijacks or manipulates a person’s attention, it’s actively eroding their independent self-hood as a conscious individual.

Users are slowly waking up to the fact that free-to-use, infinite feeds are predatory.