exploring the inner workings and dynamics of companies building products engineered to hook us, addict us, and hijack our attention to sell more ad inventory
One of the weirdest things about the Internet is that even though we’re just a click away from the greatest authors of all-time, from Plato to Tolstoy, we default to just scrolling Twitter
Sometimes we don’t quite process that billions of people on the planet get unlimited entertainment, voice and video calling, maps, restaurant reviews, weather, news, an encyclopedia, mail, messaging, and more for *free* just because 1-2% of us click an ad every now and then.
Gloria Mark, a professor of information science at the University of California, Irvine, and the author of “Attention Span,” started researching the way people used computers in 2004. The average time people spent on a single screen was 2.5 minutes. “I was astounded,” she told me. “That was so much worse than I’d thought it would be.” But that was... See more