Attention Economy
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
by sari and · updated 4mo ago
Attention Economy
There are those who believe the social web is reaching its terminal point. I hope they’re right. Platform after platform was designed to make it easier and more addictive for us to share content with one another so the corporations behind them could sell ever more of our attention and data. In different ways, most of these platforms
... See morefrom Opinion | the Great Delusion Behind Twitter - The New York Times by New York Times
sari added 1y ago
- It is the business model of the internet, driven by ad revenue, that pushes companies to design their digital tools for compulsive engagement. This is, I think, true enough. The business model has certainly exacerbated the problem. But I’m far less sanguine than Hari appears to be about whether changing the business model will adequately address th... See more
from Attending to the World by theconvivialsociety.substack.com
sari added 1y ago
- Ads have ruined company priorities
It used to be that we design for the best possible experience. But then “free” came around. Nothing is really free, however – you may not pay for it but you do with your data to improve ad targeting.
As a result, the incentives for the creators of these products is not to create a better experience for you. It’s to... See morefrom Notes on The Best Interface is No Interface by Golden Krishna
phoebe added 1y ago
- People in my profession say all the time that they can't do their jobs without Twitter, and it drives me so crazy because I think most of them are worse at their jobs because of Twitter. The reason is that Twitter, as do other forms of social media, gets you to lose control of what you care about. You lose that intentionality with your own attentio... See more
from Ezra Klein’s Formula for a Good Day Involves These Four Things by gq.com
sari added 1y ago
- To optimize for viral growth, today’s social platforms are designed to feature entertainers and sensationalized content in a one-to-many fashion to generate more ad impressions... this is inducing divisiveness and reducing human interaction to just tapping on a like button.
from A Kinder Internet by Dan Kurani
sari added 1y ago
Something I’ve noticed, however, is that exclusively using TikTok doesn’t mean I’m only exposed to TikTok-specific trends and culture. In fact, many of the dust-ups from other platforms still make their way onto my For You page. Rather than a standalone platform, as it was in its early days, TikTok has become the ocean into which—and out of which—t
... See morefrom TikTok is the town square now by kate lindsay
Keely Adler added 4mo ago
Contracting our attention into the moment is hard, but it increases its potency, just as the brevity of words increases the potency of an idea, creating deeper grooves in the mind. If brevity is the soul of wit, then presence is the soul of experience. We cannot be fully ourselves until we are fully in the moment—attention nowhere but here.
from distillation by Isabel Hazan
Stuart Evans added 1y ago
- I guess I meditate because attention is my art form. I’d even wager that much of what we call art — paintings, novels, poetry — are secondary, byproducts of rarefied attention. Attention, then is the primary art form.
from Why I Meditate
sari added 1y ago
- The reason we’re so increasingly intolerant of long articles and why we skim them, why we skip forward even in a short video that reduces a 300-page book into a three-minute animation — even in that we skip forward — is that we’ve been infected with this kind of pathological impatience that makes us want to have the knowledge but not do the work of... See more
from Maria Popova — Cartographer of Meaning in a Digital Age by Maria Popova
Natalie Audelo and added 1y ago