Shuya Gong

What we are trying to do influences what becomes salient to us. If you are looking for a friend in a crowd, faces become salient to you, faces that would have otherwise passed you by. If you are making videos, you will notice patterns in the videos you watch. If you’re not, you can watch a thousand videos and have them pass through your head

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You might also be aware that all this is delivered by means of “persuasive design”—an umbrella term for an armory of psychological techniques borrowed directly from the designers of casino slot machines, for the express purpose of encouraging compulsive behavior. One example among hundreds is the ubiquitous drag-down-to-refresh gesture, which keeps... See more

Much of Buddhist philosophy centers around this same idea, this balance between what’s being phrased as “intention” and “attention” – our intentional curiosity about knowledge and growth, and our choice of where to focus our awareness, what to pay attention to.

Social media algorithms identify our politics and then shepherd us into a hermetically sealed bubble, framing our worldview through a window of rage and extremism.

As we spend an increasing amount of time out of the office, on our computers, and moving around the country seeking comfortable and affordable places to live, our IRL communities are becoming increasingly fragmented. Instead, we are seeking richer and more meaningful engagement and social connection through our online communities.

For my purposes, the attention economy is as simple as the buying and selling of attention. There’s the micro, literal version of that, which is “engagement,” a measure of how much time someone spends in an app and how much they engage with it. But I think a broader definition of the attention economy is kind of like — as I personally experience

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