Attention in the Age of Algorithms

Content publishing and distribution is but a single aspect of the online economy skewed by algorithm-driven success of online communication platforms. Whether it’s gaming, news or communications — Netflix, League of Legends, Reddit or Facebook — all are businesses competing for the exact same thing: your attention.

The primary purpose behind the marketing, content, and product features within the various social media channels prevalent nowadays, such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube or any other, is to increase the number of hours users spend engaged with the product. Time spent within the product translates into revenue. A user who spends 10 hours a week on Facebook, doesn’t spend it on YouTube, and vise versa. When it comes to user generated content platforms akin to Facebook and YouTube, the job of picking and delivering the right content to the right people is entrusted to the algorithm. A perpetual learning machine that tunes itself to your opinions and desires, creating a stream of engagement that claws onto your attention to the point that it feels alien to allocate your efforts to anything else.

As our devices become inseparable aspects of our lives and the way we perceive reality, regaining and retaining control over the algorithms binding all communication methods is increasingly important.

If we look at the trajectory of perception, we see that that the amount of information immediately available to us about our world is growing at an accelerated pace. Instead of applying familiar tools such as stereotyping/prejudice towards people, we now have to make more personal and informed opinions, frequently based on the information available online. This information, which just 10 years ago was accessible only via a PC and would have been virtually impossible to gather 25 years ago, is now readily available to us 24/7, often a couple of taps and swipes away.

We are on our way towards losing the tap and swipe barrier altogether, as AR and always-on interfaces take center stage. Our perception of reality, the definition of good and bad interaction habits, will be in the hands of those controlling the world’s information overlay.

Facebook has changed how we interact with other people (causing people to engage in activities they can’t afford to maintain connections with people they never see); in a world where people have become used to assessing one’s accomplishments in business, social status and quality of life based on the number of likes on their recent post, an always-on layer quantifying real-world interactions will set the new social standards of success.

If projects focusing on the decentralization of context and content delivery don’t step forward and provide a viable, well functioning alternative to the for-profit and government-issued information overlay, our society will be permanently shaped into a mold provided by the algorithm.