Insufficient appreciation for our own attention

In the introduction of his book The World Beyond Your HeadA review of Crawford's book, Matthew B. Crawford makes an analysis of how we currently treat attention. He was inspired to write this book when during a payment, between entering his pin and confirming the payment, he was confronted with an advertisement.

According to him, attention is something intimate. It determines what is real to us, that what we have in our consciousness. In fact, companies like Google, Facebook and Amazon use our attention for our commercial goals. And because you only have a maximum amount of attention, Crawford doesn’t see this as creating new prosperity, but as a redistribution of existing prosperity. From you, to the companies in Silicon Valley. Put differently, the time spent on Facebook is mainly good for Facebook and you can’t use it again for your own economic or socio-cultural activities. Crawford therefore argues for ‘attentional commonsThe Grand Central terminal as an example of a commons’, the recognition that attention is a limited and shared source that we all need. Like clear air enables breathing, cognitive silence — in the sense of no distraction — enables thinking.

Thankfully, attention has recently gotten more attention. Tim Wu, the driving force behind net neutrality, just wrote a bookTim Wu's 'The Attention Merchants' about it. And ex-Google philosopher Tristan Harris has started a non-profit with the name Time Well SpentTime Well Spent's website. He believes that big companies from Silicon Valley are playing a zero-sum game to claim as much of our attention as possible. Everyone who has spent more time on Facebook or Youtube than they actually wanted will recognize this. This race for attention has quite some negative effects, according to Harris. One example is the vulnerability of our democracy to fake news.

Fake news is the result of the way our information ecosystem works. Harris blames technology for this. But I think, together with Crawford, that the problem lies elsewhere. We haven’t yet sufficiently politicized this attention-economy. Currently, it’s some kind of Wild West, without rules and where everything is still possible. We’re not yet aware that attention is a limited source, like clean water or clean air. So we need to take the political decision to protect that better. Both offline and online. In São Paulo they’ve demonstrated that this is possible.