Stopping Social Media From Hacking Our Attention

How we are fuelling the beast that increasingly divides, influences and destroys us

The video above shows Chamath Palihapitiya, a former Facebook executive responsible for user growth, who along with a growing number of silicon valley insiders is coming out publicly to encourage us all to take the massive negative long-term effects of social media serious.

While lots of the commentary regarding this topic is rightfully focusing for example on the failed responsibility of these social media networks, or the underlying capitalist, profit-seeking systems and ideologies behind these problems, or very importantly also on the structure of the algorithms which are creating these feedback-loops that increase our addiction to these platforms and push us into increasingly smaller filter bubbles.

I think one major topic is always missing! Namely, our own role as the oil that fuels this whole social media machine.

Because I think one of the major problems here is that we aren’t conscious about the fact that it is us, ourselves that are the product of social media. We don’t really see ourselves as the product that Facebook, Snapchat, Google and others make their money with. And that the advertising companies or brands using these platforms are their actual customers, the group they adhere to primarily.

We watch a 30-second ad in exchange for a video; we freely pour sentence after sentence, hour after hour, into status updates, into likes and comments. None of this depletes our bank balances. Non of this has an immediate, conceivable, negative effect on us. Yet it has a cost! The cumulative cost of increased social media use, while it’s of course hard to quantify, affects many of the things we usually hope to put at the heart of a happy life and healthy society: rich and meaningful relationships for example, rewarding leisure activities, a happy and peaceful mind, civil discourse, and the exchange of ideas and information.

But, because we are increasingly using social media in a sort of TV-like, autopilot way, we kind of miss to put the adequate value on our attention. However, this attention is what keeps the social media machine running, our attention fuels the profits of social media companies and the code of the algorithms that create the filter bubbles that divide us.

And the more we use social media, the shorter our attention spans get and the faster our little short-term happiness, or dopamine spikes — through likes and comments on our posts — fade away. This is consequently making our attention even more precious which leads to a so to say re-engineering of the social media machine and new ways of trying to grab our attention: from text to image to video; from interesting but maybe boring and long content to short, entertaining, engaging, and shocking content. And it doesn’t help that our brains evolved during a time when we had to constantly be on edge in order to perceive and spot danger, which is why we react more to inputs that are negative or that produce anger or fear