The Battle For Your Attention
The number one thing companies are trying to capture in 2021 is our attention. We’re surrounded by advertisements, texts and video content to an overwhelming degree. That’s because your attention is a valuable thing. Whatever you focus on becomes your reality.
This makes life in 2021 a balancing act - how do you make purchasing decisions, the films you watch, your media diet - all of these personal aspects of your life are the trophies of an unseen battle for your attention span. Our lack thereof has become accepted as a part of our lives, but how did we get here and is there some way to win it back?
An Invasion of Privacy
The World Wide Web was designed to connect people around the world for the purposes of communication, commerce and the spread of information. But people wanted more. This new technology could eradicate the need for things like television, the mail system, the home phone and even the shopping mall.
This versatility was the undoing of its initially innocent goal. A website could focus on news, entertainment, personal communication and more and it could be freely accessible. Free because websites could also function as virtual billboards and sites could make money from ads, as magazines and television used to. But as people spent more and more time online, these sites found they had a far more valuable resource available to them: data.
This information about our online habits tells companies and political entities a lot about us as people. Our politics, diets and more inform them as to what we want so that they can market it back at us.
An Addictive Experience
For people raised in the internet era, internet addiction is common. And it’s designed to function in this way. YouTube, Instagram and others all give us recommendations based on what we’ve engaged with previously. This means that these companies can harvest more data to make more money.
The casualty in all of this is our attention. You can’t do the things you need to do for yourself if you’re spending time watching an endless stream of videos. There are of course other issues as well such as the creation of echo chambers and the proliferation of fake news but unlike these issues, your attention is uniquely personal. What you focus on is what you develop. If your focus is going toward an overuse of social media, you’re giving your attention toward feeding a tech company with data, making them money while you waste time.
Something Worth Fighting For
All of this might sound quite doom and gloom, but it’s all about being aware of yourself and your habits. Once you realise what your attention is worth to some of the most powerful companies on earth, you’ll realise that it’s something worth keeping. Monitor your time online, stick to playing tragamonedas peru and make sure you’re using the internet as it was intended to be used - to connect with family on the other side of the world, to learn new skills and languages, and to feel a sense of connection to the people around you.