Introduction
Attention Sovereignty is our capacity to control our attention at any given moment, and not give it away to any external entity.
When a technology has an incentive to capture your attention, its goal will be to capture as much of it as it can, since the related company will increase its profit proportionally to the amount of attention it can grab from you.
Most social media, like Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, Snapchat, and more, are controlled by publicly traded companies that are pressured by stakeholders to continuously increase profits.
With this system in mind, it is known that the companies of these types of apps have a business model that relies on extracting as much of your attention to achieve this goal. We could say that these companies are enganged in an Attention Economy, an arms race where each participant tries to steal as much of your attention as possible, not just from other apps but from your life in general.
The more time you spend on a platform that participates in an attention economy, the more valuable information that a business can extract from you, and more ads are shown to you.
How attention is stolen
Below are some practical examples of how these platforms try to hold on to your attention for as long as possible:
- infinite scrolls
- infinite scrolls were designed to not let you think if you want to consume more content or not
- push notifications
- constant reminders that we might be missing something, which could distract us from our thoughts or current activity
- recomendation systems
- recommendation systems algorithms optimize for keeping you in the platform for as long as possible, not for your enjoyment or fulfilment
Awareness
In my view, it is very important to keep in mind what was described above, though it may seem obvious to most.
If we remember that there is an incentive to take away our time and our attention, perhaps we can learn to value it and protect it while using these technologies.
In practice
Some things I did to protect my attention sovereignty are:
- I deleted my reddit account to not have an algorithm keeping me engaged in the platform. Instead I use reddit more meaningfully by explicitly searching what I'm looking for.
- I deleted my twitter account for the same reason. Twitter is not a platform that optimizes for sharing ideas, it optimises for content that emotionally triggers you to keep scrolling through more ads.
- I deleted my instagram account for similar motives. Instagram is not a platform that optimizes for sharing photos and moments with friends. It optimizes for ads shown through stories and other feeds.
- I cut down my youtube usage, by applying the ideas in this previous post: https://www.lucas-prado.com/blog/reducing-youtube-usage
- I deactivated every notification on my phone, except for more sensitive things like payments, phone calls, etc. Most notifications are the apps trying to use you, instead of being you who uses the app.
- Made my phone boring: changed to a minimalist launcher without icons and distracting things like app badges