When it comes to paying attention to what we pay attention to, I found this quote, originally from William James, that Tim Wu used when discussing attention to be relatable. “…our life experience would ultimately amount to whatever we had paid attention to. At stake, then, is something akin to how one’s life is lived.” In the end of our lives, we will look back and the most important things in life, the things that gathered most of our attention and time, will come to mind. Whether this be family, friends, travels, our time in nature and the world, or today, perhaps time spent online, losing and taking away attention from the important things.
This is not to say that the online world is an all-around negative aspect of the modern world that only causes harm, as there are many good qualities and outcomes as to how far society has advanced in technology. However, oftentimes the online world is the easiest place for your attention to be manipulated and turned elsewhere. For example, as I was paying attention to what I paid attention to over the past week, and when the online environment was involved, it often blurred the lines between what I agreed to pay attention to, and what I was forcibly or redirected to pay attention to.
I found when I played a two-minute movie trailer on YouTube, in order to watch that I had to watch thirty seconds worth of advertisements. When my friends and I decided to watch another movie trailer, the same problem occurred, with being forced to watch more advertisements. While these short ads are what helps keep platforms like YouTube running so we’re able to watch videos like movie trailers, the short advertisements you watch throughout life add up. If you watched just five minutes of advertisements every day of the week, whether these are on television, the radio on your drive to work, your phone, computer, social medias, etc., that would be 35 minutes of your week, and 1,820 minutes of your year. Most people one way or another experience an even larger number of advertisements daily, which will end up making up for a large amount of time in our lives.
I also found that when I would look at articles online, whether for school, or travel ideas, I was oftentimes prompted to make an account with the website, sometimes just to access the full article. This isn’t a big deal until you are receiving hundreds of emails in your inbox from various articles you viewed one time over the years. This takes more time and attention away from your life, and the things you truly care about, to clear out an inbox or create an account to read any article you encounter. Along with this, advertisements can pop up along the sides of articles, or when you first enter the website, prompting your attention away from the information you were originally seeking. Alongside this, when algorithms learn your patterns and interests, the advertisements you are shown become harder to ignore and divert your attention from. For example, I was recently reading an article on the best rated light sources for SCUBA divers, but found the website continuously offered distracting advertisements such as “win a free trip” giveaways, or links to equipment I was not researching. This makes a simple task distracting and takes more time to research due to my attention being drawn away.
The worst section, in my opinion, of the online world for attention is social media. Whether it is TikTok, Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, etc., they are all designed to keep your attention and time on these apps for as long as possible. When you agree to put your attention into social media and just scroll for five minutes, this will eventually turn into an hour, or hours. It has become social media’s entire goal to keep you on their platform for as long as possible, even if it is destroying people’s attention spans and wasting precious time here on Earth. Thoreau greatly emphasized the importance of paying attention to the little things around us, and not letting ourselves get caught up in a fast-paced, never fully pleased world. When you just seek more and more, nothing will ever have any value, and you will stop seeing the important things around you. I think the same applies to social media. I found myself multiple times over the past week getting trapped in the online world of social media, my attention span withering away scrolling through short 15-30 second clips. In today’s world, having the ability to step back and put your attention towards the things you truly care about is difficult, but not impossible. While we may not always be able to control outside factors that try to steal our attention, such as advertisements in the online world, we can control what we intentionally put our attention into.