In the digital world today, attention is considered to be one of the world’s most precious commodities. Every time you thumb Instagram while standing in line at the bodega, every instance in which you shoot a YouTube video into your veins like digital heroin, every second you dare breath in between a notification’s chimes, you’re engaging in what economists have termed the “attention works,” a system in which tech giants fall over each other in a mad scramble to enthrall and monetize your eyeballs, your eardrums and whatever particles in your brain might fathom your own wants and desires. This economy is wholly different from one where we trade physical goods: A market for human attention. Now that billions of people are spending hours a day on digital platforms, knowing how this system works is arguably more important than ever for consumers who want to get their time and mental energy back.
The Currency of Clicks and Eyeballs
In these days where attention is the currency of the internet, your eyeballs are money. Social media and search, and streaming services all run on advertising models that are based on one thing: keeping you engaged. The more time you spend on their platform, the more ads they can show you — and the more they can learn about your preferences and behaviors.
This is a pretty powerful incentive structure, and it has platforms designing their interfaces to be as addictive as possible. Features such as infinite scroll, push notifications and algorithmic timeline feeds are not accidents — the result of circumstance or bad design decisions — they exist, and continue to proliferate, precisely because they are the things that serve the entire capitalist whole: they have been designed to give way, to solicit Pavlovian responses, designed to be irresistible. These same principles of design and engagement can be observed in a range of other digital industries, from online shopping to baccarat online, where user interaction is tailored to keep people on the site and engaged.
The Science of Digital Addiction
Tech companies have squads of neuroscientists, behavioral economists and data scientists whose job is to manipulate your every waking moment, to keep you scrolling: never sausage — it’s ground meat. They use several key strategies:
- Variable reward schedules that mirror gambling mechanics, making each notification or new post feel like a potential jackpot
- Social validation loops through likes, comments, and shares that trigger dopamine releases
- Fear of missing out (FOMO) created through real-time updates and disappearing content
- Personalization algorithms that serve increasingly targeted content based on your past behavior
The Price We Pay for Constant Connection
Yet, because they do supply something real—communication, entertainment, and access to information—the attention economy comes with hidden but economically significant forgoing costs. Studies indicate that continuous digital stimulus can splinter our attention, diminish our ability to think deeply and contribute to high rates of anxiety and depression.
Now the average person touches their phone over 150 times a day and looks at a screen more than 7 hours each day. This sustained state of partial attention has implications for the way we work, for the ways we form and maintain friendships and relationships, for how we spend our leisure time, for how we raise our children, and simply, how we live.
Wrapping Up
The attention economy is one of the most radical departures in terms of how value generation and exchange occurs in the contemporary world. We may not be able to simply opt out of digital life, but understanding how these systems function allows us to more deliberately decide how to use technology. Once we realize our attention is valuable and scarce, we can learn to protect it by ensuring our focus reflects our own deliberate intentions instead of just the bottom line of tech companies. The solution is attention — to use it intentionally, and sometimes, to not use it at all — to the radical practice of looking away.
