On attention and reading

Waking up at 5:30 is beginning to feel more natural now. I woke up 5 minutes before my alarm was set to go off today. The habits are setting. Although slower than I would like. But that's usually the case.

Distractions have been on my mind for a while now. My brother mentioned the other day that he wanted to start reading. Or rather, he felt that he should be reading. Should. I don't like that word. It is this specter of a word that carries a lot of uninspected values. So i asked him "why". I don't find reading to be superior to any other hobby. And in today's media capable world, there are certainly other (efficiency notwithstanding) means of learning. Nonetheless, his answer wasn't surprising. He wanted to recapture his childhood feeling of being absorbed into a story and binging books. Lots of people want to recapture feelings from their childhood. The conversation took a different turn when I'd asked him why he hadn't.

We pinpointed the change more or less to the time that we all became increasingly more "online". Reading was the preferable thing to do when we didn't have a machine on us all the time. Desktops and laptops used to not always be left on. And cell phones in their early days were certainly not a personal devices; we had one for family emergencies. What did this all mean? We had fewer distractions to compete with. Yes, we had video games. But there was a lot more friction between playing them than we have now.

Say you wanted to play on your gameboy. Games were limited to cartridges; you couldn't just download new ones. You'd need to acquire batteries (far less capable than today's); often not enough to finish a game. Screens weren't backlit so you couldn't easily play at night. This is very different from today, where friction has systematically been eradicated. The ease of giving into these impulses is like never before. You can go from wanting to play a game to playing it without a second's thought. Most of the time, you don't even need to leave your couch.

There isn't anything wrong with this perse. It does, however, make choices much harder. Chosing to do things outside of daily impulses is much more of an active task. And while this is perhaps acceptable for adults to contend with (I don't agree it is, but more on what a policy maker's responsibility another time). It seems nigh unethical to put this load on children. Just like how we are finally noticing the ills of marketing sugar-laden cereal to children by way of cartoon characters. We will notice the long-term adverse effects of notification bombardment much later. From personal experience, I can attest that coming out of the notificaiton-hell has left me unable to focus for long times as I used to be able to.

Even though if Sturgeon's Law that 90% of everything is more or less garbage, FOMO becomes real. The constant conenectedness makes it feel like you're always on the verge of missing out on that potential 10%. Everything feels time sensitive because that is the way the attention economy works. Applications are not designed to make it easy for you to detach or get a chronological update of things. These algorithms (recently in media's lens) determine what you see and when you see. And so you keep coming back for more possibilities of that 10%. If this feels like gambling, it's because it is. Under the guise of "engagement" app-makers havee taken psychology lessons straight from casinos. Dark design patterns implemented to effectively hijack your brain. Jenny Odell in her book How to do nothing talks more about this and cites some interesting papers. I will add that to this note at a later time (if I remember). But that is a good book to look into for this topic. What it boils down to is that these companies are hiring the cleverest minds in the world. And you're just one mind, one mind divided by other responsibilities. How are you supposed to know and actively fight and rally against them. It's death by a million papercuts. One notification at a time, your ability to resist the next one dies a little. And one distraction at a time, you become unable to commit to a single task for extended periods.

Of course the argument could be made that we were among the first generations to be introduced into this tech. And capitalism drives things forward by edging out the competition and exploiting what is possible. But if we know enough to make casinos and gambling illegal for minors, shouldn't these things which so closely resemble it be treated the same way? Take a look at Loot boxes- at this point you're not even disguising the fact that it's gambling. And with real money.

Anyway, that's it for now.

Not from Odell's book, but this is also an interesting paper to read on a tangentially related topic of dark patterns Unpacking Dark Patterns: Understanding Dark Patterns and Their Implications For Consumer Protection In The Digital Economy

Amishi Jha on mindfulness is an interesting article that covers this and potentially a solution. My problem with this, again, is that it puts the onus on the individual. Making it seem like this problem is not manufactured. Imagine if instead of attention eroding tech, it was radiation. "You can protect yourself, you just need to do xyz- duh" instead of just telling folks that they ought not be dosing us with radiation in the first place.