Vivek Kaul: The economics of attention deficit

Unfortunately, as with any counterfactual, a definitive answer is not possible. But what I do know is that I have what the world likes to call attention deficit disorder.

First thing in the morning after waking up, I scroll the reels. I scroll the reels many times during a day. And before I go to sleep at night, I scroll the reels. Sometimes when I wake up in the middle of the night, I scroll through the reels before trying to go back to sleep.

Honestly, I don’t know what I’m going to get out of doing this, but I’m addicted and can’t give it up. Like any addiction, this is not a good thing. Or maybe it is, given that I’ve written about it.

1) First of all, is what we call “attention deficit” really lack of attention, or is it something else entirely? Do the reels on social media really distract or hold our attention? Looking at the total hours I spend scrolling through my phone each day, I’d like to believe it’s the latter.

As Oliver Burkeman writes Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Accept Your Limits and Make Time for the Important Things: “What makes modern digital distractions so harmful is not that they are distracting, but amount It has content that is algorithmically designed to keep people challenged for hours, making them less susceptible to distractions of the accidental and productive kind.”

When you look at reel-scrolling from this perspective, the perspective changes completely. The problem is not lack of attention, but focusing too much on one particular thing, leaving less time for other things. So this focus that leads to a lack of what the world likes to call focus is not good focus.

What makes modern digital distraction so harmful is not the way it distracts, but the way it retains attention.

2) Second, sometimes too much reel shifting causes imposter syndrome. When I see people talking confidently about investing, stocks, money, personal finance, politics, foreign policy, wars, relationships, the lives they live, cooking, traveling, hiking, buying things online, the relationships they share with their parents, which should you use a credit card, how to get into an airport lounge for free, how to travel cheaper in first class on an airline, the seven best places to visit in Greater London, the best forex cards, the best ramen served in Mumbai or the best for that matter best vada pav, songs that Indian cinema copied from Pakistan and more, I feel like I can do much better in my life. That I knew almost nothing.

As Burkeman writes: “For some, this manifests as imposter syndrome, the belief that you have a basic level of expertise that almost everyone else has acquired but you do not, and that you can’t stop second-guessing yourself until you get there.”

Usually this feeling of imposter occurs late at night, right before I go to sleep. Like smoking, spooling is harmful to your health.

3) Third, the business of reels, videos, and other social media posts is completely contrary to the gig economy as it has existed and been conducted over the last few centuries. Typically, firms hire employees who produce a product or provide a service that they can then sell to customers and hope to make a profit by ensuring their expenses are lower than their revenues. Or they hire other companies to make the product or part of the product they want to sell. Or they franchise the service they want to offer, etc. That’s how business models work.

But social media companies don’t work that way. They disrupted the traditional business model. As Kevin Kelly writes Inevitable: Understanding 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future: “What we didn’t see was how much of this brave new online world would be produced by users, not big institutions. “All of the content Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and Twitter offer is created by their audiences, not their staff.”

And this was completely contrary to what was believed to be true before social media exploded thanks to cheap smartphones and cheap internet. As Kelly writes: “No web phenomenon has ever been more confusing than the endless rabbit hole of YouTube and Facebook videos. Everything media experts knew about audiences—and they knew a lot—supported the belief that audiences would never get off their asses and start creating their own entertainment.”

Customers of Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are also suppliers of these companies. The digital age has created a new type of company.

Or as John Kay wrote The Corporation in the Twenty-First Century: Why is (almost) everything we are told about business wrong?: “Customers of Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are also suppliers of these companies. The same goes for eBay and Google. The digital age has created a new type of company. “The disastrous merger of AOL and Time Warner was rationalized by the misconception that the platform should own the content.”

But that reality has been turned upside down as companies no longer produce the content they make money from. User-generated content is now produced on a massive scale. The funny thing is that those who produce this content do not earn much money.

Except for a few notable influencers, most people make very little money from producing social media content. Many who do this will be better employed in other fields and make more money there. The opportunity cost for them to continue producing content for social media is huge, but they are happy to do it anyway.

So why do people create so much content? Kelly believes that nurturing participation This causes ordinary people to spend huge amounts of time and energy producing content such as free encyclopedias, free tutorials or reels and videos.

But there’s a little more to it. For the younger generation currently in their teens and twenties, influencers are role models and they want to emulate their role models and create the kind of content their role models are. If not, at least create your own type of content and hope it goes viral in the process. Imitation is always a very powerful economic force, and it seems to be working in this case as well. The explosion of stand-up comedy on social media is a perfect example of this phenomenon.

4) Fourth, where does this leave people like me who are victims of this phenomenon? Being distracted or focusing too much on scrolling reels, videos, or even posts comes with a price. Even all the notifications that constantly pop up on our smartphones tend to distract us.

Attention deficit has increased exponentially due to alerts, texts, news feeds, news pop-ups, and other interruptions.

As Rolf Dobelli wrote Stop Reading the News – A Manifesto for a Happier, Calmer and Wiser Life: “Attention poverty has increased exponentially due to alerts, texts, news feeds, news popups, and other interruptions.” On top of that, there are reels and videos ranging from news clips to trending songs, stand-up comedy, and more. people often wander around, which increases our struggle and continues to challenge our resolve to focus.

So how to deal with something like this? I was told you need more willpower. You need to focus. You need to decide not to scroll the reels and other social media and then stick to that decision. Now, only if it’s as simple to do as it is to say.

Psychologist Roy Baumeister compares willpower to a muscle that tires over time. Like a runner losing pace after a marathon, our willpower depletes as we encounter more and more interruptions. This fatigue means that our resistance to distraction is weakened as notifications and social media constantly distract us.

If you’ve been feeling like time has been flowing faster in recent years, there may be a possible reason for this. It’s not just the moments we waste checking notifications and scrolling through reels, videos, and text posts, it’s also the time we waste refocusing on what we were trying to do before we got distracted.

Dobelli notes that “refocusing alone takes two or three minutes at a time,” which adds quite a bit to a day. That’s why I don’t read as much as I used to, I don’t write as much as I used to, I don’t watch as much as I used to. I watch as many TV series as before, I meet and even talk to as many people as before, and the time I spend preparing my daily meal has also decreased.

Of course, almost all of the content produced and published for social media is free. But the hidden cost of this freedom is the loss of our privacy. We often unknowingly sign our data before using any of these social media applications. Of course, companies share their privacy policies with the public. But as Shoshana Zuboff writes in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, in 2008 two Carnegie Mellon professors estimated that it would require 76 business days to read all the privacy policies encountered in a year. The number of days has increased since then.

By tracking our behavior and interests, these apps ultimately learn more about us than we realize. In this sense, we are the product, not the customer; It’s an awareness worth thinking about.