The Great Eyeball War, Part 1

in her bank account every day. It's Saturday if she's off work, and she's out of food at her apartment, so Alice decides to go to the grocery store to buy a few things to make herself some lunch and dinner. On our way walking to the store, she sees another woman walking an extremely cute puppy. Alice goes up to ask the woman if she can pet the puppy. The woman says, okay, but it will cost you three credits.

Alice thinks about it for a second, then makes a few swipes on her identipad and sends this woman the money. She pets the puppy. Of course, she enjoys the experience because hey, puppies are great. On the way to the store, she stops four other dog walkers and pays them each three credits to pet their dogs. Now, dogs are still great when you can find them. Petting dogs is still wonderful, but Alice notices that each time she stops to pet a dog, she gets less happiness out of it than

she did the last time. Having spent fifteen credits on dogs, she's now down to a hundred and six credits for the day. Halfway to the store, she walks past the scene of an auto car accident ambulances a peacekeeper detail. She doesn't really want to look, and she feels guilty, but she can't help it. The feeling of curiosity is so overwhelming she has the irresistible urge to peek and see if anybody got hurt, but she gets caught. An armored peacekeeper walks up and says, ma'am, I noticed you

watching the scene. There's a surcharge of twenty six credits if you want to do that. Reluctantly, Alice hands over the payment and then spends a while watching the scene. Now she's down to eighty credits of the day, and on top of that, she feels pretty guilty about snooping on the wreck in the first place. On the way to the store, she has more encounters like this. She stops to watch a couple having a heated argument a parking lot. They charge her forty credits to watch, and

all it does is make her feel bad. Then outside the grocery store, a vendor is selling crystal lattees. She buys one for five credits and stands there drinking it. It is a truly delicious crystal latte, so she buys another one, and then another one, and then three more. By the time she's done, she is highly overcaffeinated, feels twitchy and anxious, and has a horrible stomach ache, and she only has fifteen credits left to buy groceries with.

This is not enough for her to make what she was planning for lunch and dinner, let alone enough to save what she needs each day to pay for rent her virtual reality bill, or save for that Ganymede Mec holiday. She's been dreaming of what happened Alice in this story. At every stage of every part of the she was doing what she wanted to do in the moment. Nobody coerced her at all, nobody forced her to do any of that stuff, and yet everything has gone wrong. Her

financial plans for the day have been completely destroyed. What happened? Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how stup dot com. Hey you, welcome to stuff to blow your mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And what we just read was an attempt to sketch out an illustration of an idea that we're going to be talking about for a couple of episodes here. This is going to be the first of a two part episode about the attention economy, the technosphere, and the war for

your eyeballs. And one of the core ideas that we're gonna be talking about today is the idea that we should start thinking about our attention, what we pay attention to, as a finite resource that has to be invested in things with deliberation and care in order for us to get what we want out of life. If you think back over the story we told about Alice and simply take out the money, remove the credits from the scenario, is it a day well spent? Is the story? Okay?

If you take out all the money she spent staring at the at the wreck, at the argument, at the puppies, at the Latte's um. It's still not quite right, is it. Yeah. The great thing about this little story is that we have these sort of fun dystopian sci fi elements, but at heart we have a very dystopian idea that matches

up with our our daily life, our daily struggles over attention. Yeah, exactly, because even if you take all of the money out of the story, she wasn't spending money, but she's spending something that cannot be replaced, which is her time and what she devotes her mind to. Yeah, thinking about that purchase that she wants to make, thinking about the situation that she's a mere bystandard too. Right, It's a distraction from whatever else it is you want to do with

your life. Because our attention is truly finite. It might feel like an infinite and value uncoupled resource to us, right, because there's just so much of it for us to give, and we squander it so much of the time, and there's no explicit dollar value attached to it. But think about it like this. You do work so that you can get a paycheck that will number one by you the basic necessities of survival, But then what do you

work for on top of that? It's because you want to have money in your paycheck that will allow you to spend your free time devoting your attention to things you want. You like to spend your attention on family, on friends, on books and movies and enjoyable meals, and sports and the outdoors and meditation and how abbies and personal projects and all of all of that is attentional desires. The reason we want to have free time is because we want to be able to spend our attention on

these things. And we at least subconsciously realize that we only have a limited amount of attention to spend. Our attention, quite literally is our lives. And over the next couple of episodes, we're gonna try to offer some evidence and make an argument that we increasingly live in a world of incredibly powerful, highly evolved attention vampires that we have thoroughly integrated into our daily lives and allowed to just suck away our attention at a massive scale without us

even noticing it. Because do you ever realize that you've been sitting there scrolling through your Facebook news feed mindlessly for half an hour when you really meant to be doing something else, Or do you ever suddenly snap, as if from a trance from watching a long string of random YouTube videos, not videos that you went to YouTube specifically to watch, but videos that have been served to you as related content, compulsively clicking on the next video

or allowing it to auto play, like you're just hypnotized. Yeah. Like, I often have this situation where I feel like if I were a primitive human, I would be seated and say a clearing um, perhaps you know, next to a tree, and I would be working on some craft. Perhaps I'm I'm chipping away at what will be an arrowhead or

the head of a spear. And then occasionally I'll look up from my craft and I'll look around at the surrounding territory, you know, just to make sure that the rival tribe is not attacking, that there are no predators creeping up on me, and then continue with my work. But in my day to day environment, it's not merely the physical surroundings that I had that I gaze up

from and look at. It's the all the social media um aspects of my environment, like gazing over at at Facebook, at Twitter, at Reddit, at at what have you, many of which are tied to my job. I'm looking at feeds for the podcast feeds for work, and yet it is it is getting in the way of my my actual job. But you often get derailed. I bet, don't you Like you go to Twitter or you go to Facebook because it's something you have to do for your job, and say, I need to check the page for X,

or I need to upload a link to why. But then that news feeds there isn't it, Or some things are scrolling in and you get kind of sucked in, or sometimes you're not even in there for any other reason, but you feel this kind of inexplicable tug. Do you ever notice yourself getting derailed from important or interesting projects they frequent unnecessary compulsion to check Twitter and see what happened on it? Or do you ever have that feeling that suddenly a whole evening is gone by and you

didn't really do anything productive or enjoyable. You just had a long sustained session of consuming digital content without making any conscious choices or decisions, and all you're left with is this hollow feeling of regret. What happened to my night? Yeah? Sometimes it's something is is nonsensical too, is just a sudden need to explore the filmography of Rod Steiger or something that added fact. You know, it's like it's just like I wonder what his big film was, and then

and then going out. Yeah, like the encyclopedic rabbit holes, going one Wikipedia link to another. That can happen too. And this is what we're gonna be talking about for these next couple of episodes. So I came across a startling fact that's often cited by a technology ethicis that we're gonna be talking about in these couple of episodes. A guy named Tristan Harris. You might have seen him in the news over the past couple of years because he's been leading this new movement. Will be discussing a

little bit. But Harris often cites the fact that the average person with the smartphone checks their phone hundred and fifty times a day. Yeah, well that doesn't that doesn't sound too far off. I I shudder to think that could be true. But that might be true about me. I don't know, but I would be scared to see the number if somebody kept track of how often I checked my phone, because it begins to feel like coming up for air. It's just something that you almost do

as a reflex. You know, I'm walking down the hallway, Well, nothing to do but check my social media. Yeah, if that number is true, And if you're in that average band and you check your phone about a hundred and fifty times a day, think about what that does to your day. Even if you only spend an average of thirty seconds each time looking at your phone, that's seventy five minutes of every day staring at your phone. But we all know it's not just thirty seconds, right, Sometimes

it's thirty seconds, sometimes maybe a little bit less. Sometimes you open the Facebook app or the Instagram app and it turns into ten minutes, twenty minutes, or an hour. Why is this happening and how is this affecting us? One of the funny things about this is the fact that we're using in this conversation the word phone. I know we've had this talk before about how like one time, Robert, you were like, it's not really a phone, is it? No?

I yeah, I have. I have gotten in the habit of trying to refer to it as a tiny pocket computer because it feels far more accurate than saying phone, because phone sounds utilitarian. I have my phone in case an important call comes through. It's a tool for getting in touch with the hospital or something like. But it's not.

It's a tiny pocket computer full of data streams and games and various social media bells and whistles and and ultimately also it's just this portal for anxiety, you know, like all the various, all sorts of bad news can come flying through this black little screen. And yet we we want to be next to it at all times, you know, we we need to be there when when the bad news comes to calling. We have talked about how it should be called a tiny pocket computer, and

that would be much more accurate. But I also think people should run this experiment. Try this exercise. Anytime somebody says a sentence about their smartphone and they're not actually talking about like a landline telephone, if they're talking about a smartphone, replace the word phone with the word god

and see how the sentence sounds actually. Just search Twitter for some my phone statements and turned up things like I hate going out when my God isn't fully charged, my God died mid inst alive, It's been a big day. High school really is a waste of time. I just sit here on my God all day. Now. I wonder if we could give the god a proper name like

phone Hovah or something. That would be kind of fun, but no, it would more accurately represent the I mean, the the value in time and attention that we give this device. I think it is not exaggerating at all to say that we now have a religious level of

devotion to these personal devices that are Internet connected. We consult them in a way that if we if we were suddenly exposed to this world, if we hadn't been eased into it over the past, you know, ten years or whatever, if we just popped into this future and saw everybody checking their phones and staring at their phones all the time, we we would think this was absurd.

We would think this was a ridiculous way to live. Yeah, And I mean I have moments where I do snap out of it and for a few minutes anyway, and realize this is this is crazy that we're all pouring ourselves into these devices all the time, and it it's it's beyond mere convenience. And yet when people bring this up in a satirical context, I often see people making this point. Everybody's staring at their phones all the time.

It is treated as an indictment of the behavior of people and not an indictment of the design of the technology. If you notice that it's like, oh, all these stupid people staring at their phones all the time? Yeah, wake up, people are are often at times, there's there's sort of this this this this anti youth vibe to it as well, like, yeah,

there's millennials won't stop looking at the fields. But I think we all have seen enough examples to know that humans of all ages are susceptible to the the the sirens song of the smartphone. Right later in this pair of episodes, we're going to be discussing a lot of the specific ways that our technologies that are personal devices and the apps within them are absolutely totally designed to

hijack our attention and make us behave this way. I think it's not because people are stupid, it's not because they're weak. It's how we are. We have certain vulnerabilities in our brains, and these devices and the software within them exploit those vulnerabilities brilliantly. Yeah, we have just we have crafted an ever evolving neural parasite that we all

pay top dollar for. I want to discuss a couple of findings about the effects of having of like phone and interruptions, the interruptions they provide on our attention, and the way this happens in our lives. Before we dig more into the meat to the topic. Just in, Robert, I think you might have seen the study. I think maybe we talked about it. There was research out of u T. Austin just last year in that found something

pretty weird. People who had their smartphone within reach did worse on tests of cognitive performance than people who had it in another room. This is even if the smartphone was turned off. If it's visible or within an arm's length, it was distracting enough to deduct from our effective I Q and I have anecdotally noticed this in my own life.

I'll be working and having trouble focusing on work, even if I'm not actually checking my phone, I will be in a more distracted state of mind if I've got my phone on me, And if I merely take my phone to a different room of the house and shut the door and then go back to my work, I can focus more. I'm serious. I have found this as well. If I can stick it in a drawer now, as as I am saying, this as I am speaking into the microphone. My phone is situated over here to the side.

I have it an airplane mode so that it won't interrupt me. But still it's there in my peripheral vision, like kind of staring at me with its with its dark screen, and there's this this sense that's still this is this idea that it might light up at any moment, I might get some sort of an alert, even though it should not be able to give it to me, right yeah, even though it's not doing anything to you, it's in your It's in your consciousness at some level.

Right in the same way that somebody's god belief becomes a part of their conscience, the presence of your phone becomes a part of your situational awareness. It's always lingering there. It's always a potential, right yeah. And sometimes the potential is just for mundane stuff to happen, like, oh, the doorbell will ring at my house. That means a package has been delivered, you know, and it's just I don't need that information. It's just you know, a box of

of cat food. I don't need to be there, and no additional plans need to be made. But yet the delivery of cat food has interrupted my daily workflow. Yeah. The English psychologist Glen Daniel Wilson I've read, has shown that the distraction threat of things in the digital realm, So like the example would be an unread message sitting in your inbox, you're aware of that, and you've got that distraction threat on your mind. It can lower our

effective i Q by about ten points. But then think about what happens when you actually have the distractions coming in, Like if you've got notifications turned on on your phone. Interruptions matter a lot to your ability to focus on projects and activities you care about. When a notification interrupts you, it's not just the time you spend looking at the interruption that you lose. Interruptions degrade the quality of your focus on your primary activity. Some psychologists call this quote

a task shifting penalty. Robert, I'm sure you've felt this before, right, I feel this all the time. Yeah. You get into a certain workflow and then something pops you out of it, right, and that's and that's when, or if you actually get back into the task at all. According to a two thousand five University of California, Irvine study by Gloria Mark and colleagues. Regaining your original focus on a project or task after an interruption takes people, on average over twenty

five minutes. And if that's they actually resume the task on the same day they were interrupted. Sometimes they don't resume it for the whole day. So what happens when you get when you're working on something or you're focusing on something, is if you're gonna get interrupted, it takes you longer to get back into the zone. And that's if you even pick the task back up, and sometimes it will take you a while to do that. Interruptions

are more than just the content of the interruption. They totally degrade the quality of our engagement with every goal pursuit we care about. You know, this reminds me of some some research I was putting in on another topic where an individual touched on the nature of torture and one of the psychological aspects of torture is making the torture recipient unsure about what is going to happen at any given time. And this is a power that we have handed not only over to the torture but also

to the smartphone and various other devices in our life. Well, yeah, we were just recently reading some stuff about pain and the role that that uncertainty and anxiety plays in the amplification of the sensation of pain. So anyway, given all of this, I have to start wondering in a quite literal sense. I I don't mean this as an exaggeration. Are we currently living in an attention dystopia? All right?

You think about that while we take a quick break, and then we'll come back and try to regain focus. Than alright, we're back now. I think we should think about the idea of attention. We've already discussed that attention essential is our lives. Attention is what we value in

our lives. When you think about the life you want to live, what you really mean is you want to be able to spend your attention on certain things, right, Yeah, Because I mean when you start thinking about what attention is, it's more than just looking at something or thinking about something momentarily. It is Uh, it's it's crucial to what I've seen referred to as the selective directedness of our mental lives, right, having a having a will for how

you use your mind. Yeah, I mean, in some models of consciousness that we've discussed on the show even center on the manner in which humans utilize their attentive powers. As such, there are multiple philosophical arguments for the nature of human attention and the reasons for our limited process and capability. Yeah, but ultimately it's kind of like the

primitive example I gave earlier. You know, there's no doubt that we evolve to handle various streams of stimuli at once and to apply selective attention based on their importance. This is why we can go to a party and you can tune out all the other voices in the party except for the person you're talking to, or that you can do the exact opposite, tune out the person you're supposed to be talking to and listen to a

more interesting conversation in the vicinity. But one thing you'll notice if you do that is it really degrades what

you take away from any of those experiences. That's so like if you were trying to talk to one person in a crowded room, you can focus on them and pay attention to them, But if you're trying to switch between paying attention to them and eavesdropping on somebody nearby, you're not really going to get a very good sense of either one, right, But still there are limits to what you can encounter in a like a physical real

world scenario. You know, even if the tribal meeting is is rather crowded, there's only so much you're gonna be able to hear over the shouting and of course the sacrifices to to ug uh you know, I mean, it's uh, there are going to be limits in place. There's the world of multiple stimuli streams and fixed and moving objects that we evolve to thrive in, and then there's this world we've made a place of over stimulation, over choice

in myriad voices to command our psyche. This is a really good point because we could easily think of the virtual world we've created, the world within our phone operating systems, or computer operating systems, or the web, especially the modern web, which is so highly designed focused, or our social media apps and all that. We could think of that as an extension of our world. It's just like the world is going into this virtual space. But I don't think

it's like that. This is not an extension of our physical lives in the physical space. It is a different world with different properties, and it operates on different rules and the rules it operates on. As we're about to get into our the monopolization of your attention primarily, that is the ultimate goal of most of this stuff we interact with in the information age. The attention devouring technosphere, i would say, is not an accident. It's by design.

These apps and devices are specifically engineered to suck out as much of our attention as they can get. And you know this, rightly, feel it. You can see that in every piece of clickbait headlines, right you know, or anything like that. It's trying to get your eyeballs. People in the industry talk about the idea of eyeballs. They

want eyeballs on things. Yeah, there is kind of the the content product, and then there is the the the app product, the interface product, and all of them are saying, hey, look at me, look at me, do this, interact with me, use me more, read me more, consumedly more, and ultimately probably purchase more. Right exactly, so we should ask the question why, like why are so many highly calibrated technological monsters vying for our attention in the first place? And

this is an interesting question. One paper we might want to mention is that back In two thousand twelve, the M I. T economists Eric Brynjolfsson and U he Oh

wrote a paper called the Attention Economy. It was essentially geared toward trying to quantify the economic value, the money value provided by free content and services on the Internet, because obviously the abundance of all these free services, you know, websites that you go to for free, apps that you use for free, all that stuff that's offered online is providing value to people because they're choosing to spend their attention on it, and that value isn't getting directly measured

in the economy the way the value of many other consumer services would be. Like if you want to measure the value of a bottle of drain, Oh, it's the value is what people go to the store to spend on it. Right, But the consumer is not spending money on these apps and devices and stuff, but they are spending something something that has some kind of value that

we need a way to measure. Well, it sounds an awful lot like engagement to get into sort of the business terms of websites and and even podcasting, right, The idea that you want you want to user engagement, right, and the user, the user or the consumer. One of the things we've got to understand is that the user, the consumer of these information services, these free internet services like Facebook or any any digital media, even what we do, the user is not really the customer because they're not

paying money. The customer is going to be the advertiser, and the user is the product. Essentially, you cultivate a product by getting eyeballs, and then you sell access to those eyeballs that you gather to an advertiser in any way. That paper I mentioned earlier, those two economists estimated that over at the time, this was back in two thousand twelve, quote, the increase in consumer surplus created by free internet services was quote over one hundred billion dollars per year in

the US alone. There's an enormous amount of perceived value or wealth being offered in these free internet services. But somebody that they exist mainly because we live at a time when your attention alone is worth money to somebody else.

So you mentioned the idea of ad supported media. Most of the internet and online services that you uh that you use are offered to you for free, and it doesn't have to be this way, right, We could have a tech economy where everything that you got over the Internet or through your devices had a fee to access, right, Do you ever think about why it's not that way? Well,

I mean both. Part of it is that we have we have grown accustomed to getting things for free on the Internet, and that applies to everything from newspaper articles to music, and that's been one of the that's been one of the hurdles for for online business to try

and figure out how to get people to pay for things. Again, do you think free music sharing through piracy and Napster and all that in the early days of the Internet helped shape the free ad supported information content of the Internet today, Like people got trained on the idea that it wasn't really stealing because you know, I can't remember

who this is. But there was once a comedian I heard doing a comedy act about those old piracy commercials that are like, you wouldn't steal a car, why would you?

Why would you steal music? But the comedian said, you know, I would steal a car if all I had to do was touch the car, and then an instant copy of the car would be created and I could have it and the original person could keep their car, and you know, it created the sense because it was digital information that could be copied without consequence, that you weren't really taking from anybody. You're just getting a copy of a thing. Yeah, it's out there, and all I am

doing is breathing it in as if it were air. Yeah. And so it's like trained people on this idea that that, you know, information should be free, and as has been said, information wants to be free, but it's led to this world where Okay, to produce information, you have to spend money, right, Like anything that is made on the internet. If you want to run a website, if you want to write an article, if you want to create a podcast, if you want to create a video, almost none of this

can be done for free. You have to invest in it. And so that's got to be paid for somehow. And so the way everything works, including us here, is that

you pay for things by running ads. That's right, I mean, And that's not even getting into the idea that people are putting their time into creating things, and that time has to come out of your life and you and the individual the individual creator has bills to pay and a route to maintain, and needs to have food eat, right, and so the way technology companies and digital media companies

can pay for themselves is to run advertisements. And the way they can increase the amount of money they're making uh and that they can charge advertisers is basically twofold. I think one is simply by selling more exposure to your eyeballs to the user's eyeballs. The more attention you spend on a platform, the more advertising that platform can show you. So if you go to Facebook and they get you to stay on Facebook twice as long, they can show you twice as many ads, so they can

charge the advertisers that much more. You increase the supply of attention that can be sold to the customer, which is the advertiser or The other main way media companies can make money off your attention is by gathering data about you. The more you use a social media site like Facebook or whatever, the more social media, the more that social media site knows about who you are and where you live, and what you're interested in and what

you'll spend money on and so forth. And the more it knows about who you are, the better they know how to sell you stuff. You might have noticed that in the early days of the Internet when you were getting targeted ads, they were bad. You. I remember the days when I was getting targeted ads on Facebook that were for ridiculous things I would never want. But over time, targeted advertising has gotten a lot better, hasn't it. Oh,

it's gotten really really good. It's like to the point where you you look up an item on Amazon on you're thinking about thinking about getting it. For instance, recently I looked at the blu ray of the movie Screamers, A Wonderful Fishman, which one the one from the nineties with Peter Weller or the no, that's a great film too, but though this is the Fishman movie and the Italian one, yeah, the Italian one. And I wasn't actually gonna buy, you know,

but I looked it up. I was curious to see if the blue, if the blue ray was available, And then it seems like every day for the following week, when I first went onto Facebook, i'd be hit with that Amazon targeted ad for that very blu ray disc. Now that's the easy part. You've already looked that up. They've sold that data to somebody else, or they're using that data to run targeted ads for you on another platform.

That's pretty straightforward. It gets creepier though, what about what about when they show you ads for things that you've never looked up as far as you can recall, but they really are in your wheelhouse. Yeah, yeah, I'm into that, Like it's another Fishman movie that I'm not familiar with, and or it's a Fishman comic, or it's a an All Gillman, you know, doom that band, and I'm like, oh, I had no idea, but that sounds like the kind

of thing would be into, right. So this is another reason the providers of these technology platforms want your attention. It's because the data is valuable to them directly. The more you use the platform, the more attention you give them, the more data about you you give them, and the more they can target you in the future, the more they learn about how to glazer in on exactly what you'll click on and buy. So it's also it's valuable

for that reason. It's also valuable as the data is valuable as a commodity that can be sold to third parties that want to know things about you in order to target sales or advertising. And actually, I'd put in a third motivation for capturing more attention, and Robert, I wonder what you think about this. This doesn't get cited as much, but I would argue a third major motivation for commanding your attention on a platform is habit formation.

What do we usually reflexively do with our attention when we've got free time. We do what we've done before, right,

that's right. We fall into the hal bit of going on Facebook, or for me, one of the worst is just going into my my email, not to actually read meaningful emails, but to clear out garbage, to clear out not even necessarily spam, but the sort of promotional emails that I think you signed up for, that I signed up for, that I'm for some reason, I'm still like, I don't want to actually unsubscribe, but I'm also not

going to read them, but they just keep coming. I'm just sort of maintaining this weed garden of of crap, and it's taking away from my day. And that's a habit you formed. We are creatures of habit. We mostly do what we've trained ourselves to do in the past. Most of our behaviors are not novel. Most of the time, we tend to shop at the stores we've shopped at before. Most of the time, we go to the restaurants we've gone to before, and we do the same thing in

our digital spaces. Every time you make a decision about what to do with your attention, you are training your brain to make similar decisions or the same decision in the future, which is kind of a daunting thought, isn't it. I think that's absolutely true. But you need to think about the fact that every time you act, even in trivial activities throughout the day, you are altering the source code of your own brain to encourage your future self

to behave more like your behaving right now. And of course all this is even more nefarious when you realize that not everyone is selling a product. A lot of people are selling an idea or a or or or some sort of vision of reality, a political ideal, a social ideal. They are attempting to tell you how to feel and how to think. But that all depends, of course,

on continued access to that consumer of information. Right. So, if you are a platform like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, any of that, and you want people's attention, it's it's important to help people form patterns of habit in which they learn to give that attention to you. They'll be more likely to keep giving it to you in the future because it's become familiar and easy and habitual. It's what they've done before, so it's what they'll do again now. I want to come back and say that we want

to be clear. I think that not every bid for your attention is bad or evil. Right. There are lots of things we do with our attention that we consider good uses of our attention. And there's lots of for example, ads supported media that obviously we think is worthwhile and worth having. I mean, I listen to podcasts that run ads in order to pay the bills and keep producing the podcast. I'm fine with that if I care about the podcast and want to make that decision deliberately with

my time, right Yeah. There's nothing evil about that, right, I Mean, that's just we've recognized that's part of the economics of how the content we like and care about

is produced. What becomes more nefarious is when we find ourselves using technological services and consuming content compulsively or impulsively reflexively without really making a decision about something we want to consume or that we care about, right yeah, Yeah, where it's just this click click, click, it's just this uh, it's it's not even becomes a situation where you're not even really absorbing information. You're just dipping into the information

stream exactly. Yeah, you are becoming a passive receiver of what is being fed to you by a platform that you have habitually formed an information consumption relationship with. You're on Facebook, and it's just streaming into you. Yeah, and and there's so there's this like informational context to it, but also there's there's a tactile context to it as well. You know, the swipe of fingers over the over the screen, and then the the acknowledgement that you have clicked something,

you've checked something off of this list. In a way, I think we should take a quick break and pay the bills with some advertising, and then we should come back and look at some actual data on the way people use their attention on digital devices and how they feel about that. Thank alright, we're back now. You might have seen this idea of like the distractions and the attention war come up in the in the news over the past year or two with respect to technology, apps

and social media. And one reason you might have seen something about this is that words been spreading about a particular movement and nonprofit organization called Time Well Spent, which was founded by a guy I mentioned earlier, a former Google employee named Tristan Harris, and a number of other people.

And these people were not the first to point out that the media are controlling the economy of our attention in negative ways, but having worked in the modern tech sector, I think they've got a more specific message about the way, for example, your phone and the apps on it are not just sub optimal, but possibly really driving your life and the culture in general into an extremely unhealthy space that runs contrary to our goals and what we want

our lives to be. And so they've been doing a lot of media interviews recently in the past year so and so I think maybe we should take a look at some at some time well spent information and data. That sounds good job. This sounds like time well spent alright, So how good are we really at spending our attention in ways that make us happy and give us a sense of fulfillment. Maybe you're out there listening and you're like, now,

I don't buy it. I use my attention exactly how I want, you know, when I use Facebook, it's just it's because I want to do that. I'm living my own life. Yeah, or you know, or you you sort of qualify the kind of content. Well, I use it to keep in touch with my friends. My real friends are my real family, and it's about maintaining that social network. And there's some truth to an argument like that. Oh sure, yeah,

we don't want to totally demonize any particular app. I mean, we've been saying a lot of negative stuff about Facebook and related apps, but there's no reason to totally demonize an app to its core. But we should be aware of what its capabilities are and how we're interacting with it on average. So there's an iOS app called Moment, which is a device usage tracker, and what it does is it logs how much time you spend using your iPhone or your iPad and which apps you spend the

most of your time on. And so the Moment app has partnered with time Well Spent what I just spent before and the associated UH nonprofit, the Center for Humane Technology to gather data about how much time people spend on various apps and how they feel about spending their time that way. So to be clear, this is something

where the user can see how they're spending their time on. Right, So the app says, hey, did you know you spent x a number of minutes on this app and this many times a day, and what it shows you your usage. I like this idea because it reminds me of how with a lot of the modern video games we have, they'll tell you how many hours you've sunk into the game,

but you spent twenty seven days playing. Yeah. It's it's generally horrifying to read because because it's the sobering moment where you're like, oh my god, I spent that much time playing this video game or any video game or anything that isn't uh, you know of of of really intrinsic value in my life. Yeah. So, there was an initial study conducted in a pool of two hundred thousand iPhone users on this this moment uh and time well

spent partnership. And when you look at the results, there is an immediately apparent and overwhelming correlation between apps that we spend more time with and a feeling of unhappiness with spending our time in the apps. Now, you might be able to explain this correlation in a number of different ways. We'll get to that after we discuss the data,

but first let's just look at the results. Apps like Facebook, Snapchat, and tweet bought people tended to spend roughly an hour or more in each day, and the majority of users reported that they were unhappy having spent the time in

the app. For example, Facebook, the average daily Facebook use was fifty nine minutes, and sixty cent of users, or about two thirds, reported that they were unhappy that they had spent the time that that amount of time in the Facebook app, and the apps that made people the most unhappy seemed to be things like social media, dating apps,

and games like candy Crush. Meanwhile, let's look at the opposite end of the spectrum, which apps did people claim to be the most happy with the time they spent using. The list is more diverse here. It's more populated by things like books and podcasts. It makes me feel good about podcast space, but books and podcasts, music, weather apps,

navigation apps, fitness, meditation, and calmness. So the general trend here is that I think these are things related to intellectual stimulation like books and podcasts, uh and even like music. Personal improvement like you know, wellness, and all that, and functional utility tools that are useful in your life, like navigation or weather right or the flashlight app. Let's not

forget that at all the ding dang time. I'm sure people are very very happy with their use of the flashlight app, and yet people reported spending much less time engaging directly with these apps that made them happy. For example, people were happy with the time they spent with Audible the audio books app, but they only spent an average of about eight minutes a day with it, which is a lot less than people spent in Facebook and Candy Crush, especially given how long some of the audio books. Are

you planning to finish that thing anytime? Saying I don't know, People spent a lot less time, but they felt good about the time they spent. They were happy about the time they spent with podcasts, but spent only an average of about eight minutes a day there as well. Again, so these episodes seen to be about an hour long, the two coming out a week, You gotta you gotta

crack the quip a little bit more. Well, you gotta think about these are averages of courses, So you know, maybe people listen to one podcast a week I'm just thinking of Joe and Jane average out there. Now. I wonder if I don't know exactly what the methodology here is, So I wonder if this could be an artifact of how moment tracks app usage. Like if an app runs in the background without being the first app open on

the screen, I don't know how that gets tracked. Does that get Does that get tracked the same way a screen oriented app like a game or Facebook would. I'm not quite sure, but I want to think. I think we should think about explanations for this. So why is it that the apps we spend the most time with make us the most unhappy? It could be that the same apps that command the most of our attention just coincidentally also happened to be the ones that leave us

feeling regretful about spending our time with them. Well, you know one thing that instantly pops out at me too is these examples of positive experience apps. They are not as focused on the machine itself. You know, like when I'm listening to music, I am potentially doing something else. I'm not staring at my phone and looking at Spotify, you know, I'm doing I'm engaging in some of their activity.

But people were very happy with their books apps, and so like, if you're reading your kindle app or something, people that made people happy. But where are you when you read a book? You're not really in the phone, in the imagination in your mind. Yeah. And then likewise with some of these mindfulness apps, whereas what are you doing when you're looking at Facebook? You are kind of in the default mode network of worries about your own

social situation past in future, you're in the Facebook space. Yeah. So another explanation could be a more direct correlation, right. It could be the fact that we spend so much time with an app is what makes us regretful about using it, Right, Like, would we be happier with our Facebook usage if we only spent ten minutes a day on it? Would we be sad about our Audible or Kindle usage if we spent an hour or more a

day on that? I feel like there might be a yes to the first question, but a node to the second one, right, Like there, I can't be sure, but somehow I doubt that we would be sad using Audible for an hour a day because I don't know when I listened to audiobooks for a long stretch of time while I'm doing yardwork or cooking or something. I feel very happy about that. Yeah, it doesn't feel like a slur to say, to say, oh, man, Joe is an audible theme. It's an audible freak. Joe, get out that audible,

you know. But if we if we inserted a Facebook or Twitter in instead of instead of an audio book program, it would be a different connotation entirely. Now I should say I just realized we've run audible ads on the show before. They're not paying us to talk about any of this. This is just what the results were. But I can honestly say I do enjoy books and podcasts related apps much more than social media apps. But then again,

I don't know. Like, so imagine that the average Facebook usage was only ten minutes a day, and it's still the same kind of usage. It's not like having a specific interaction with somebody or looking up an event page or something. But just ten minutes a day scrolling through the algorithmically generated news feed. Would people be happy about that? I don't know. It's hard to say. I don't know.

It doesn't doesn't sound that happy. Yeah, I want to look at a second set of results compiled through the Moment app with Time Well Spent. This was just a separately compiled page I found uh In this separately compiled set of results, the top apps that people were happy to have spent time with were in similar categories. There are things like, uh, you know, books and meditation and wellness and learning and music. And the average amount of time people spent per day on these top happiness apps

was around seven minutes. Another way of measuring the usage is that they noted how many times a day did you pick up the app for these apps? The answer was generally about one to three times a day. The top apps that people were unhappy to have spent time with were generally social media apps and games, and these apps people spent closer to around forty five minutes to an hour a day on less time on the dating

apps than the other social media and games. So for the purpose of this conversation, I think we can assume that these results are more or less correct. They certainly ring true to me, though I haven't found an in depth description of the methodology by which they were arrived at, but these organizations seem trustworthy to me. I think these are probably basically correct findings. But assuming this is roughly correct, why are we living the technological part of our lives

this way? Why do we spend the most time using our technology in ways that end up making us the least happy. That's kind of the the ultimate uh, like kicking the pants at the end of a day, right where you if you look back and you think, oh, I spent I spend a fair amount of time doing things that brought me no joy? Why didn't I use that time? Why didn't I scroll that time away for the things that I need to do and or really

want to do? Exactly? Nobody's forcing you to scroll your Facebook timeline over and over, your your news feed or Twitter or Reddit or any of these other things. Nobody's forcing you to just spend your time running through this infinite stream of content. And yet you do it. You keep doing it, you keep going back to it sometimes

during the things that we want to do. Have you ever had this experience where you're you're watching a movie yeah, or a movie you're interested in yeah, and then for some reason, like I mean, on one hand, I kind of get into it this way, like I'll I convinced myself it's certainly okay, to go to IMDb and look up people in the movie. So who's who's that? Who's that actor? All right, I'll look him up, and I mean, that's all right. But then it goes beyond that, because

then I'm just on a reflex. I'm pulling open my my work email account or my personal email account, or I'm even worse, I'm clicking on social media or or or Reuter's or something instead of just focusing on the one distraction that I'm supposed to be into right now. Yeah, So we're detecting that there is this inherent tension. It's the same thing we talked about in the story we

used to illustrate the problem at the beginning. There is a tension between what we want to do with our lives, what we want to want, and the things we do with our technology of our own free will. Seemingly moment to moment when we have these impulsive, tempting little bits of digital candy to pull us a side and distract us and lure us in and then just keep us gobbling for you know, minutes, hours, for as long as

it can keep our eyes glued to the screen. And I think in the next episode we should focus a little bit more on how technology is doing this to us, how it's changing us, and how it works, what tools it uses in order to exploit our psychological vulnerabilities. Yeah, next next episode is going to be more of a fight the power. I'm hoping it's gonna be. We wanted to explain the problem in this one. Yeah, the next one, you're this This episode was about finding out what the

terminators are. In the next episode you'll find out about how to blow them up and you know, make your own kitchen pipe bombs to do it. Right. So, when that social media app says I need your clothes, your boots, and your motorcycle, you say no. You say no, sir, no, thank you? All right? Well, hey, in the meantime, head on over to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That's where you'll find all the podcast episodes. You'll find various blog posts as well as links out to our

social media accounts such as Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler, Instagram. We have so many of them. Uh, they drain us. Allow them to drain you as well. Well. I'd say if you go use them, try to be deliberate about that time. Don't get sucked into whatever. Look for what you're looking for. Get that thing you're looking for, don't let it pull

you into passive consumption. But if you want to be really deliberate about getting in contact with us, of course you can do that through email the old fashioned way. Oh and of course I want to give a big shout out, as always to our excellent audio producers Alex Williams and Tarry Harrison. But that email address if you want to write us a note let us know what you think about this episode or any other, to request a topic for the future. That address is blow the

mind at how stuff works dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics. It how stuff works dot Com about a lot of people, the people the biggest fourth start