Paper by Elettra Bietti: “The ability to direct and receive attention is constitutive of human life. Humans have an inborn need for attention, and an inborn ability to direct attention for survival. Yet attention is not just a creature of an individual’s mind. It is a relationship between people and their environment. As such, our attention is shaped by the material, social and economic conditions that surround us. Today, people’s attention is increasingly extracted and colonized through technology. Attention platforms and AI technologies are transforming the shape, objects, metrics and value of human time and attention.
This article focuses on the role of data-attention platforms in transforming time and attention. Data-attention platforms include social media platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, and increasingly AI companions such as Replika or Character.AI. They capture data and attention and draw revenues from them, primarily but not exclusively through surveillance advertising. The business models of data-attention platforms are organized around the data-attention imperative, the drive to continuously capture troves of data and attention to generate value. They capture eyeballs to sell ads and collect data to target ads and maximize engagement. Time online enables more data collection, which, in turn allows for the design of products that more effectively addict users. This extractive data-attention spiral produces a harmful commodification and erosion of time and attention which shrinks the human experience and undermines collective life.
This article asks how governments should and shouldn’t regulate data-attention platform business models and the distortions they cause. It is tempting to reduce growing data-attention disorders to problems of individual choice online, delegating solutions to market-based tools, more competition or the exercise of individual data protection rights and parental controls. Instead, the answer requires moving past individual preferences and embracing an infrastructural approach focused on changing platform incentives and technological affordances and on safeguarding space for offline time. Privacy and data protection, child social media regulations and productivity tools provide for controls and safeguards that too often magnify instead of addressing attention disorders. The idea of individual autonomy that underlies them is unfit for the attention era. The article advocates a conception that takes the power of platforms to shape our attention seriously and advocates for the protection of children and adults’ time away from technology. Time away from technology is a collective good in need of protection. Based on a three-fold agenda that incorporates design changes, taxation, and legal reform to reduce time spent online as well as the speed and scale of the digital experience, the article aims to bring attention platform ecosystems in greater alignment with the interests of society without placing unrealistic expectations on individual users and parents…(More)”.
