Conversational and literature intersections as of late: the Attention Economy, and how and why social media algorithms are structured to attract and absorb as much attention as possible. Attention has long since been digitally commodified, or turned into a raw material resource. A person could really think back to when this all started. And like any thread in history, it’s just one thing after another. Does it start with MySpace, the flashpan social media platform overtaken by Facebook? Or does it start with the rise of the public internet, the routers that plugged into land line phones, where one would announce — using an outside voice — throughout the household, “I AM GETTING ON THE INTERNET! PLEASE STAY OFF THE PHONE!”

Back to the Attention Economy: Jonathan Haidt has touched a book selling nerve in this capacity with his The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness (Penguin Press, 2024). A good read that, like all works, should also be critically evaluated (promoters on the back of the book refer to Jon as a “prophet” — prophets can be great because you can just follow them without thinking anymore). Haidt has either been able to motivate or has been motivated by public policy (North Dakota’s example here) where states have been legislating a required detachment from smartphones when the school bell rings in the morning to when it rings in the late afternoon. I’ve also been revisiting Michaeleen Doucleff, Hunt, Gather, Parent: What Ancient Cultures Can Teach Us About the Lost Art of Raising Happy, Helpful Little Humans (Avid Reader Press/Simon and Schuster, 2021).

I kind of wish I could find the bibliography I put together for Bill Caraher in like 2012 or 2013, for a Digital History graduate seminar he invited me to co-lead. Building that bibliography of peer-reviewed monographs was another important butte/mesa I was able to summit, as it gave a window into the digital architects who were on the backend of the rising social media platforms. The digital architects were considering and figuring out ways to capture more and more of the raw Iron (Attention) Ore (hereafter Attention Ore) of each individual desk- and lap- top and, increasingly, smart phone user.

And it turns out in the Attention Ore mining economy, the social media algorithms feed rage. Because when someone is enraged, they tend to pay laser focused attention on what is enraging them (or what the perceived source of rage is). In an evolutionary anthropology sense, we know rage and anger is what evolved us out of being able to momentarily escape the saber tooth tiger. The drawback (one of several) of anger and rage is that while we laser focus on one specific attention, there is a lot of our surroundings (both in space and time) that we do not attend to. Which, I think one can see, is or can become, quickly, a large problem. So where is all this going? I think it’s moreso me thinking about the way I think about interacting with social media platforms. And whether or not to act or interact with them. Scrolling through the social medias? See an article you like? Click on it? That click is logged on the back end of your user profile. Now the algorithm is learning from you. Have audible conversations around your smart phone? Then within moments start seeing similarities of stuff scrolling by on your smart phone that was thematically similar to the audible conversation you just had? Yup. It’s all tracking. And I’m not tracking down the path of absolutes, as in giving up the social medias. Or abandoning smart phones (Besides, as Obi Won Kenobi reminds, only Sith Lords deal in absolutes). But being conscious of the digital architecture, or the digital or structural aquariums that we are all swimming through is important. It allows us to mentally maintain and gauge. An ability to better choose when we see something whether we want to become outraged. Or whether we want to maintain degrees of cerebral composure.