Unit 1 Takeaways: How To Counter Engineered Attention
Commoditized attention engineering in digital spaces frames an ethical discussion of value exchange, how the limits of our language influence our diverse cultural realities, and brings into question the degrees of agency we believe we have in our use of technology.
Dr. Shanen Boettcher describes humans as a data hungry species, but we're also generous in our permissions for others to harvest information from us. In that generosity we often lack the language or curiosity to understand the agreements being brokered. Bombaerts accurately describes the tech industry's business model as thriving on human attention as a commoditized resource. But this resource is also highly renewable, and the tactics employed to engineer deeper engagement strongly predicated on reducing a user's agency. We may feel as if we are choosing the next video to watch of our own free will, but often our attention is being engineered toward more extreme outcomes. As Zeynep Tufecki accurately describes, "you can never be hardcore enough for YouTube." (Tufecki, 2017). We often lack the capacity to understand these frames of reference being placed around us. As Dr. Boettcher concludes, the healthiest organizations motivate the space for individuals to raise concerns and have discussions. At scale we need to improve our awareness of how information is presented to us, and to what extent it contains bias. As citizens, we have a social responsibility to ourselves and others to be curious and informed about the digital world and what it surfaces, but this can often feel contrary to the engineering of our attention for commercial benefit.
Tufecki, Z. (2017). We're building a dystopia just to make people click on ads. TED.com. [Digital Video File]. Retrieved from https://www.ted.com/talks/zeynep_tufekci_we_re_building_a_dystopia_just_to_make_people_click_on_ads?language=en#t-35326
