Flattening of attention landscape

Somewhat analogous to the flattening of the physical landscape, the flattening of the attention landscape is a term I use to describe how all activities now are on equal grounds with one another to compete for your attention. As an example, because of the advent of phones, the time you spend reading books could also be spent watching pornography, meaning that they are both competing for your finite attention, except that the latter is far, far more addictive, and also far more destructive to your life.
Things weren't always this way, because although pornography is not a recent invention, the difficulty of acquiring it means that in practice, it wasn't directly competing with books. There were other factors than mere inconvenience of acquisition of course, such as stricter social taboos, real-life relationships being more common such that pornography didn't feel as appealing, and a significantly less appealing form of pornography by virtue of it being made of static images.
All of these restrictions create friction in how one can use their time and attention, and the set of all frictions amount to what I would label as a “landscape”, albeit a far more abstract usage of that word. A mountainous attention landscape is one where traveling to certain spots, i.e. engaging in certain things, involves more friction, such as how acquiring porn magazines requires more effort than simply typing a URL on your phone. A flat attention landscape on the other hand is one which is much smoother, meaning it is easier to travel between activities, as is made by digital media, to the point that it can become too easy, resulting in people having incredibly short attention spans since they're constantly switching between things to pay attention to.
Some other consequences of the lower friction in the attention landscape are:

• The appeal to the lowest common denominator, both in terms of intelligence and attention span. Short clips, oversimplified issues, tribal narratives of in-group vs out-group, crude dichotomies, all of those get reinforced because most people simply can't be bothered to pay attention or think.
• The escalation of crude emotional influence, where I use “crude” here as the opposite of subtle. The way in which everything needs to be amped up to grab people's attention, since now something cannot merely be pleasant or interesting, it has to be the most intense thing you have ever witnessed, whether in terms of joy, excitement, or sadness. This is what Darren Allen calls 'pornography' in a broad sense, whereas art stills, pornography moves you, which is to say it promotes an unconscious and reactive mode of being. ¹⁰
• The escalation of importance, especially in academics, i.e. our field and our problems are the most important and this is why you should pay attention and we should receive more funding.
Before the flattening, there were more constraints to what you could be paying attention, which meant that people would simply focus on the same thing for longer periods of time. This isn't to say that TV was necessarily better than what we had, but at least people genuinely watched what was in front of them. Now the trend goes towards flicking between different sources of excitement several times in a single minute. As such, I have found it useful to reintroduce friction back in my life, by for instance:

• Getting rid of my smartphone and only using a "dumphone" ¹¹
• Installing browser addons on my computer, such as Leechblock to add a delay when going on certain sites, or outright blocking them, and Minimal Twitter and Unhook to restrict certain features of Twitter and Youtube respectively
I could probably go much further than this, because honestly I could probably spend my time in significantly healthier ways, but I wouldn't underestimate the impact of making small changes in that way. It's amazing how quickly someone's priorities shift when they add a few seconds of friction to doing things they know they shouldn't.

Footnotes

⁶ To see a fantastic elaboration of this point, and why our culture might be so obsessed with the Hero's journey, see also River Kenna's essay on how the Hero's journey is a jammed door.

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2024-10-27