Vivek Kaul: The economics of attention deficit

One of the things I have often wondered is how many more books I could have read if I hadn’t spent hours scrolling reels on social media. Or how many more hours I could have slept. Or walked. Or cooked. Or talked with my friends. Or made more friends. Or just generally not done anything and let my mind rest and come up with better ideas.

Alas, as is the case with any counterfactual, an exact answer is not possible. But what I do know is that I do have what the world likes to call an attention-deficit problem.

I scroll reels the first thing after getting up in the morning. I scroll reels multiple times during the course of a day. And I scroll reels before I go to sleep at night. Sometimes, when I get up in the middle of the night, I scroll reels before trying to go back to sleep.

Honestly, I don’t know what I get from doing this, but I am hooked and can’t let go of it. Like any other addiction, this is not a good thing. Or maybe it is, given that I am writing about it.

1) First, is what we call “attention deficit” truly a lack of attention, or is it something else entirely? Are reels on social media actually disrupting our attention or holding it, for that matter? Given the total number of hours I spend every day scrolling my phone, I would like to believe it is the latter.

As Oliver Burkeman writes in Meditations for Mortals—Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts: “What makes modern digital distraction so pernicious isn’t the way it disrupts attention, but the fact that it holds it, with content algorithmically engineered to compel people for hours, thereby rendering them less available for the serendipitous and the fruitful kind of distraction.”

When one thinks about reel-scrolling from this point of view, the perspective totally changes. The problem is not a lack of attention but too much of it on one particular thing, leaving less time for other things. So, this focus, which leads to a lack of what the world likes to call focus, isn’t a good one.

2) Second, sometimes too much reel-scrolling manifests into an imposter syndrome. When I see people speaking very confidently about investing, stocks, money, personal finance, politics, foreign policy, wars, relationships, their lived lives, cooking, travelling, trekking, buying things on the internet, the relationship they share with their parents, which credit card to use, how to get into an airport lounge for free, how to travel first class in an airline at a cheaper price, the seven best places to visit in Greater London, the best forex cards, the best ramyen served in Mumbai, or for that matter the best vada pav, the songs Hindi cinema has copied from Pakistan and vice versa, and many more, I get a feeling that I could have done much better with my life. That I barely know anything.

As Burkeman writes: “For some it manifests as imposter syndrome, the belief that there’s a basic level of expertise that pretty much everyone else has attained, but that you haven’t, and that you won’t be able to stop second guessing yourself until you get there.”

Usually, this feeling of being an imposter strikes late in the night, just before I am about to go to sleep. Like smoking cigarettes, reel scrolling is also injurious to health.

3) Third, the business of reels, videos and other social media posts goes totally against the economics of business as it has existed and been carried out over the last couple of centuries. Typically, firms hire employees who make a product or offer a service, which the firm can then sell to customers and hope to make a profit by ensuring that its expenditure is lower than its revenue. Or they hire other firms to make a part of the product or the product they want to sell. Or they franchise the service they want to offer, and so on. That’s how business models work.

But social media companies do not operate like that. They have disrupted the conventional business model. As Kevin Kelly writes in The Inevitable—Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future: “What we failed to see was how much of this brave new online world would be manufactured by users, not big institutions. The entirety of content offered by Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and Twitter is not created by their staff, but by their audience.”

And this went totally against what was believed to be true before social media exploded, thanks to cheap smartphones and cheap internet. As Kelly writes: “No web phenomenon has been more confounding than the infinite rabbit hole of YouTube and Facebook videos. Everything media experts knew about audiences—and they knew a lot—promoted the belief that audiences would never get off their butts and start making their own entertainment.”

Or as John Kay writes in The Corporation in the Twenty-First Century: Why (almost) everything we are told about business is wrong: “The customers of Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are also these companies’ suppliers. And much the same is true of eBay and Google. The digital age has created a new type of corporation. The disastrous merger of AOL and Time Warner was rationalised by the misconception that the platform needed to own the content.”

But that truth was disrupted, with corporations no longer producing the content from which they make money. User-generated content is now being produced at an enormous scale. And the funny thing is that not much money is being made by those producing this content.

Other than a few top influencers, most people make very little money from producing social media content. Many of those who do would be better employed in other areas and make more money there. The opportunity cost for them to continue producing content for social media is huge, but they are still happy doing it.

So, why are people producing as much content as they are? Kelly believes that it’s the nutrition of participation that makes ordinary folks invest a huge amount of time and energy into producing content, be it free encyclopedias, free tutorials, or reels and videos.

But there is a little more to this. For the younger generation, people in their teens and twenties right now, influencers are role models, and they want to ape their role models and make the kind of content that their role models are. And if not, then at least make their own kind of content and hope it goes viral in the process. Imitation is always a very strong economic force, and that seems to be working in this case as well. The explosion in standup comedy on social media is an excellent example of this phenomenon.

4) Fourth, where does this leave people like me who are victims of this phenomenon? The disruption of attention or too much focus on scrolling reels, videos, or even posts comes at a cost. Even all the notifications that keep popping up on our smartphones tend to distract us.

As Rolf Dobelli writes in Stop Reading the News–A Manifesto For a Happier, Calmer and Wiser Life: “The poverty of attention thanks to alerts, text messages, news feeds, news pop-ups and other interruptions has increased exponentially.” On top of this, there are reels and videos—ranging from news clips to trending songs to standup comedy to people generally goofing around—which have added to the struggle and keep challenging our resolve to stay focused.

So, how does one tackle something like this? I have been told you need greater willpower. You need to focus. You need to decide not to scroll reels and other social media and then stick to that decision. Now, only if it is as simple doing it as it is saying it.

Psychologist Roy Baumeister compares willpower to a muscle that tires out over time. Like a runner who loses steam after a marathon, our willpower depletes as we face more and more interruptions. This fatigue means that as notifications and social media continually disrupt us, our resistance to distraction wears thin.

If you’ve felt that time seems to be slipping away faster in recent years, this could be a possible reason. It’s not just the moments we spend checking notifications and scrolling through reels, videos and text posts, but also the time lost refocusing afterwards on what we were trying to do before we got distracted.

Dobelli notes that “refocusing alone robs you of two or three minutes each time”, which adds up considerably over a day. This is why I am not reading as many books as I used to, writing as much as I used to, watching as many TV series as I used to, meeting as many people as I used to, or talking to them for that matter. The time I spend cooking my daily meal has also gone down.

Of course, almost all the content produced for and published on social media is free. But that freedom comes at the hidden cost of the loss of our privacy. Before we use any of these social media apps, we often unknowingly sign away our data. Of course, companies do share their privacy policies in public. But as Shoshana Zuboff writes in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, in 2008 two Carnegie Mellon professors estimated that reading all the privacy policies encountered in a year would require 76 workdays. The number of days would have only gone up since then.

These apps track our behaviours and interests, ultimately learning more about us than we might realize. In this sense, we’re not the customers but the product—a realization worth pondering.