Opinion Sur
A little more than a century ago, to sell World War I in the United States, publicist George Creel created a squad of thousands of “four-minute men” after calculating that the average consumer’s attention span was not sustained for more than four minutes.
Since then, the consumption of information through new media such as radio, cinema, and television has been creating, through advertising and propaganda, what we could call (without linking it to the medical condition defined with the same terminology) individuals with attention deficit. In 2015, a study based on electroencephalograms (EEGs) by Microsoft Corp. concluded that people continue to lose their ability to concentrate. For that year, the time achieved was eight seconds. In 2000, the average sustained attention span for an average consumer was 12 seconds. According to scientists’ calculations, the same power in a goldfish reaches nine seconds, one second longer than the average social media consumer.
Now, “attention span” and “captivity” are two different things. Different, but complementary. Hyper-fractional attention is more susceptible to digital captivity because it requires immediate gratification. It is the world of video games. A player becomes addicted when he needs one reward atom after another. An attention span that is capable of immersing itself in a two-hundred-page book has a more holistic goal of understanding a problem or situation. Hyper-fragmented attention is an endless succession with no destination. In fact, the players’ fits of rage when they lose a game are probably due more to the interruption of the immediate-reward-stimulus process than to the defeat itself, since this is a virtual defeat, i.e., it is nothing. Nothing else is the memes, the micro TikTok videos, or the endless compilations of fragmented situations where you cannot even see the end or the resolution of the situation and much less have a second of reflection or digestion of what happened in the previous fragment before being exposed with the new micro situation that, naturally, has zero relation to the previous one.
None of this is part of nature, sunspots, or quantum physics. The laboratories of social networks such as Twitter have engineer-psychologists who dedicate all their time to imagine and implement ways to keep their consumers captive, and that this captivity is longer and longer, that is, exactly the opposite of the capacity for concentration of the consumer victim.
Aza Raskin, a former employee of Mozilla and Jawbone, summed it up graphically: “It’s like they’re spraying cocaine all over the net to get users to come back again and again for the same drug […] Behind every phone screen, there are 1,000 engineers working to make the use of a platform as addictive as possible.”
According to Sandy Parakilas, a former Facebook employee, “social media is very similar to a slot machine […] There was definitely an awareness that the product was habit-forming and addictive.” When she tried to stop using the platform herself, she felt like she was struggling with tobacco addiction. Naturally, Facebook’s version (like tobacco companies’ excuses in the past for denying or downplaying lung cancer deaths) consisted of another cliché that, like all of them, has a piece of truth that is used as a smokescreen: its products were designed “to bring people closer to their friends, to their families, and to the things that matter to each of them.” Leah Pearlman, one of the inventors of the Facebook Like button, years later acknowledged that she had become hooked on Facebook because she had begun to base her sense of self-worth on the number of “likes” she got with each interaction.
For his part, Sean Parker, Facebook’s founding chairman, said that social media “changes an individual’s relationship with society” and interferes with productivity in strange ways. “Only God knows what he’s doing to our children’s brains,” he added at a seminar on the subject in Philadelphia. It is no coincidence that the gods of Silicon Valley send their children to schools with almost no technology, apart from chalk boards. Bill Gates himself did not allow his children to have a cell phone until they were 14. Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, also acknowledged that he imposes the same limits on his nephew. “There are some things I won’t allow. I don’t want them on a social network.”
But social media is a part of a larger, earlier reality: the ideology of profit-over-all. The children below belong to another human species. They are products. They are consumers. Like the slaves of the nineteenth century, like fighting bulls, they do not feel pain or have civilized feelings. McDonald’s, for example, educates children from the moment they leave their mother’s breasts with the indoctrination of “The Happy Meal”, more demagogic than any politician and as indoctrinating as any religion. None of these indoctrinations are called “child abuse,” even if the victims are children as young as five or ten. According to the director of Fox Family Channel, until 2001 one of the subsidiaries of the Freedom Channel and part of the media conglomerate of the giant Disney, “increasingly, companies are realizing that if they develop a loyalty in today’s children, they will be tomorrow’s adults.” One marketer had already observed: “If you have children, I can assure you that when you come home you will ask them what they want to eat, or what they would like you to buy them. Parents don’t want to buy anything their kids don’t like. They don’t want to hear them complaining. It’s not an efficient thing to do.” By that time (1997), children between the ages of four and ten were responsible for a $24 billion ($43 billion at 2022 value), i.e. three times larger than a decade earlier.
In 2016, candidate Donald Trump did not win the presidential election in the United States because the press had spoken well of him, but because he was talked about a lot. Most of the mainstream media, from the New York Times to CNN, never tired of publishing news, analysis, and reports on the limitless material for outrage provided by the most ridiculous candidate in history, after James Polk in 1844. The themes went to the heart of the base instincts, typical of the social networks that the candidate used until he was half-asleep during the late hours of the night: racism, sexism, tribalism, xenophobia and all kinds of toxic and negative topics, constituent elements of our deepest ancestral reflexes.
His opponent, Hillary Clinton, received more favorable coverage from the mainstream press and even her campaign invested more money ($768 million) than her rival ($398 million). However, as the media data analytics firm MediaQuant showed, from July 2015 to October 2016 Donald Trump’s presidential campaign received $5.9 billion in free media attention, while Clinton received just $2.8 billion.
Selected section from a larger article published by NODAL on November 17, 2023
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