Attention is the basis of our free will, allowing us to direct our minds as we choose. Technology poses a threat to this individual agency, writes Carolyn Dicey Jennings, but may also yield new rewards. Social media harnesses our attention for incentives that aren’t our own, sublimating it into the interests of the group. We are trading our individual power for collective power, and we need to understand the risks and benefits of doing this.
Attention is the source of our power. Before every choice and action, you first organize your world through attention—your priorities push some things closer to the center, other things to the sidelines. The center then shapes your thoughts, choices, and behaviors. Without this ability we would not have agency or autonomy—we wouldn't be selves. But we are more than selves. Our priorities and projects are bound up with others, whose interests shift our own. Our evolutionary history adds more pushing and pulling to this mix, sometimes against our values. All of these influences are woven into a single landscape, controlling our thoughts and actions.
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The question is: where does our power go, and will it be used to our benefit?
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Recent technologies change this landscape by favoring what is predictable—our biological propensities and social instincts—and diminishing our role as individuals. The question is: where does our power go, and will it be used to our benefit? The collective power enabled by these technologies comes with new risks and rewards, and it is worth considering how we can best leverage it.
Each of us is born into a world of influences, biological and social. Philosophers and scientists have argued for thousands of years about whether we have any independence from these influences—whether we are “free” to set our own path. While this idea is intuitive, a coherent, scientifically sound explanation of free agency is an ongoing challenge. Many famous philosophers and scientists have argued that it is impossible, seeing room only for a reductive and deterministic worldview.
Enter attention. Attention is how biological, limited creatures like ourselves favor some stimuli and responses over others. Decades ago, philosophers introduced the idea that our freedom comes from self-regulation, but left it unclear how to square this with the reductive and deterministic worldview without losing the true sense of “freedom.” I have used research on attention from psychology and neuroscience to demonstrate the possibility of a deeper form of freedom.
The idea is this: your interests are initially provided to you by evolution and early upbringing (“bottom-up” influences), but you can start to control those interests through attention (“top-down”). Namely, when your interests are in conflict, you can, with effort, redistribute resources and “press the scales” to favor one interest a bit more. Your ability to do so is a non-reductive power that is not solely determined by your neurons or genes. Thus, through attention you can direct and shape your own mind, the basis of free agency.
This power of attention has its detractors, but nearly everyone agrees that attention is a foundational capacity that is closely related to intelligence, consciousness, and agency. Recent advances in artificial intelligence are based on the “attention mechanism”—an application of some aspects of the human model of attention to machine learning—and future advances will arguably depend on whether we can get closer to the human model (by, for example, adding sensitivity to the current task and the surrounding context, which some have already tried to implement). And nearly everyone agrees that recent digital technologies threaten our powers of attention, leading to significant public concern.
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Some of these concerns are valid. Recent digital technologies shape attention in at least three ways. First, they increase multitasking. Multitasking is generally less effective and less efficient than completing one task at a time. We think we are being efficient using the downtime of one task to complete another, not realizing that effective action requires rest, the second task will spill over, and that we drain our cognitive resources by switching attention back and forth. Multitasking erodes our power, both in the moment and (likely) long term.
Second, social media undermines our self-esteem and increases our insecurities, which make us less effective agents. The lack of simultaneity in our social interactions online allows for less intuitive, more curated responses which can lead to greater self-awareness and self-doubt. It also invites comparison to others, which for an increased pool means more chances of being outshone. The resultant lowered self-esteem can lead to a greater need for validation from others, increasing our time on social media and leading to a vicious cycle in which we are increasingly driven by insecurity rather than our current goals and interests.
Finally, the very structure of recent digital technologies influences our attention. Our attention is naturally balanced between “top-down” and “bottom-up” forces, between our goals and interests and what already stands out to us in our environment. We can shift that balance. When a goal is particularly important to us we might ignore even the most distracting of distractors. When we are relaxed or looking for inspiration we might favor going with the flow and following our nose. Recent digital technologies push us to be the kinds of people who follow rather than lead. They are more adaptive than any previous technology and deliver content at a much greater scale. This tricks us into thinking they are more important than other projects, that we should set aside our own goals and interests (with especially significant impact on the young and those with ADHD).
The most effective of these technologies are those that have a social component. Fairly universal in recent digital technologies is the use of intermittent variable rewards, which are known to be addictive. When we cannot predict how often or how much a reward will be, we feel compelled to seek it out more frequently. Social interaction is naturally structured this way, as it is difficult to predict when people will respond and to what degree, which may have some benefits. While most companies increase this effect (to increase “engagement”), its foundation is a natural one. This leads me to wonder if in using these technologies we are trading our individual power for social power.
One way we might trade individual for social power is by relegating our individual interests to those of the group in order to be a more central member of the group and thereby have greater influence. We have all seen this in social media, leading to a greater emphasis on authenticity and the embrace of “cringe.” A more interesting way we might trade individual for social power is that we might sacrifice ourselves and our projects for the “greater good,” without promise of greater centrality. We might be building up a social realm with its own power by sacrificing our own. In this case, it would be less clear whether the impact of recent digital technologies on attention is a cause for concern—it depends on how much we value the individual, how much the social.
One reason I find this possibility compelling is the scale and structure of our interactions on social media, which have begun to approximate those of a human brain. While in person interactions are messy and time intensive, the distilled nature of digital interaction has allowed us to be connected to far more people, much more quickly. And these interactions mirror the characteristics of self-organization that we see in the brain. What is less clear is whether there is non-reductive power in social groups online that is similar to what we see in in an individual. Can a social group direct its attention? Exert power over its own interests?
Over the past year I have begun to explore the possibility of a truly collective attention: non-reductive prioritization of a group’s interests by the group itself. Signs of this include the fact that while online activity increases polarization, individuals do not see themselves as polarized—this is just what we would expect if the group, rather than the individual, is doing the work. Social media backlash or “canceling” may also reflect this, since punishment plays a key role in social connection.
I am especially interested in cases where network structure best predicts group behavior in the case of conflicting interests. Could network structure – the web of relationships and interactions that determine information flow, exposure to diverse viewpoints, the social dynamics of influential actors, coalition-building, and public opinion – predict, for example, why a political party in Spain that is against Catalonian independence controversially supported pardoning Catalan separatists?
If collective attention is possible, we may want to redirect some of our concern about recent digital technologies: instead of focusing solely on the loss of attention and individual power, we should also explore how best to engage with a collective through, for example, social media. One might ask: Is the collective you are engaging with something that helps you or harms you, and how fickle is its support? It is not generally a good idea to give up personal power for the sake of a group that is insensitive to your interests—a lack of social support can damage your health and lead to burnout. In fact, communities with lower quality of life are just the ones that tend to have higher rates of internet use disorder. Is the collective you are engaging with single-minded and brittle or diverse and flexible? Those who leave groups that are rigidly centered on a few principles or personalities commonly report psychological problems, whereas those in diverse social networks with at least some reciprocity have better health outcomes.
Going forward, I would like to see us extend work on attention and how it is lost to explore who or what gains from this loss. Some blame commercial interests, and lament their greater power over us, our reduced ability to fight back. But we may also have a new power, a shared power, if we could just harness it. We are not automatons, subject only to the will of all powerful companies. We seek out their products, devoting our precious time to engage with them. It may be that we do this with good reason, and just need to better understand how to shape our use of them around our individual and collective values.
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