The battle for our children's attention

On Monday, I found myself standing at a bus stop in the centre of Belfast. The bus service was particularly slow. I’d been standing for ten minutes. A group of teenagers stood near me, also waiting for the bus. But they were not watching for it. Nor were they looking around or talking to each other. Instead, their heads were down, their attention captured by a flickering rectangle in their hand.

As I watched them, I could start to feel the compulsion to reach for my phone too. I’d just forced it into a pocket a minute ago …

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I know I’m not the first to write about the smartphone’s capture of our attention, but I do want to think about the challenge of how we raise our children in a world where distraction has never been easier.

We live in the so-called Attention Economy. Since the rise of the internet, our eyeballs have become a valuable commodity. The more attention a platform can capture, the more money it makes, usually from advertisers who want to reach a captive audience.

The challenge for tech companies and advertisers is that our attention is, in fact, extremely limited. Researchers estimate that the brain can only hold about four things in its working memory at any given time. Try listening to two conversations at once! Our time is also limited. There are only so many things a person can pay attention to in a day.

The limits of our attention combined with the rewards for capturing it has resulted in intense competition. Ambitious tech companies have had to work really hard at figuring out how to get us hooked on their platform. And over the past decade, I’d say they have pretty much cracked the code.

How attention is captured

In his book ‘Hooked’, author and investor Nir Eyal explains how tech companies build habits by attaching their services to our daily routines and emotions. He points to four steps involved in hooking attention and keeping us engaged online:

1. Trigger – these can be (1) external triggers like notifications, push alerts or recommendations from other social media users, or (2) internal triggers: like boredom, curiosity or the need for validation.

2. Action – This is what users do in hope of getting a reward, like scrolling through a feed, liking a post, commenting, sharing, or creating content. The platforms have made all of these actions low-friction (e.g. double-tap to like a post and auto-fill text).

3. Variable Reward – Content is delivered in an unpredictable way so that users never know what will appear next. Social rewards (e.g. likes, comments and new followers) also occur unpredictably. All of this keeps us hooked.

4. Investment: The more time, effort or personal data that users put into the platform, the more invested we are. We feel they have an audience to nurture or a personal narrative to keep going.

Who is in control?

With this level of intentionality being invested the design of social media and tech products, the unintentional user has no chance!

I think that is really significant in relation to young people. Tech is training them to live on auto-pilot, to mindlessly engage with online platforms, letting notifications, trends and recommendations direct their next action. When young internet users are not living with any sense of purpose or agency, their attention will be captured in no time, and their whole experience of life will be orientated around that six inch rectangle in their hands, or some other captivating device.

How to take back control of our attention

I’m glad Nir Eyal has written not just about hooking attention but about how to take control of our attention. In the introduction to his second book ‘Indistractable’, he writes this:

The ability to focus is a critical skill we all need to learn in the Attention Economy. We need to teach our children how to choose where to direct their attention and how to guard their attention.

The key to focus, however, is more than fixing the phone. Phones have only made distraction easier, but the real reason we can’t stop scrolling is a human one. “Distraction starts from within”, says Nir Eyal.

I’d actually describe it as a spiritual problem.

When we lack inner peace, we will recoil from silence and want to escape from reality of our own worries, stresses and bad experiences.

When we lack inner purpose, we will lack both the discipline to say no to short-term gratification and the drive to focus on tasks of long-term value.

Eyal agrees on this point about purpose: “You can’t call something a distraction unless you know what it is distracting you from.”

I think this something worth thinking about with the young people we are walking beside. There are so many good questions we can ask to help them find their ‘why’, like:

• what work am you fitted for?

• what kinds of friendships would you love to build?

• what kind of person do you want to become?

• what do you want to learn in the next year?

• where would you like to be in six months? In five years?

The more we can help the next generation become young men and women of forethought and purpose, the more they will be able to resist the siren call of the smartphone and instead channel their focus to people and tasks worthy of their precious attention. And with more careful focus will come a richer experience of life.

The same applies to us.

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Thanks for reading.

I’d love to hear what you think about any of this.

Stephen

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