From value to noise. The dark side of the attention economy

The actors who have the greatest incentive to operate through these bluffs are many and range from traditional media to social platforms, from corporations to investors and politicians, of course. Bluffs can exploit all three of the attention processes we talked about last week. Certain physical stimuli - colours, movement, strong images and shouted headlines - all hijack our attention automatically. But contextualisation, so-called 'framing' also has a very strong effect: presenting a choice in a certain way, emphasising only certain attributes and not others - highlighting the percentage of the discount rather than the total price - redirects attention by shaping our choices. Then there is the motivational channel. We are surrounded by systems that provide us with variable rewards. Without going as far as the extreme case of gambling, a sector that drained 157.4 billion euro from the pockets of Italians last year alone, we need only think of the likes on our social pages, which are capable of arousing states that make our attention more available to certain stimuli and thus direct us towards predictable reactions. This is why 'two phones and a sofa, it's the grave of love', as Coma_Cose rightly sing in 'cuoricini, cuoricini'.

Stirring up a political debate by means of a provocative statement not only generates visibility, but also captures the attention of the media and the public, diverting their and our attention to marginal issues and displacing it from more important ones. The informational value of these statements is usually very low, while the attention-grabbing effect is enormous. Another technique is that of 'saturation'. A lie repeated a thousand times is known to become a truth. In many cases, in fact, it is enough to repeatedly show - saturate precisely - a certain fact or data, to give it a relevance and importance that in reality is only apparent. Think of certain hammering advertising campaigns promoted by companies that have little market value. Repetition builds an impression of importance that is in no way related to the fundamental value of the company but still alters the perception of consumers.

In the field of marketing, packaging is another phenomenal tool to 'grab' our attention. As a famous study from a few years ago shows, when there is a cartoon character looking you straight in the eye in the cereal box, your attention will be captured automatically and this will make that brand stand out among the dozens of others on the shelf, increasing its sales (Tal, A., Musicus, A., & Wansink, B. 'Eyes in the aisles: Why is Cap'n Crunch looking down at my child? Environment and Behavior 47, pp. 715-733, 2015).

Then there is the social channel. Making people believe that others are thinking about something or liking a certain character makes that thing or character more 'attractive' in our eyes as well. That is why the market for paid followers is so popular with influencers and politicians. Because we tend to follow what is followed

The problem is not so much that attention is caught, this is inevitable and, in many cases, even useful: when, for example, the dashboard of our car warns us that we have exceeded the speed limit with a nice red flashing signal, that helps us change our behaviour for the better by inducing us to slow down. Serious problems arise when attention is systematically diverted from what really matters. In the financial markets, for example, attention bluffs fuel volatility and bubbles. In the public sphere, the political agenda is often dictated by scandals or marginal and transitory media events, while structural issues such as climate change or income dynamics struggle to get the attention they deserve. In terms of consumption choices, then, the persuasive design of e-commerce platforms pushes us towards impulsive purchases that generate unnecessary spending. And, more generally, this constant competition for our attention through incessant notifications and stimuli only erodes concentration, reduces productivity and fuels anxiety and stress.

Then there is an even more subtle aspect: attention bluffs generate 'externalities'. Since, as we have said, attention is a scarce resource, every time an actor manages to draw it to himself, he is simultaneously drawing it away from something else. A politician who occupies the headlines with a scandal can make us look away from crucial issues such as healthcare or education. A brand that bombards consumers with advertising distracts them from competitor alternatives, which may be better and cheaper. Social media that keep billions of young people and others hooked around 'nothing' are dissipating their attention and time that could be used in far more profitable activities. The competition for visibility thus becomes a negative-sum game: to gain some space, everyone has to raise their voice, use more extreme language, invest more in marketing and manipulation. But not everyone can win, and the result is a saturated information ecosystem, where noise often covers the message.

It could be argued that the public, over time, learns to call their bluff; and this is partly true: many users become more selective, they learn to ignore certain lures. It is estimated, for example, that Instagram has lost 400 million users in the last year alone. But despite this, attentional bluffs are persistent because they are grafted onto cognitive biases rooted in the deep structure of our minds, in the very nature of our cognitive processes, and this is why they represent a vulnerability that is difficult to eliminate.

The question, then, is how to deal with these bluffs without falling into stifling paternalism and over-regulation. Loewenstein and Wojtowicz suggest a few paths. The first is to improve our ability to measure the phenomenon: digital indicators, trend analysis, systems that distinguish between genuine interest and artificial hype can certainly help draw the boundaries of the phenomena and verify their true proportions. The second is to use the same logic of attentional nudges for pro-social purposes: reminders to remind sufferers to take their medication, more transparent layouts highlighting the real costs of a certain purchase, clear labels facilitating the best choice for consumers. The third is to rethink the rules of the game, especially for platforms and media that today have strong incentives to maximise only dwell time, even at the expense of collective well-being. A few years ago, Frances Haugen, a former product manager at Facebook, made public thousands of internal company documents that Instagram's top management was aware of the damage caused to teenagers' mental health by their social, but never took adequate countermeasures. This was deliberate because the platform's algorithms tended to favour content that generated anger and polarisation, because it increased engagement and kept users' attention. Unfortunately, these facts do not seem to have generated the outrage, indignation and regulatory reactions that they could and should have triggered.

Recognising the existence and impact of attention bluffs means understanding the fact that a not insignificant part of the economy today does not revolve around what is valuable, but what manages to seem important. Understanding this is the first step to start protecting oneself. It is an uncomfortable reality, because it forces us to look at our choices not as expressions of free preferences, but as outcomes of an ecosystem that conditions us deeply. But it is also a powerful interpretive key. It helps us understand why a meme can move billions in the stock market, why we spend hours scrolling through content that we don't remember the next day, and why crucial political issues constantly take a back seat. And it questions us about the meaning of it all.

The real luxury of our time, then, is not having more and more expensive things, but that comes more from controlling one's attention free from manipulation. Learning to protect it means regaining not only our focus and time, but also our freedom of choice. That is why the challenge that the attention economy presents us with is to learn to recognise the bait earlier and better, because only then will we be able to avoid the hooks to which it is attached.