The current debate about the effects of digital technology – and social media in particular – often centres on the detrimental effects it has on our attention, both in terms of our ability to concentrate on tasks in a sustained way and in terms of the way in which our attention is grabbed by sensationalism and misinformation. It’s hard not to get caught up in this latest moral-panic and become convinced that technology is supremely damaging and dangerous (being compared with hard drugs and tobacco or even having altered the nature of capitalism itself!).
Certainly, it’s hard not to feel overwhelmed by a constant information deluge and a sense that one’s individual agency is increasingly being snatched away. There’s always too much to read and watch and look at and listen to and think about and reply… The infamous “algorithms” who are frequently blamed for all the ills of social media and digital consumption should really be the mechanisms for curating and buffering the information overwhelm. But as we know, in practice act as mechanisms for simply enabling more overwhelm.
It’s this idea of a “buffer” or “curation” of information that is central to the polymath political scientist’s, Herbert A. Simon’s 1971 paper, Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World. 37 years before the first iPhone, Simon rang the alarm about a world in which – even then – the sheer amount of information was overwhelming the ability of individuals to process it. He argued that people only have a limited attention-span and presented what he saw as a shift from information-scarcity to attention-scarcity as the basis for what became known widely-known as the “attention economy”.
Simon foresaw the effect of overwhelming amounts of information as causing a “poverty of attention”:
In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence, a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.
One of the solutions Simon suggested was for the adoption of automated “attention-focusing” systems that enabled individuals to sift through data to identify what is important. He highlighted the role of experts and specialists in various domains who could process and interpret information to enable more efficient attention by others:
A great deal of the design of information-processing systems, therefore, will have to be concerned with the allocation of attention. The real task is not to provide more information, but to organize the sources of information so as to minimize the amount of attention that is required to extract the important information from the mass of unimportant information.
It’s this “allocation of attention” that is, for me, the crux of the matter. How and by whom are the vital questions. It requires great trust to be placed in the “experts” who would direct this focusing. And could this be ethically performed by AI or does it require a human mind to ensure the validity of moderation or curation? (I have daily RSS feeds of hundreds of items that clamour for my attention – and that’s before I get caught up with emails attempting to catch my attention, Youtube videos, podcasts, tv shows, social media, text messages…) Does managing the “allocation of attention” mean, as some argue, forms of digital detox – simply cutting oneself off from all the digital feeds (and, if we’re honest, the other non-internet bombarding forms of information overload)?
Is it, as Sherlock Holmes tells Watson in A Study in Scarlet, that people have to deliberately limit the amount of information to which they are exposed?
I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skilful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.
Am I foolishly taking in “all the lumber of every sort” with little regard? And is it actually doing me any real harm? Should I do more to ensure my attention-agency, to allocate my attention more purposefully?