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This kind of disgusts me. Products aren’t being developed to complete a task, or give you enjoyment, they’re being made to hold your attention. They’re being ma

This kind of disgusts me. Products aren’t being developed to complete a task, or give you enjoyment, they’re being made to hold your attention. They’re being made to distract you while you’re used as a product to sell to advertisers

proto-n 6y ago
Phrased in a different way, they are developed to entertain you in your free time and help you relax. When they do this, they compete against all other forms of entertainment. Well, this is true for paid entertainment at least. You are absolutely right about ad driven stuff though.
- newsclues 6y ago
  Except that entertainment would be a vast improvement over the attention sucking hate machine that social media often becomes. It’s like heroin addiction, after first it feels great, but later on the rush is gone, the great feeling is gone and all that’s left is the desperate need for another hit to not feel like hell.
  - bonoboTP 6y ago
    Correct. I went cold turkey on Twitter some time ago because it was making me go crazy and paranoid (doomscrolling and all). If you have the attention span to watch a full movie without compulsively checking your phone, you're doing relatively well in the general population I think.
- bonoboTP 6y ago
  Isn't this one of those examples about implicit ideology at play? Like, it's an unquestioned assumption that you need "entertainment" in the form of consuming attention-eating stuff all your free time. That you need to be "doing something", and that in some strange way getting through media is some kind of accomplishment, at least you didn't just do nothing. I think this doesn't go without saying... People have always entertained themselves in various ways, like having rituals, singing together, playing, fixing stuff (clothes, stuff around the house), creating things like tools and clothes etc. But these tended to be more active "hobbies". I'm taking issue with the template/implicit model whereby work sucks your energy out, and then you need to regenerate by sitting in front of some media device and consume some subscription content or some media item that has a title, author etc. As if unstructured time were scary. That you just go for a walk without having a podcast in your ears. That you just cook dinner without the TV on. That you eat without watching Youtube. It somehow feels non-productive and "cheating". I don't think these are the best way to unwind or regenerate for the next day, as opposed to actually letting your brain just be without "content" being fed into it. Also a lot of content, like news and podcasts just work us up instead of relaxing and "entertaining", unless you consider "outrage" entertainment.
  - A4ET8a8uTh0 6y ago
    I think you are onto something. There is an argument to be made that entertainment is a comfortable rails, which you can use to appropriately guide the population in a desired direction ( propaganda does not always have to be overt ). Unstructured time not only does not result in money changing hands, but could also result in unpredictable thoughts that may be unpalatable to the system. It is no small wonder the default perception is captured by 'idle hands' proverb.
    - bonoboTP 6y ago
      Right. After more thinking it's not that new, it's "panem et circenses" all over again, just way more scalable. Also, I think Americans are culturally just much more market-thinking and transaction-oriented. In many other places it's a much higher threshold for people to give out money for something. Now, surely this is a function of disposable income as well, but "paying for stuff left and right" is just a basic thing for many Americans, while e.g. Germans would much rather save up. So marketing also has to adjust to local circumstances: Germany has very cheap supermarkets (discounters) because brand loyalty is lower and price weighs in stronger. This also means that innovative people much rather go to the American market, because there's just more willingness in normal people to try and pay for new things there. It's both good and bad.
  - lasagnaphil 6y ago
    It reminds me of the excerpt in Bullshit Jobs (by David Graeber, rest in peace...) "In a sense, those critics who claim we are not working a fifteen-hour week because we have chosen consumerism over leisure are not entirely off the mark. They just got the mechanisms wrong. We’re not working harder because we’re spending all our time manufacturing PlayStations and serving one another sushi. Industry is being increasingly robotized, and the real service sector remains flat at roughly 20 percent of overall employment. Instead, it is because we have invented a bizarre sadomasochistic dialectic whereby we feel that pain in the workplace is the only possible justification for our furtive consumer pleasures, and, at the same time, the fact that our jobs thus come to eat up more and more of our waking existence means that we do not have the luxury of—as Kathi Weeks has so concisely put it—“a life,” and that, in turn, means that furtive consumer pleasures are the only ones we have time to afford. Sitting around in cafés all day arguing about politics or gossiping about our friends’ complex polyamorous love affairstakes time (all day, in fact); in contrast pumping iron or attending a yoga class at the local gym, ordering out for Deliveroo, watching an episode of Game of Thrones, or shopping for hand creams or consumer electronics can all be placed in the kind of self-contained predictable timeslots one is likely to have left over between spates of work, or else while recovering from it. All these are examples of what I like to call “compensatory consumerism.” They are the sorts of things you can do to make up for the fact that you don’t have a life, or not very much of one."
hrktb 6y ago
The interesting part is competitors can co-exist as long as the user see them as worth the monthly fee. For instance a user can have Amazon Prime and Nintendo Online, with Spotify, and be happy with the mix. It's not completely zero-sum, even if your attention is finite. There might be frictions on adding Netflix to this, but Netflix can still be added in with incredibly great content that a user would be willing to pay monthly to keep seeing it (the same way Nintendo Online doesn't need all your attention if you're happy to keep it just for Animal Crossing, for instance) If find it globally healthier than the alternative advertisement based services, which look to be more cut-throat places.
- permo-w 6y ago
  I totally agree that subscriptions are a lot healthier than advertising, but for me, as a fairly left-wing person, I think that the gold standard is state-funded media
  - hrktb 6y ago
    I am not completely up to date on the right/left positioning, but I agree state-funded media is needed as a baseline to at least properly convey any purely factual issue (i.e. it's optimal for official info, like which law passed or who won the elections cough). Of course it can't be the only media, nor should be trusted that much more than other media for any generic topic. In particular it shouldn't be trusted to be complete nor people focused, so there is still the need to find other sources that complete the picture with different angles that can be crucial.
    - permo-w 6y ago
      In relatively free and somewhat uncorrupt nations, yes that makes sense, but I'm actually largely talking about entertainment. In the UK, the BBC makes all sorts of fantastic tv shows and documentaries that have no reliance on advertising or corporate sponsors
onion2k 6y ago
This could be a positive thing though - if people have resources left over after fulfilling everything they actually need then society is doing pretty well, even if that means people will waste their extra resources on unnecessary garbage.
Synaesthesia 6y ago
Products are just a way to enrich the people who are selling them.
- permo-w 6y ago
  not always. Look at the BBC
TameAntelope 6y ago
I try very hard (and still often fail) to put myself in the shoes of people who are meaningfully not like me, and one thing that's come from that is understanding how motivation doesn't always track equally for everyone (and trying to come to terms with the fact that this might be okay). Finding things that give enjoyment and deliberately distract from the things going on in a person's life has potentially immense value, depending on what those things going on in their life are. The implicit agreement made here is that both parties know what you're saying, and both parties agree to not talk about it -- for the seller, because it's an ethical quandary, for the buyer because they don't want to have to confront the things in their life they're trying to ignore. It doesn't always have to be so sinister of course (maybe I just want to relax and am otherwise keeping my responsibilities), but it can be sinister, which I think is what you're getting at. My argument is that both parties know this, and it may be the whole point.
- nine_k 6y ago
  This sounds pretty similar to alcohol, weed, and other substances for "recreational use", that is, for staving off the pains of living. Substance abuse is a well-known problem. Same apparently applies to digital entertainment of certain kinds.
- permo-w 6y ago
  My thinking is that there are better ways to do this, even for people that can't afford to pay for their content. I think the BBC is a perfect example. Why can't we have state-funded social media? I know this is a fairly left-wing perspective, but I feel that the implicit agreement - which I totally agree exists - isn't necessary. There doesn't need to be a buyer and a seller. Once that is taken away, where is the incentive for sinistrum?
tsjq 6y ago
Exactly this. This is the crux. Different stuff to make us stare at the screen to watch ads
vharuck 6y ago
What you said is true for some services, but TFA is talking about something applicable to all services: consider all the limited "resources" being asked from customers. Money, attention, a monthly trip to the movies, a meal, etc. Facebook competes for your time and attention. The ringtone company was competing for a share of a kid's allowance. A local outdoor skating rink competes with building snowmen, even though the latter isn't a company-provided service. Nearly all products and services compete for a user's time, even if it's only the time spent deciding to buy it. Facebook wants more of our time, but that's because it's an advertising platform. Most services try to cut down user time.
- permo-w 6y ago
  Oh I totally agree that my comment is a fairly tangential to the article, but the last few lines really gave me a feeling of disgust that I felt I had to express

proto-n 6y ago

Phrased in a different way, they are developed to entertain you in your free time and help you relax. When they do this, they compete against all other forms of entertainment. Well, this is true for paid entertainment at least. You are absolutely right about ad driven stuff though.

newsclues 6y ago
Except that entertainment would be a vast improvement over the attention sucking hate machine that social media often becomes. It’s like heroin addiction, after first it feels great, but later on the rush is gone, the great feeling is gone and all that’s left is the desperate need for another hit to not feel like hell.
- bonoboTP 6y ago
  Correct. I went cold turkey on Twitter some time ago because it was making me go crazy and paranoid (doomscrolling and all). If you have the attention span to watch a full movie without compulsively checking your phone, you're doing relatively well in the general population I think.
bonoboTP 6y ago
Isn't this one of those examples about implicit ideology at play? Like, it's an unquestioned assumption that you need "entertainment" in the form of consuming attention-eating stuff all your free time. That you need to be "doing something", and that in some strange way getting through media is some kind of accomplishment, at least you didn't just do nothing. I think this doesn't go without saying... People have always entertained themselves in various ways, like having rituals, singing together, playing, fixing stuff (clothes, stuff around the house), creating things like tools and clothes etc. But these tended to be more active "hobbies". I'm taking issue with the template/implicit model whereby work sucks your energy out, and then you need to regenerate by sitting in front of some media device and consume some subscription content or some media item that has a title, author etc. As if unstructured time were scary. That you just go for a walk without having a podcast in your ears. That you just cook dinner without the TV on. That you eat without watching Youtube. It somehow feels non-productive and "cheating". I don't think these are the best way to unwind or regenerate for the next day, as opposed to actually letting your brain just be without "content" being fed into it. Also a lot of content, like news and podcasts just work us up instead of relaxing and "entertaining", unless you consider "outrage" entertainment.
- A4ET8a8uTh0 6y ago
  I think you are onto something. There is an argument to be made that entertainment is a comfortable rails, which you can use to appropriately guide the population in a desired direction ( propaganda does not always have to be overt ). Unstructured time not only does not result in money changing hands, but could also result in unpredictable thoughts that may be unpalatable to the system. It is no small wonder the default perception is captured by 'idle hands' proverb.
  - bonoboTP 6y ago
    Right. After more thinking it's not that new, it's "panem et circenses" all over again, just way more scalable. Also, I think Americans are culturally just much more market-thinking and transaction-oriented. In many other places it's a much higher threshold for people to give out money for something. Now, surely this is a function of disposable income as well, but "paying for stuff left and right" is just a basic thing for many Americans, while e.g. Germans would much rather save up. So marketing also has to adjust to local circumstances: Germany has very cheap supermarkets (discounters) because brand loyalty is lower and price weighs in stronger. This also means that innovative people much rather go to the American market, because there's just more willingness in normal people to try and pay for new things there. It's both good and bad.
- lasagnaphil 6y ago
  It reminds me of the excerpt in Bullshit Jobs (by David Graeber, rest in peace...) "In a sense, those critics who claim we are not working a fifteen-hour week because we have chosen consumerism over leisure are not entirely off the mark. They just got the mechanisms wrong. We’re not working harder because we’re spending all our time manufacturing PlayStations and serving one another sushi. Industry is being increasingly robotized, and the real service sector remains flat at roughly 20 percent of overall employment. Instead, it is because we have invented a bizarre sadomasochistic dialectic whereby we feel that pain in the workplace is the only possible justification for our furtive consumer pleasures, and, at the same time, the fact that our jobs thus come to eat up more and more of our waking existence means that we do not have the luxury of—as Kathi Weeks has so concisely put it—“a life,” and that, in turn, means that furtive consumer pleasures are the only ones we have time to afford. Sitting around in cafés all day arguing about politics or gossiping about our friends’ complex polyamorous love affairstakes time (all day, in fact); in contrast pumping iron or attending a yoga class at the local gym, ordering out for Deliveroo, watching an episode of Game of Thrones, or shopping for hand creams or consumer electronics can all be placed in the kind of self-contained predictable timeslots one is likely to have left over between spates of work, or else while recovering from it. All these are examples of what I like to call “compensatory consumerism.” They are the sorts of things you can do to make up for the fact that you don’t have a life, or not very much of one."

hrktb 6y ago

The interesting part is competitors can co-exist as long as the user see them as worth the monthly fee. For instance a user can have Amazon Prime and Nintendo Online, with Spotify, and be happy with the mix. It's not completely zero-sum, even if your attention is finite. There might be frictions on adding Netflix to this, but Netflix can still be added in with incredibly great content that a user would be willing to pay monthly to keep seeing it (the same way Nintendo Online doesn't need all your attention if you're happy to keep it just for Animal Crossing, for instance) If find it globally healthier than the alternative advertisement based services, which look to be more cut-throat places.

permo-w 6y ago
I totally agree that subscriptions are a lot healthier than advertising, but for me, as a fairly left-wing person, I think that the gold standard is state-funded media
- hrktb 6y ago
  I am not completely up to date on the right/left positioning, but I agree state-funded media is needed as a baseline to at least properly convey any purely factual issue (i.e. it's optimal for official info, like which law passed or who won the elections cough). Of course it can't be the only media, nor should be trusted that much more than other media for any generic topic. In particular it shouldn't be trusted to be complete nor people focused, so there is still the need to find other sources that complete the picture with different angles that can be crucial.
  - permo-w 6y ago
    In relatively free and somewhat uncorrupt nations, yes that makes sense, but I'm actually largely talking about entertainment. In the UK, the BBC makes all sorts of fantastic tv shows and documentaries that have no reliance on advertising or corporate sponsors

onion2k 6y ago

This could be a positive thing though - if people have resources left over after fulfilling everything they actually need then society is doing pretty well, even if that means people will waste their extra resources on unnecessary garbage.

Synaesthesia 6y ago

Products are just a way to enrich the people who are selling them.

permo-w 6y ago
not always. Look at the BBC

TameAntelope 6y ago

I try very hard (and still often fail) to put myself in the shoes of people who are meaningfully not like me, and one thing that's come from that is understanding how motivation doesn't always track equally for everyone (and trying to come to terms with the fact that this might be okay). Finding things that give enjoyment and deliberately distract from the things going on in a person's life has potentially immense value, depending on what those things going on in their life are. The implicit agreement made here is that both parties know what you're saying, and both parties agree to not talk about it -- for the seller, because it's an ethical quandary, for the buyer because they don't want to have to confront the things in their life they're trying to ignore. It doesn't always have to be so sinister of course (maybe I just want to relax and am otherwise keeping my responsibilities), but it can be sinister, which I think is what you're getting at. My argument is that both parties know this, and it may be the whole point.

nine_k 6y ago
This sounds pretty similar to alcohol, weed, and other substances for "recreational use", that is, for staving off the pains of living. Substance abuse is a well-known problem. Same apparently applies to digital entertainment of certain kinds.
permo-w 6y ago
My thinking is that there are better ways to do this, even for people that can't afford to pay for their content. I think the BBC is a perfect example. Why can't we have state-funded social media? I know this is a fairly left-wing perspective, but I feel that the implicit agreement - which I totally agree exists - isn't necessary. There doesn't need to be a buyer and a seller. Once that is taken away, where is the incentive for sinistrum?

tsjq 6y ago

Exactly this. This is the crux. Different stuff to make us stare at the screen to watch ads

vharuck 6y ago

What you said is true for some services, but TFA is talking about something applicable to all services: consider all the limited "resources" being asked from customers. Money, attention, a monthly trip to the movies, a meal, etc. Facebook competes for your time and attention. The ringtone company was competing for a share of a kid's allowance. A local outdoor skating rink competes with building snowmen, even though the latter isn't a company-provided service. Nearly all products and services compete for a user's time, even if it's only the time spent deciding to buy it. Facebook wants more of our time, but that's because it's an advertising platform. Most services try to cut down user time.

permo-w 6y ago
Oh I totally agree that my comment is a fairly tangential to the article, but the last few lines really gave me a feeling of disgust that I felt I had to express