Pay attention to how you pay attention

“Attention is not neutral,” Anton Barba-Kay, a philosopher at University of California, San Diego, writes in A Web of Our Own Making: The Nature of Digital Formation.

- Ezra Klein

A girl in Sydney uses her phone after an interview discussing Australia's social media ban for users under 16, on Nov 22.REUTERS

(REUTERS)

“It is the act by which we confer meaning on things and by which we discover that they are meaningful, the act through which we bind facts into cares.’ When we cede control of our attention, we cede more than what we are looking at now. We cede, to some degree, control over what we will care about tomorrow.The politics of attention are on my mind because a recent court case has sharpened the need to describe what, exactly, has gone wrong in our digital lives. In 2020, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) sued Meta for creating an illegal monopoly in the personal social networking market. Last month, a US District Court in Washington ruled in Meta’s favour.

The FTC argued that there was a discrete market of personal social networking in which the only competitors were Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and an app I’ve never heard of called MeWe. Meta’s rebuttal was simple:

It also competes with TikTok and YouTube, among others. It might have begun life as a social network, but it is, today, something else entirely. Only 17% of time spent on Facebook is spent viewing content posted by friends. On Instagram, it's 7%.

The ruling includes images showing how all these apps have come to resemble each other: Reels on Instagram and Facebook are virtually indistinguishable from Shorts on YouTube or videos on TikTok. I can look at Meta’s products and see that it has responded agilely to the innovations of its competitors. It’s made me like Meta’s apps less, but I can’t deny that when I open them, I’m likelier to be drawn into a scrolling hole that I need to wrench myself back from. Competition seems, to me, to have made these apps better at fulfilling their corporate purpose and worse for human flourishing.