I am not sure how many of us are aware about this, but in these times the most precious thing you can have is your attention.
Nearly everywhere you find a distraction or attention-grabbing element, and social media plays a big role in it (actually quite significant).
We are being sold without any clue to the marketers and entities running their advertisements on these platforms. We are being tracked unconsciously, and data associated with our online activity is being stored on daily basis. All this data is utilized to run advertisements to trigger the target audience based on their interest and online activities.
Have you ever wondered, why are you getting similar posts and news into your feed according to what you searched or viewed earlier? And it keeps making you go into that rabbit hole until there is any change to your online activity and behaviour. A lot of platforms even track how much time you spend on scrolling, and how much time you spend on a post or content, did you read the caption or not, or did you read comments, and what not, so they can suggest you next post or content or article according to your behaviour. Social media only shows what you want to see and that’s it, that’s the trap. It keeps you away from different perspectives.
Let me give you an example. Earlier anybody could see how many people liked a โutubeโ video and how many people disliked it (means they have different perspective or opinion). However, now you only see how many people have liked the video but no information about the numbers of dislike (you only see a thumbs down icon and that’s it). On same platform earlier it was allowed to pause your watch history so it does not recommend you content on basis of your previously watched videos, but now you must turn on your watch history to use the platform.
The whole purpose of these platforms is to make each user spend more time on their platform and keep us engaged in the content on their platform, either by showing content based on our behaviour, or maybe by introducing new features.
For instance, they keep sending you notification about new friend suggestions or maybe “say hi to your friend who joined xyz platform” notifications. One app is very famous about changing feature or rearranging them every few days, because they want you to not get used to with the interface.
Short form content reduces the capability to focus on a same thing for a long time because it affects your attention span, you start to feel bored if anything is not constantly changing or you don’t get to see something new (that is the main reason a lot of platforms focusing on the short form content and endorsing the creators to create reelz, shortz, or tiptok because these short videos get much more views and attention).
You might have noticed few times or maybe many times that you opened your finstagram or utube just to spend 5 minutes and you end up wasting 2 hours. Then you feel sad or depressed that you have wasted a lot of time for nothing (if you are really conscious about your time).
Your attention is very precious, save it from these attention-grabbing platforms and focus on your goals.
There could be a lot of people who couldn’t reach to this paragraph, because they might actually have short attention span and they simply couldn’t keep their attention on a boring text for long enough.
So, it’s actually a thing. Pay attention to your attention.