Attention
A designer gets to work on a new brief — a graphic poster for a new soft drink flavor that will grace a large billboard on a busy highway. The designer pores over every detail, from type pairing to image composition to color palette, to make the best possible version of the billboard graphic, which the client in turn desperately hopes will translate to sales revenue. Once complete, the poster goes up on the billboard, beginning its years-long spell of subjecting unwilling commuters to its garish contrast against the calm sky. Over time, more billboards pop up around it, all now competing for the same appalled commuters’ attention as they slog through slow traffic into the city. The ads get louder and flashier, each one trying to one-up the other in a futile attempt to embed themselves into some of the travelers’ memories for the few short seconds that they spend glimpsing at them. One of these travelers is the designer of the original poster for the soft drink flavor, who looks on at their own work with a newfound perspective in which all of the design intent and graphical choices are rendered unrecognizable in the now-transformed commercialist skyline of gigantic billboard ads.
Worse yet, inattentional blindness causes these commuters traveling the same route every day to tune out the billboards entirely, leading them instead to focus their attention elsewhere. Advertisers keep trying to re-gain their attention with even more loud and gaudy designs adorning even more billboards that slowly block out natural sunlight, forcing advertisers to now shine floodlights directly onto them to maximize visibility. Never having consented to it, the commuters are forced to visually process dozens of ostentatious color schemes and tacky product taglines brightly lit against the starry expanse above, demanding their attention and exhausting their already-weary senses on their way home.
The city of São Paulo in Brazil took extreme measures when this exact kind of visual pollution in the city reached a breaking point. In September 2006, the mayor of São Paulo banned all outdoor advertisements entirely. Over the next year, over 15,000 billboards, storefront ads, and ads on bus stops were taken down to comply with the new law. The change was so transformative that residents who used to rely on specific billboards as wayfinding landmarks had to now adjust to referring to architectural details on buildings or in the urban environment to describe routes to destinations. Even more unexpectedly, the removal of massive billboard ads revealed a side of the city that many were unaware of — large slums and favelas in the distance — whose fully unveiled existence was a new visual stimulus that the higher socioeconomic classes were forced to confront and grapple with.
In today’s hyper-consumerist and over-commercialized urban fabric, attention is the hottest commodity. Data is the new most valuable resource because it allows for more targeted advertising, which in turn is more likely to hold our attention. In a world where everything is demanding our attention seemingly all the time, the ability for anything at all to permeate through the noise and be given the privilege of our focused mind even for a few seconds is the golden egg that nearly every corporate conglomerate and hot new trend is chasing, often at the detriment of our own human ability to selectively choose what’s important to us and prioritize our mind’s limited resources to that thing.
For most of human history, humans have chosen what to pay attention to. The early hunter-gatherers had honed their visual acuity skills out of necessity, patiently scanning the horizon to pick up any sign of movement or threats to identify predators and prey. The crinkle of a leaf in a moss-blanketed forest or the momentary flicker of a shadow in the trees above set off alarms in our nervous system because we were in an environment where we were conditioned to pay attention to these things to ensure our very survival. At the time, the way we navigated our environment and assessed our surroundings wasn’t too dissimilar from any other mammal or living creature’s behaviors. Once we started developing tools and became the most dominant species, though, everything began to change.
Safety in numbers was the golden rule to ensure the survival of our species. Early cities where many humans congregated for trade, commerce, and agriculture conveyed a sense of safety where we didn’t feel the need to pay attention to every single thing around us. We began to tune them out. The persistent cries of a hawker trying to sell his wares, the discordant clanking of pots and pans in a busy market, or even the ambient chatter of barely intelligible conversation around us all started to become things that our brains selectively filtered out in order to focus our attention on more important things like where we’re going and what we need to do that day. The wonderful thing about this automatic filtering where the brain automatically tunes out a lot of the world is that we still had the power to step in and override our brains’ choices by telling it that a specific conversation in the distance is worth paying attention to and command it to focus our attention on that.
Much later when our tools got more advanced, we began building monuments and temples to higher powers. Religious buildings and imagery dotted the urban landscape in almost every major world power — temples in Southeast Asia, churches in Western Europe, and stepped pyramids in South America. In empires where religious indoctrination was particularly dominant, it was almost impossible to ignore it. Walking down a bustling thoroughfare in fifteenth century Florence would’ve undoubtedly have you pass by several cathedrals, churches, a basilica, maybe a monastery, and the town square with a crier or two preaching the gospel. In an environment like this, it’s impossible to not pay attention to the significance of Christianity when it was literally taking over the visual topography of nearly everything around you. Even if the times have now changed, the permanence of these structures still exists to this day, serving as a reminder of the city’s historic and cultural significance.
The advent of the printing press and developments in ad printing allowed cityscapes to be plastered with temporary poster ads all over bare buildings, as if to hide the imperfections in the brick layering underneath. It wasn’t uncommon to see a bill-paster meticulously arranging the ads on an overcrowded bill wall that clearly displayed the lettering and typography of all the major businesses. Again, these were attempts at turning heads of passerby shoppers and attracting their eyeballs to events and destinations that the advertisers wanted to promote, but could easily be ignored by anyone walking by who had more pressing matters to attend to.
Over time, new technologies like electricity that enabled signage lighting paved the way for neon signs and kinetic ads that completely transformed the visual language of the city at night, adding an “after-dark” mystique to the tune of humanity’s triumph in capturing and deploying the power of light. The fascinating allure of these brightly lit, colorful signs that dynamically turned on and off to eccentrically animate lettering made them particularly hard to ignore and in turn that much more effective at attracting eyeballs. As with most advancements in attention-garnering technologies, though, we began to tune these out too.
Much later came the personal computer and with it the internet. The internet brought about the inevitable commercialization of the internet, which then reached peak capitalism with the onslaught of mobile devices and social media. An entire economy devoted to digital advertising sprung up practically overnight, with the sole purpose of keeping you glued to your device that manifested in eerie dark patterns like infinitely scrolling feeds or never-ending video content automatically selected for you by an algorithm.
Things took a turn for the worse when social media exploded with the proliferation of mobile devices. Everyone everywhere could reach anyone anywhere in mere seconds. Any thought, musing, or rambling emotion could be broadcast to the world and stored on underground servers for eternity. Algorithms optimized “news feed” like displays that predicted what you’re likely to find engaging based on what others like you find engaging. The key difference with algorithmically determined dynamic content is that you’re not opting into specific kinds of content, and it’s much harder to tune out.
Every leap in advertising technology before this allowed us to condition ourselves to the environment and choose not to pay attention to it. Today, when we open Instagram or TikTok, we don’t know what we’re going to get — it could be reactions to a major news story or pictures of dogs being goofy or concerns about human rights abuses in China or a lifehack recipe to make better milkshake smoothies. Once you’ve made the choice to open the app, there’s no telling what will be demanding your attention and what your brain gets to selectively tune out. The only agency we have with this new form of interacting with content designed to attract our eyeballs is to simply not enter the environment where it exists at all.
With previous forms of advertising, we always had the choice to walk past it or ignore it. But this time, it’s a digital rendition of the fifteenth century walk in Florence, except it’s religious indoctrination one day and extremist propaganda another day and baking pro tips to achieve the ideal dough rise the next day. The frenetic pace at which information moves and becomes irrelevant today causes a never-ending digital whiplash that you can’t quite recover from before the next one hits, leading to our attention being everywhere and nowhere at the same time.
How is it even possible to pay attention to a specific thing when our senses are constantly blasted with the news of an invasion across the world in one minute, a celebrity death in Hollywood the next minute, followed by an ad for tequila set in a tropical forest, then a rigged election outcome in Asia, then a breaking news segment about an earthquake in Japan, followed-up with another ad for the unparalleled level of immersion that the new PlayStation VR headset offers? Whether you’re watching it on cable news or on TikTok, the disconnect between these wildly detached threads of information is not something that our primitive brains evolved to ingest and process, especially at the dizzying pace that they’re pumped into our brain.
The hunter-gatherers that patiently scanned the horizon to look for movement and identify prey would likely look at us with a sense of awe, wondering how we’re able to process so much information in so little time, with brain physiology that’s mostly similar to theirs. In reality, we’re not processing anything. We like to think we are, but we’re selectively filtering almost everything out just like the early settlers of cities did in an environment where there’s simply too much happening for us to coherently decode and process all at once. Studies have repeatedly shown that when we multitask, we perform each individual task worse than we would have performed on it if our full, undivided attention was given to it. After all, we can’t undo millions of years of evolution in the span of a few centuries.
Leibniz, most famously credited with the invention of Calculus, also prominently wrote about psychology and philosophy where he defined attention as “the determination of the soul to know something in preference to other things.” This kind of selective attention shifting has mostly held true until the modern age. Today’s media landscape combined with dopamine-disposing apps trap our souls in a vicious vortex that we can’t quite break out of. If our soul can’t maintain focus on one thing for more than a few seconds, how then, does it know if it’s worth paying attention to over something else?
The technological chaos we live in today has spurred an entire cottage industry of mindfulness services and wellness gurus, all promising to simplify our cognitive processing in a world full of distractions. A digital detox to take a break from the pixels or a meditation retreat focused on bringing our attention back to our inner selves instead of projecting it out into the world. These programs have varying degrees of success and cater to a very specific kind of audience of people already immersed in technology and can only break away from it if mandated to keep off. Therapists are also in high demand lately to help us not get swayed by the allure of digital media and instead try to live fuller lives with other people.
With our solutions to cope with the rise of ad-fueled technological dystopia comes the evolving arms race of corporations also trying to one-up our dopamine-starved brains. Snapchat exploited our desire to not miss out on important events by erasing content after a set timeframe, forcing our attention at specific times in the same way that “limited time only” ads exploit our desire for making a purchase before the item sells out. BeReal, another spotlight-craving social media app, literally sends notifications at completely random times throughout the day, demanding your attention to drop what you’re doing at any given time and post a picture in a two-minute window. Failing to do so comes with the social shame of not “being real.” Cue eyeroll.
Human interpersonal dynamics evolved in social groups over hundreds of thousands of years. Building connections remotely through our devices is such a novel concept in the context of history, and we’re giving in too easily to corporations’ desire to exploit our very real human need for connection by tricking us to pay attention to their product so they can sell our data. Mobile platforms have had to implement OS-level digital wellbeing features that let us set timeouts for how long we can use specific apps or block apps from sending specific types of notifications entirely because companies that prey on our need for connection with patterns like never-ending content loops and randomly timed notifications clearly can’t be trusted to treat their users’ limited attention with care and respect.
For the neurodivergent among us, attention can be a moody blessing or a timely curse. Those with ADHD (Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder) can enter a state of hyperfocus for many hours at a time, fixating entirely on one thing and tuning out the entire world around them. These periods of “hyper-productivity” enable them to accomplish a lot in a small amount of time, but they can’t be triggered at will. They come and go as they please, making it a highly unpredictable game of chance where your motivation at any given time is seemingly decided by the roll of a die.
ADHD also requires a certain level of mental stimulation to even function at a basic level. Often, tasks like doing the dishes or listening to a lecture can be incredibly boring for the ADHD brain. Performing a secondary passive task like listening to a podcast when organizing the house or playing a casual mobile game during an academic lecture can actually help the brain process and retain the information far better, directly contradicting the classical research of humans underperforming when multitasking. It goes to show how much of our traditional understanding of attention is now undergoing a sea change as more and more people come to terms with how they process information in a world filled with more and more distractions by the day.
Task prioritization can also be a real challenge for those with ADHD. The brain struggles to prioritize and sequence the order of operations for day-to-day chores, often forgetting some entirely or dropping a task halfway to do something else. This ADHD brain is particularly susceptible to anything that suddenly demands its attention. The smell of a pastry, the thought of a nap, or the sudden ping of a notification on the phone. If you thought notification spam was bad in general, it’s especially exaggerated for those with ADHD. The brain craves dopamine, and any notification telling them to check a friend’s story before it disappears or to post a picture of themselves in a two-minute window can be devastating for their daily routine and wellbeing. This segment of the population is so underserved by corporations prioritizing profits over the wellness of its users that it’s nearly impossible to incentivize the companies to build better products for this market. After all, these users are boosting their oh-so-important engagement metrics that will boost their stock price in the next quarterly earnings report.
Attention has always been a muddy thing for us humans. We think we know how it works, but we can’t always guarantee we’ll be in the right state of mind to pay attention to something. Our brains can randomly conjure up an embarrassing moment from years ago, forcing our focus on that time & place instead of the present moment. And we don’t fully understand why this happens. Instead of funding more research into understanding the behavior of our brains, VC investors are pumping money into companies that exploit this unknown behavior at the disservice of the people that use the company’s products to fulfill a basic emotional need. We don’t seem to be equipped to deal with the technological changes spinning us faster and faster in the vortex, and there’s no plan in place for how to even start tackling it.
AI is looming on the horizon, and many tech startups are barreling headfirst into it without any cause for concern. We have no idea what attention-destroying threats lie underneath its waters, and yet we’re diving into the deep end anyway. AI will certainly automate much of our lives as we slowly build trust with it, but there’s a big risk in letting AI make decisions on our behalf. Imagine waking up to work and an AI lists out the top tasks for you to do that most meaningfully impact the company’s bottom line. Sounds great in theory, right? You’re doing tasks that make more money for the organization, increasing revenue and boosting your chances for a promotion. And now imagine if everyone at the company is doing this, fully trusting the AI to determine your day-to-day tasks and you simply performing them in a strange role-reversal of the man and machine dynamic from the Industrial Revolution.
You’ll soon have no idea what you’re actually building. Everyone’s working in a black box chipping away at small tasks given to them by AI, but you’re still presumably building a product that’s still serving some human need for other humans. But how is it impacting the experience for people using it? What strange behaviors is it incentivizing? What moral values is it imposing upon its users? What judgement calls is it making that you’re unaware of? The answer to all of these is that you don’t know. You simply have no idea what the company’s products are doing because the AI is only ruthlessly optimizing for company profits. A side effect of this primary goal is likely going to be that its products must be good, but you don’t know why. We’d be building this complex web of organizational funnels and initiatives that nobody can explain, not too dissimilar to how we live today in a world where one person may not have all the knowledge of how a single product comes together due to the globally interlinked supply chains.
It’s an extreme example to illustrate, but it makes a strong case to showcase the risks of letting AI run wild. A worker not intentionally choosing how they spend their time during a day and allowing AI to dictate it might seem harmless at first, promising to simplify their workload and take the stress off their “busy lives.” But humans have always had agency in what they do. They’ve always chosen to walk past the flashy advertisements or turn off the annoying notifications or utilize tools to manage the dizzying array of distractions in the world today.
AI works in a sinister opposing manner where it doesn’t demand your attention but instead takes that choice of not paying attention away from you. It simply doles out instructions or responses, building enough trust with you over time where you offload almost all decision-making to it, letting it decide things like which emails are worth responding to or having it create a schedule of things for you to focus on that day. You have chosen to not manually pay attention to how you sift through emails or curate activities in your day, taking away something precious in the process. It’s taking away the unknown ways in which the brain makes choices, how it recalls memories, or how it chooses to do something spontaneous on a whim. We don’t know how it all works yet, but it has gotten us this far as a species. Trusting our brains is what makes us human. Choosing to let that go without fully understanding it and giving up control to AI seems like the first misstep of many to come in the rapidly approaching age of artificial intelligence.
Our modern world is hectic. It’s strange, unexpected, occasionally beautiful, and often overwhelming. We’ve created technological systems and have made choices about how we live our day to day lives without a full awareness of its long-term impacts. We choose to engage with deceitful and manipulative technology because we want our basic human needs fulfilled. Our attention spans have been dropping consistently as newer forms of micro-content are blasted into our brains every day, and everyone’s in for a wild ride in the future we now prepare to let AI tell us what’s good for us instead of other humans.
The designer who made the soft drink ad on the billboard likely looks back at it fondly, remembering a simpler time when his main focus was creating a good compositional balance between type and graphic. The meaning and intent of the work is completely lost in the sea of billboard dystopia, but there’s something crucial that will always remain with the designer — the pride in the work. It was an idea in the mind that he was able to translate into a visual using a very specific skillset and tool. Humans have done this since the dawn of time, and our ability to shift our attention across various stages of the process to achieve that outcome has enabled that vision to become a reality. We test, we refine, we prioritize, and we finalize. All of this takes a very special kind of anthropocentric decision making that’s only possible because we’re able to pay attention to what’s important. If we want to maintain this connective tissue for our species going forward, we’ll have to pay very close attention to how we engage with AI in the coming years, or we risk the same billboard dystopia that the designer is staring into except this time it will be even more soulless and bland, optimized to the quarterly earnings of the companies in the ads and leaving behind a trail of humans who now have no idea where to focus their attention.