Reads: Media, Technology & Attention Economy
A wrap on some of the interesting reads from across the web...
Addicted to Your iPhone? You're Not Alone - The Atlantic
Are you addicted to your smartphone? Are you unable to escape Facebook and Google's seductive power? It's all equivalent of "tech junk food", designed with the sole purpose of chipping away your concentration, says Tristan Harris, design ethicist and former product philosopher at Google.
"The biggest obstacle to incorporating ethical design and "agency" is not technical complexity. According to Harris, it’s a "will thing." And on that front, even his supporters worry that the culture of Silicon Valley may be inherently at odds with anything that undermines engagement or growth. "This is not the place where people tend to want to slow down and be deliberate about their actions and how their actions impact others," says Jason Fried, who has spent the past 12 years running Basecamp, a project-management tool. "They want to make things more sugary and more tasty, and pull you in, and justify billions of dollars of valuation and hundreds of millions of dollars [in] VC funds."
They've Got You, Wherever You Are - The New York Review of Books
How the time you spend on Google and Facebook is just to capture our attention and make us spend more time using their services, which in turn is just about advertising.
"The old cliché about advertising was, "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half." The new cliché is, "If you're not paying for it, you're the product." In an attention economy, you pay for free content and services with your time. The compensation isn't very good. Consider the pre-roll commercials you are forced to watch to gain access to most video clips, increasingly the dominant type of content on the Web... The problem isn't simply that attention has been made into a commodity, it's that it's so undervalued. Marketers buy our time for far less than its worth."
Addicted to Your iPhone? You're Not Alone - The Atlantic
Are you addicted to your smartphone? Are you unable to escape Facebook and Google's seductive power? It's all equivalent of "tech junk food", designed with the sole purpose of chipping away your concentration, says Tristan Harris, design ethicist and former product philosopher at Google.
"The biggest obstacle to incorporating ethical design and "agency" is not technical complexity. According to Harris, it’s a "will thing." And on that front, even his supporters worry that the culture of Silicon Valley may be inherently at odds with anything that undermines engagement or growth. "This is not the place where people tend to want to slow down and be deliberate about their actions and how their actions impact others," says Jason Fried, who has spent the past 12 years running Basecamp, a project-management tool. "They want to make things more sugary and more tasty, and pull you in, and justify billions of dollars of valuation and hundreds of millions of dollars [in] VC funds."
They've Got You, Wherever You Are - The New York Review of Books
How the time you spend on Google and Facebook is just to capture our attention and make us spend more time using their services, which in turn is just about advertising.
"The old cliché about advertising was, "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half." The new cliché is, "If you're not paying for it, you're the product." In an attention economy, you pay for free content and services with your time. The compensation isn't very good. Consider the pre-roll commercials you are forced to watch to gain access to most video clips, increasingly the dominant type of content on the Web... The problem isn't simply that attention has been made into a commodity, it's that it's so undervalued. Marketers buy our time for far less than its worth."
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