Attention economy in the digital media era

Ironically enough, the way I became aware of my overexposure to digital media was through (you guessed it) digital media itself, when YouTube decided to out me as a chronically online goblin and recommend me some videos on how to combat the addictive nature of smartphones and screens.

The video in question is by this guy, Nathan Laundry, who quickly became one of the most inspirational figures in my life over the past year when it comes to the way I view, approach, and consume digital media.

The attention economy pretty much describes attention as a finite resource in people’s lives that is being stripped away by our devices through the way they are designed to fulfill that specific role, leaving us little to no attention left to pour toward what matters to us.

This made me realize how my whole modern life is built to depend, in a utilitarian way, on digital devices, which, to nobody’s surprise, leads to a dependency that takes shape in what people would call addiction.

Most people’s routines can be subdivided into macro categories such as Working/Learning, Entertainment, and Sustainment. While at first I would only reach out for a screen to fulfill my entertainment needs, after getting into a digital career, all my work also became screens. Sustainment was the only survivor at this point, until I decided to take on the habit of eating in front of YouTube videos and falling asleep with them.

So now it’s full circle: digital media has slowly crawled into every single aspect of my life without me even realizing it, from the moment it starts with my alarm clock to the moment it ends with background noise to fall asleep to.

If the journey to combat a problem is Awareness → Actions → Overcome, I’m probably still around the awareness part of it. It’s very hard to distance myself from digital media when my work relies on it, and when what I care about and am passionate about learning is also found on the internet. It’s by far the most effective medium to learn, and taking things slowly would make me feel like I’m falling behind in the rat race that the tech field is.

That said, I have also taken actions that have shown some positive results, and my goal for this coming year is to slowly get my life back—to at least not feel like I’m being kept in a torture chamber when I’m left bored for more than 10 seconds.