Episode 25 – The Loop
- The Loop is a phenomena emergent in the digital age.
- What’s worse is it’s highly likely that whatever you were reading wasn’t worth reading in the first place.
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The Attention Loop
I’ve talked about this somewhere before, maybe on the podcast but I can’t remember. I’ll try to re-articulate it again:
The Loop is a phenomena emergent in the digital age. It happens on your phone and on your desktop, it is a repetitive journey across apps and tabs that is difficult to escape.
You hardly ever notice you’re stuck in The Loop, only once you have broken out of it:
Breaking out of the Loop is the realisation that you woke up in bed, picked up your phone and then over an hour has passed and you haven’t gotten up yet, made breakfast or even peed. It is important to recognise that you didn’t notice when you first got stuck in the loop. Because you weren’t paying capital A Attention.
The Loop is far more easily observed in others: For example, I commute a lot, where it’s most easily spotted in the wild. When the private world between human and phone screen at its most exposed.
On the bus or the train, you end up standing next to someone and can’t help but not see what they are doing on their phone. From the outside The Loop looks something like this:
Open facebook / refresh / nothing interesting / close facebook/ open instagram. Look at two new photos the algo has put to the top / Fave one / close instagram / Open Whatsapp / No new messages / Close Whatsapp /Open twitter / there’s one new message in the feed / read it / close twitter / open facebook / ….. And so the loop continues.
I assume that at this point you know exactly what I’m talking about. It’s our sacrifice of time to that little red dot in the corner.
You get stuck in the loop looking for a hit of new content. Meanwhile, if you had taken responsibility for your attention / you could have read a whole page of a book, or at the very least looked out the window and paid attention to the changing world.
I’ve been attempting to find mechanisms to remind myself that my attention is sovereign every single time I open an app on my phone. The only solution has been to keep it in my pocket and not even try and open an app. Slowly, slowly you begin to not bother pulling out your phone at all. If you are actually doing something, like reading a longread news article and feel the urge to check social media you have to think to yourself ‘Should I open twitter *again* or should I keep doing what I was doing’.
Infotainment
What’s worse is it’s highly likely that whatever you were reading on your phone or laptop when you were tempted to open twitter wasn’t worth reading in the first place.
Out of the approximately 10,000 news stories you have read in the last 12 months, name one that – because you consumed it – allowed you to make a better decision affecting your life, your career, your business – compared to not having swallowed that piece of news.3
The point is: the consumption of news is irrelevant to the forces that really matter in your life. At its best, it is entertaining, at worst irrelevant.
Even if you do pair down your information consumption. I’m 100% convinced you are not actually reading whatever you choose to read properly anyway – You’re skim reading. Words are present on the screen, your seeing them and stringing them together but only registering the gist of the article. Because the media environment we’re in means there are plenty more words still to go in. At work, on signs, on adverts, in messages and in spreadsheets – so you only need a surface level of awareness to navigate the world. I find that if i’m actually paying attention to what I’m doing:
1. Adverts begin to make no sense at all, seriously they are all designed to register at a surface level
2. My attention is far less likely to wander off and want to look at twitter.
It’s also hard to deep read most ‘news’ articles as they aren’t written in a way to be deeply read. It’s all 300-500 words of infotainment. And what’s worse, is that if you read a news article about something you actually know about in detail there are so many errors in it. I can only assume that if this is multiplied and consistent across all news media, reading only the Guardian might mean you come out the other side less well informed than you were before. 100x for the Mail.
There is an idiom in Thai. To “Take ears to the field, take eyes to the farm.” and it means that someone doesn’t pay any attention even when they have the tools and faculties to do so. We live in a word where even most of our media takes its eyes to the farm too.
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