##How does competing in the attention economy shape the social media products we use?
The attention economy is made up of anything trying to capture our limited attention. Because companies are able to profit from your attention, there is intense competition within the attention economy.
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Social media apps are incentivized, or motivated, to develop increasingly persuasive techniques – notifications, targeted content, personalized feeds, and more – to:
- Keep you coming back
- Get your friends to use them
- Collect more data about you so that they can get better at capturing your attention and influencing your behavior
That last point is particularly key to their success. Everything we do online is monitored and analyzed. Everything we’ve ever clicked on, how long we’ve hovered over a post in our feeds, how deep we've scrolled on our friends’ profiles – it’s all data that helps companies study us better. They are able to track behaviors like:
- The types of videos we watch
- The news we click on
- The products we search for
- Who we talk to
- Which posts we linger on
Apps then feed this information into complex [[☃ definition 1]] that determine which content to show us. Generally, algorithms use what they know about us to show us content that gets us to like, click, and share.
“This is what every business has always dreamt of: to have a guarantee that if it places an ad, it will be successful. That’s their [social media companies’] business. They sell certainty. In order to be successful in that business, you have to have great predictions. Great predictions begin with one imperative: you need a lot of data.”
–Shoshana Zuboff, professor and author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism in The Social Dilemma
This doesn’t happen through sponsored ads only: videos that autoplay, promoted posts from influencers, and clickbait sites that cleverly disguise ads in posts are just a few of the examples of types of services paid for by advertising. On top of that, advertisers are able to target their messages to specific audiences: for example, by zip code, gender, age, relationship status, hobbies, job, education, and much more. (Check out the screenshot below to see just the basic targeting options Facebook offers to advertisers.)
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More advanced options allow advertisers to target based on complex psychological factors. Say that someone wanted to target information at people likely to believe in conspiracy theories. They could identify a group of a few dozen conspiracy theory believers, then use “Lookalike” targeting to point ads at millions more. This technique has been used by everything from small businesses looking to find a niche audience to foreign governments trying to stop people from voting.
We’re told by social media apps that their goal is to connect, educate, and entertain through the sharing of photos, text, and information. The technology certainly does that some of the time.
But once we understand social media companies’ business model (how a business designs products and services to generate revenue) it’s obvious that their interests are not aligned with ours.
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