📗 Understand
✦
Apr 22, 2024
✦
7 min read
Our most valuable resource—attention—is being traded at an unprecedented rate.
In the world of the "Attention Economy," your time (or more precisely, your attention) equals money. Thus, the more attention and time you allocate to a company, the richer you make them. It doesn't cost you much, at least nothing material. You find it in your interest because these services are often "free" to access. So, where's the problem?
“The attention market shapes a society of all types of fatigue, informational, democratic. [...] The time for combat has come, not to reject digital civilization, but to transform it in its nature and rediscover the humanist ideal that motivated the first utopians of the digital explosion.” — “La civilisation du poisson rouge", Bruno Patino
"Every Swipe, Every Tap Is a Transaction"
Many believe that money is the most precious commodity in their lives, but that's false. The thing that cannot be saved or economized, which is created and lost every day, is time. Yes, your time is your most precious possession.
Every day, we have only 1,440 minutes to spend, not one more, not one less. This time, each day, is lost and can never be recovered or recreated.
The economic model of a social media platform is quite simple. You can use their services for free. Signing up, logging in, using it: you don't pay anything. You watch content, and you can also post it. So where's the catch? How does Meta generate $135 billion in revenue in 2023?
It's simple: Meta collects usage data to create a digital profile of you. In essence, who you are, what you like, what you will like, your consumption preferences, marital status, job...
Then, this profile is organized with other profiles on the platform. At this point, you're no longer just a user for Meta but an advertising identifier. Then, your profile and similar ones are sold to advertisers (companies looking to advertise on their platform). They pay Meta to display their ads. But they don't want to show them to just anyone; they want to show them to people who are likely to be interested. That's where all the collected data helps Meta target advertisements effectively. Do you always feel like ads are tailored just for you? That's normal, because they are.
Your time and attention are their currency, and they've become experts at forming bad habits that make us spend hours daily on their platforms, often just for cheap entertainment. Meta and other social media platforms are publicly traded companies that need to constantly show increasing revenue. Your attention fuels their growth, and they have no plans to stop. It's time to join the Attention Resistance.
Be Conscious of Your Time
“A century ago, we lived 500,000 hours, slept 200,000 hours, a worker or a peasant worked 200,000 hours. There were 100,000 hours left to do something else. Today we live 700,000 hours, we work about 70,000 hours—based on a 35-hour work week, that's 63,000 hours—and we study for about 30,000 hours. The result: after sleep, study, and work, there are 400,000 hours left to do something else.” — Jean Viard, Sociologist, Le 1, N°185, January 17, 2018
It's mathematical. It's important to realize the value of your time quickly to avoid wasting it and blindly giving it to services that don't deserve it. Use your 400,000 hours consciously.
But it's not easy to cut back. It's a bit like swimming against the current: every effort is difficult, you feel alone, and you rarely have support or encouragement. On the contrary, you feel like a true outsider, and for good reason...
“The movement is underway, and it is very advanced. Nothing can stop it except you, if you have the desire and the strength. You are the only one who can slow it down, control it, and use it for good, for yourself and your surroundings, for your health and your social interactions. In short, for your well-being.” — “C'est décidé, je ralentis”, Xavier Kreutzer
Social media employs thousands of some of the best engineers in the world to continuously fine-tune prediction algorithms and refine their data collection systems. It's an uneven battle between us (ordinary mortals) and Meta (a company valued at $1.2 trillion).
Resist The Attention Economy
There's no need to flee social media; you'll eventually come back, sooner or later. So, it's better to learn to use all these tools consciously and in moderation. The goal is to always get the most out of them without giving them the opportunity to profit from you. As usual, I love giving you simple and concrete tips to implement. So, let's get practical!
“My research on digital minimalism has revealed the existence of a loosely organized attention resistance movement, made up of individuals who combine high-tech tools with disciplined operating procedures to conduct surgical strikes on popular attention economy services—dropping in to extract value, and then slipping away before the attention traps set by these companies can spring shut.” — “Digital Minimalism”, Cal Newport
🧠 Use Apps Mindfully
Today, most of us reach out to social media apps on auto-pilot. Meta and other platforms have succeeded in getting us to adopt these bad automatisms, which cost us a lot of time and attention, but which pay off handsomely for them.
The goal is to add more friction and break this reflexive behavior. To do this, let's block social media by default. You can use the Jomo app, available for free on iPhone and Mac.
Once installed, create or add a "Conscious Use" session. Block your social media apps, and remember to enable the "Breaks" option. In the Friction section, select "Intention".
Now, your social media will still be accessible, but only after you've entered a reason for use and a maximum duration. With this method, you'll quickly realize how many times you unconsciously open social media, and especially that many of these openings have no purpose.
🗑️ Minimalist Posture
Being on every social media won't make you more popular or interesting. On the contrary, adopting a minimalist posture doesn't mean you have to delete everything and disconnect from the world. It's more about choosing the platforms and services that you consider essential and reducing the others, which are just noise.
To do this, ask yourself a few questions and try to be as honest as possible.
What priority/importance do I want to give to this app in my life?
What does it concretely bring me?
Why am I attracted to this app?
Is my usage controlled, or is it just frenetic and irrational?
Remove from your phone all the apps that don't bring anything, those that stress you out, or those that only bring negativity. Also, remove those that cannot be regulated (those where you spend an unreasonable amount of time and feel potentially victimized).
🛡️ Control Your Average Time Per Day
It's important to set a usage budget for distracting apps. Make this contract with yourself. You know best how your daily life is organized, the time you have, and the time that is occupied despite you by social media platforms. Here are some questions to ask yourself to get started:
How much time do I think I need?
What do I want to do there?
Ask yourself again: how much time do I think I need?
The answer often differs from the first time. Once you've set a budget, you can use an app like Jomo to set a time limit (per app of for the entire social media category). The problem with time limits is that it's often difficult to stick to them. Here are two simple things you can do with the Jomo app to help you commit with your app limits on iPhone, iPad and Mac:
You can enable "Breaks" on your time limit. For example, allow yourself 2 extra unlocks of 5 minutes max once you reach your Instagram limit (100% customizable). It's a simple thing, really, but giving yourself a little more leeway is key to creating resilient screen time rules. Remember, the key is not to constrain yourself; it's to become more intentional with your time and attention.
Instead of a traditional time limit, you can configure Jomo to block social media apps after you've reached a set amount of total screen time for the day (Rules > Conditions > + > Screen Time Limit). Of course, you can use the breaks feature to allow yourself a few extra unlocks. It's a way to say, "once I've spent my allocated time on the phone, I need to become more intentional".
🫀 Learning to Live for Yourself
“Social media drags us into a frenetic pace that prevents us from taking a break or stepping back. They suck us into frenzied consumption, often without specific goals” —“C'est décidé, je ralentis”, Xavier Kreutzer
Social media has a perverse side where even if we don't use them, the world keeps turning, and they like to remind us: story notifications, posts, "you might like this"... It's time to cut off this constant flow of solicitations. Turn off the notifications. You won't miss out on much.
Next, you need to learn to live for yourself and not for the eyes of others. What you do should make you happy in the present moment, not based on the likes it will bring you. If you love camping and no one around seems to be on board, no problem, as long as it makes YOU happy, that's what matters.
Don't share your entire life, your precious moments. Don't get caught up in the rat race that social media life promotes. Because "as American actress Lily Tomlin said: 'The problem with the rat race is that even if you win, you're still a rat'" (Xavier Kreutzer).
🌍️ Finding Your "Self" in Reality
For those who spend too much time on their phones, you may have already faced this uncomfortable question: Who am I?
By consuming content, we end up becoming spectators of our own lives. We forget to do things, to cultivate ourselves through experiences, to discover ourselves. Some people reach their twenties and don't know what they like to do outside of screens?
Try to do this work on yourselves by asking questions like:
Who am I?
What do I like?
Like to do?
Dislike?
Dislike doing?
What do I want to look like in 5 years?
Who do I identify with? Why?
How can I be proud of myself?
Why am I sometimes disappointed in myself?
Social media is a good tool in our daily lives as long as it is controlled. Never forget that behind this desire to "bring us closer," they are mostly companies that monetize your time and attention. I love this quote "Every Swipe, Every Tap is a transaction." Because yes, remember that one thing they're interested in: your digital profile, and that each of your interactions refines your identity and aims to know you better, to "sell" you better.
