Skip to main content

attention hijacking techniques

Image
By


This came up a couple times in my Google+ feed and was then posted on BoingBoing.  All sources I trust (explicitly if not implicitly).

https://medium.com/@tristanharris/how-technology-hijacks-peoples-minds-from-a-magician-and-google-s-design-ethicist-56d62ef5edf3

The article is about different ways that online media "hijack" users attention.
The average person checks their phone 150 times a day. Why do we do this? Are we making 150 conscious choices?
It's been interesting to think these issues over while reading "Metaphatics Metaeverything".  (... I guess this is one benefit of being very slow in reading it -- I can be inspired by a number of different resources as I go along.)

While hardly a scientific or sociocultural breakthrough, one of the main thoughts is that by "aggregating" attention and keeping people involved, social media turns communication into a commodity.   Other recent news is related:
In thinking about what's going on here and its relationship to "fourth quadrant" phatics, it seems relevant to think what corresponding kinds of interactions might have been going on in other societies without these attention aggregating machines.  

For example, the title of the book "A Thousand Plateaus" is inspired by Bateson's anthropological observations in Bali.  (Geertz also references this work.)  Here's how D&G put it:
Gregory Bateson uses the word "plateau" to designate something very special: a continuous, self-vibrating region of intensities whose development avoids any orientation toward a culmination point or external end. Bateson cites Balinese culture as an example: mother-child sexual games, and even quarrels among men, undergo this bizarre intensive stabilization. "Some sort of continuing plateau of intensity is substituted for [sexual] climax," war, or a culmination point. It is a regrettable characteristic of the Western mind to relate expressions and actions to exterior or transcendent ends, instead of evaluating them on a plane of consistency on the basis of their intrinsic value.
Intrinsic value could be another possible (positive) gloss for asemantic in the description of phatic behavior.  Actually, what I think is going on with these "intrinsic values" is something else -- closer to Simondon's theory of information and Sloterdijk's theory of proto-architecture -- namely that phatic behavior does not "inform" the other, but instead has the purpose of giving a mutually-sustaining form to the social order.   Computer scientist Aaron Sloman points out in a couple places that something at least somewhat along these lines is how the word "information" was used in everyday language by people like Jane Austen.

But the "regrettable characteristic" mentioned by D&G seems to be involved in reshaping information-producing systems into profit-making and wealth-concentrating machines.


In some earlier writings I ranted quite a bit about "ethics" and "meta-ethics" and so forth.  I'm not sure if that's worth revisiting.  But it does seem worth keeping in mind the idea of "phatics" when reading the above-linked article on "ethics" -- and also (as a kind of "reading question") to think about how "contact" plays into addictive behaviors.  I plan to expand some of these thoughts in "phatica4" but I didn't want to lose the link above in the meantime.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Metacommunicative cues

By Semiophrenic
In the previous post on Extra channels I finished with a distinction between diachronic and synchronic metacommunication. In this post I'd like to respond to some comments by the co-author of this blog, Joe, in some of his previous posts, by invoking Jurgen Ruesch's concept of metacommunication . Gregory Bateson was interested in thinking about cybernetics, but didn't seem to feel constrained to think about it using a strictly computational or information-theoretic paradigm, while still being informed by the ideas. This gave him the freedom to talk about ideas like "context", "relationship", "learning", and "communication" without needing to define them in precise computational terms. Nevertheless, he handles the ideas fairly rigorously. (Joe, Phatic Workshop: towards a μ-calculus ) Gregory Bateson and Jurgen Ruesch, among many other notable thinkers, were part of the Palo Alto Group of researchers tasked to apply new methods (a
7 comments
Read more

Extra channels

By Semiophrenic
In the following, I would like to clarify the connection between channel and context and concomitantly the difference between metachannel and parachannel . Paul Kockelman urges us "to notice the fundamental similarity between codes and channels" (2011: 725) but instead of that purported fundamental similarity points out the contrast between them. I argue that context , or objects and states of affairs (Bühler 2011[1934]: 35), demonstrate a closer relationship to channel than to code. This is largely because the first three fundamental relations, sender or subject , context or object , and receiver or addressee , belong to Bühler's original organon model while code , contact and message , which were previously implicit in the organon model, are made explicit as additions to the model by Jakobson (1985[1976c]). Thus the most productive approach would be to pair a component from the original organon model with an additional component in the language functions model.
3 comments
Read more