Your attention please
Your attention please
Did you know human attention spans are shrinking?
I recently came across a fascinating article about “Why Everything is Becoming a Game.” This led to going down a rabbit hole of reading and research on what is happening at the intersections of capitalism, technology, and the human brain. Evidence shows that our attention spans are getting smaller.
The Chinese Communist Party was among the first to apply the principles of social media to the real world. In several towns and cities, it began trialing social credit schemes that assign citizens a level of “clout” based on how well they behave. In some areas, such as Rongcheng and Hangzhou, there are public signs that display leaderboards of the highest scoring citizens. The lowest scoring citizens may be punished with credit blacklists or throttled internet speeds.
Meanwhile, in the West, gamification is used to make people obey corporations. Employers like Amazon and Disneyland use electronic tracking to keep score of employees’ work rates, often displaying them for all to see. Those who place high on the leaderboards can win prizes like virtual pets; those who fall below the minimum rate may be financially penalized.
I recently set the goal of refreshing my high school Spanish. The app I selected to help achieve this goal, Duolingo, was disappointing. It felt like a cartoon game, not a serious attempt to become fluent in Spanish.
The reason for this is that everything is becoming a game. The mechanism for this is called gamification.
Gamification is the strategic application of game design elements and principles in non-game contexts to motivate and engage users. This approach aims to enhance systems, services, organizations, and activities by creating experiences similar to those encountered in games. Capitalism ensures that gamification is becoming pervasive. It is being used to make tech addictive. Gamification employs various game mechanics, such as points, badges, leaderboards, and progress bars, to create engaging and motivating experiences. These mechanics function across a wide range of contexts, including learning and development, to foster a sense of enjoyment and accomplishment, helping individuals to take part and achieve desired outcomes.
Gamification exists outside digital experiences. Gamification also functions in analog contexts, such as loyalty programs in coffee shops or educational activities in classrooms. Gamification applications in meat space are not worrisome.
Neuroscience research shows that smartphones are making us stupider, less social, more forgetful, more prone to addiction, sleepless and depressed, and poor at navigation—so why are we giving them to kids?
Gamification techniques leverage people's natural desires for socializing, learning, mastery, competition, achievement, status, self-expression, altruism, or closure. Early strategies often use rewards for players who accomplish desired tasks or competition to engage players, making the rewards for accomplishing tasks visible to other players or providing leaderboards as ways of encouraging competition.
Gamification has two types: structural gamification, which applies game mechanics to existing processes or activities without changing the content itself, and content gamification, which embeds game mechanics directly within the content, making the experience more interactive and engaging. Despite its widespread application and positive effects on engagement and motivation, gamification has faced criticism, particularly regarding its potential to prioritize corporate interests over those of ordinary people and the risk of exploiting users.
The human ability to sustain focus is shrinking. This, at least partially, is a byproduct of gamification — the result of the “greed is good” crowd’s obsession with squeezing every cent out of a gullible, zombie-like public.
Apps and social media are killing our brains’ ability to think critically and to sustain the sort of attention span needed to create new and better ideas about how the world is, and how it can be.
Today, people increasingly live inside their phones, bossed around by notifications, diligently collecting badges and filling progress bars, even though it doesn’t make them happy. Substantial research comprising over a hundred studies finds that prioritizing extrinsic goals over intrinsic goals — doing things to win prizes and achieve high scores rather than for the inherent love of doing them — leads to lower well-being.
Here is a video about gamification.
Gamification becomes problematic fairly quickly when examined. The “rewards” offered are usually quite meaningless. As an example of this, Amazon’s Audible app offers badges that are awarded for various reading milestones.
The problem with these badges is that they have zero value. Which is the general direction technocrat oligarchs are moving the needle of society and culture: into a reality that is less filled with meaning and satisfaction. This new paradigm ensnares humanity in cycles of endless consumption of retail goods. The mechanism is to excite the brain, tricking it into a cycle of click, click, click with a never-ending stream of low-quality content that arouses the built-in pleasure centers inside all of us. By feeding us the equivalent of junk food for the brain, the system reprograms us to always want more. Nothing is ever satisfying because the entire world is now composed of tiny nuggets of meaningless, exciting, emptiness.
In a world where everything is a game with empty boxes for prizes, no one actually wins. The slow zombification of humanity continues, and the self-proclaimed elites claim and hoard more and more of the world’s resources while we destroy the planet all of us depend on for our survival.
If future generations can fix what we broke, I wonder what they will write into the histories they record? Our short-sighted complacency is deeply disturbing. Something has to give. Will it be our species, or the things we value most in life?
Further reading:
Your attention didn't collapse. It was stolen.
The Role of Attention in Learning in the Digital Age