I have read the essay going around about habitats of attention and multimodal information consumption. It’s compelling, and I laud the sanguine approach. I am also wary of challenging anything a librarian says - I have learned they are so often right - but I think it has two major problems: one around incentive structures and one around media ecology.
Iacono hints at why our digital environments are the way they are, but doesn’t quite come out with it: greed. The companies that have designed our most addictive apps have reaped the rewards. Massive IPOs, rising stock prices, a seemingly infinite market cap. When you can harvest the time of humanity at scale you can get wildly wealthy. They do this while knowingly creating products that are harmful and they do not care.
Who then is going to make these proposed interfaces designed for deep thought? The fact is, they already exist, but not at scale. There are any number of small companies providing low-distraction phones, quiet RSS readers, or research and information tools. There are in fact still companies that sell physical books. These are utterly different kinds of companies though, because they are selling a product.
Slow, deep thought is not a scalable business model because there isn’t a wide demand for it. The market (by which I mean, people’s) demand is for diversion, as L. M. Sacasas gets at in this essay from a few years ago. The moment the steam-powered printing press lowered the cost of producing books, there was demand for penny dreadfuls. The moment we could deliver endless streams of whatever that stuff on tiktok is, there was an attentional market (billions of souls strong) demanding it for hours a day. As much as I would like to think that this is a design problem, my humanist instincts are telling me that we have a human-problem at the heart of all this.
My other issue is around issues raised by McLuhan and Postman: the medium [has an inexorable push toward certain modalities of attention to maximize profit, which given the above description of the financial incentives of screen-based attention means engagement maximization] is the message. Now that some of our biggest and most famous companies don’t sell products, how else are they supposed to operate? Surely we can’t expect them to fix themselves. It also seems highly unlikely that any government could or would seek to impose some kind of design regime. Nor would, I think, we want them to.
The most compelling idea from the essay is the construction of “attention habitats.” This is absolutely true, attention is a designed and cultivated good. It won’t just happen. Distraction is always available. But just like no one is going to clean your room or do your dishes, it seems unlikely to me that there will be a large scale effort to correct our attentional issues. Building and defending your own habitat is required. We need individuals who desire that for it to happen.