Individuals Have 2.88 Million Focus Items to Spend Per Day
Humans can only momentarily focus attention on one item, or loci, at a time. Since It is unusual to spend just 1 second looking at an item, humans on average use about 960 attention loci in the average 16-hour waking day.
Breaking this awareness down to 20 millisecond duration of a saccade – the flickering eye movements you use to scan your environment, which is processed in the brain to create continuously visible space – sets the lower temporal bound of human attention. Therefore the average individual will experience 2.88 million attention loci per day.
The brain assembles attention loci into shapes, and those shapes are laced together like a string of Christmas lights. So each set of bundle of loci connects you to something in the world: another person, place or thing.
How humans connect those loci with past experiences determines how their lives are shaped. That means the people you bring into your life, the books you read, the hobbies you take up, the skills you develop, the work you do ... each of these can be visualized as a web of connections between you and something or someone, woven from innumerable strands of the attention you pay to them.
It is said that you are what you do. But before you can do something, you must pay attention to it – more fundamentally, you are what you attend to. Just as what you attend to defines you, so your attention defines your world, not only in terms of what you look at, what you notice, but in terms of what you do in the world.
So for an induvial to have any deep, lasting effect on the world, he or she must devote considerable attention to some aspect of it: you must concentrate, wrapping your life-string around some specific phenomenon, drawing yourself into it and it into yourself, and thereby gaining the ability to shape it as it shapes you.
If your attention loci are constantly getting captured by random, unrelated phenomena, you lose the ability to have any real effect on anything. You get lost in the minutia, and your life fails to take on any sort of definite shape. You become just like a loose string flapping in the wind.
If someone else chooses the majority of the phenomena that plug into your attention loci, you lose the ability to choose the shape of your life – your life instead gets knotted up into whatever shape that someone – or something – wants it to take.
You only have so many attention loci to use, how you use them determines the shape of your life and the platforms want all of them. The Internet is a corporate machine that eats human attention and converts it into shareholder value. To maximize customer attention loci, app design teams use powerful tools to create products that provide meaningful and relevant engagement for the user.
The more engagement, the greater the corporate profit. Advertising-based business models get paid by locking down eyeballs. The internet platforms prosper to whatever degree they can colonize their users’ attention.
Modern life is now dominated by individuals in close proximity, who are often completely sealed off from human interaction by the use of their devices. Whether at a cafe, a bar, on the subway, in a shopping mall, or any other setting, there’s usually no one to talk to and nothing to actually do. So you just pull out your own device and become invisible.
The Internet is an endless stream of content. It contains the sum total of human knowledge, updated every microsecond with every additional byte contributed by every one of its 8.58 billion human nodes. There’s always something else to look at, read, watch, listen to, always someone else to chat on. The Internet doesn’t care what it feeds you. Although individual actors on the Internet may care a great deal about something, the system only cares you are being constantly fed, and feeds you more content.
In the coming era of the Large Language Models, referred inappropriately to as ‘Artificial Intelligence, we will not really be able to know if the people we’re talking to on the Internet are even humans.
There is lots of hype surrounding this remarkable new technology, but the thought that we might be getting tricked into mistaking silicon-driven algorithmic bots for the beauty of genuine human interactions will eventually lead to outright rage.
Seeing a room full of people already bent over their devices is pathetic, but how much more degrading will it be when our 2.88 million attention loci are being completely absorbed to make the quarterly earnings for teams of sociopathic professional managers.
The rebellion against the virtual life offered by the machine is already beginning to bubble. The different forms of the rejection will be diverse. But like the glorious loci addictions to newspapers, radio, TV, and cable that suddenly went into rapid abandonment mode, the era of the Internet is now on the countdown to irrelevancy.