The Internet is an attention machine
Hi Friends,
Something that I think about often is my relationship with machines. I spend a lot of my time communing with the machine I’m writing this article on. She (it?) is beautiful and powerful and has witnessed many of my biggest accomplishments over the past six years we’ve spent together. My attention is drawn back to my machine time and time again. Even when we part, we come back together again, experiencing this life together. And I have to wonder… am I in a relationship with a machine?
I’m not talking about a romantic relationship, although those are becoming more normal recently. No, it’s more similar to the relationship I have with my favorite barista at the coffee shop down the street, or the relationship I have with my fellow students at school. My attention is there, even if the connection between us isn’t strong. And it’s impossible to ignore that my attention is captured by this machine, and my other smaller screened machines, at a much higher rate than the actual humans I am lucky enough to walk through life with.
Recently actor Gabriel Basso spoke up online about why he deleted his social media. He was scrolling on social media and saw a man on the top of Mount Everest. After watching the video, he had a meta-moment where he realized he should not be seeing this moment, especially on a screen.
He said on the Tonight Show: “I shouldn’t know what that looks like. The view from the top of Mount Everest. Is that not insane to anyone else? If you make it to the top of Mount Everest, that should be yours. He literally stepped over bodies. That’s all people wanted to see. And now I’m sitting here going huh-huh. That’s wack!”
And you know what? He’s right. On the Internet, we can “experience” anything. While laying awkwardly on our couch with the blue light glow of our phones in our faces, we’re scrolling through lives with a speed never seen before in human history. And it’s so wack! Watching that video will never give us the experience of climbing a mountain. We’ll never know what it feels like to train for something like that. And the reward is… a dopamine hit?
Most of the time spent online is spent absorbing information produced by others. A person opens a phone and enters a stream of images, opinions, news, advice, and arguments that move past the eye faster than the mind can fully absorb them. This experience can feel productive because so much information appears to pass through the mind in a short amount of time. Yet the structure of the environment favors speed and novelty over depth. One idea replaces another before the first has had time to settle into understanding.
What appears to be distraction on the surface is in many ways a form of extraction. Attention becomes a resource harvested by technological systems in much the same way industrial economies once harvested forests, rivers, and mineral deposits. Each platform competes to capture as much of that resource as possible.
From an ecological perspective, the pattern is familiar. Extractive systems concentrate resources in ways that weaken the larger environment over time. Forests become fragile when too many trees are removed. Soil loses fertility when nutrients are stripped faster than they can be replenished. Rivers collapse when fish are harvested faster than they can reproduce. Attention may behave in a similar way. When it is captured and fragmented continuously, the deeper capacities of the mind begin to erode.
In such an environment the mind slowly adapts. Attention begins to behave less like a tool for perception and more like a consumer moving through an endless marketplace of information. While traveling South America this January, I spent a lot of time thinking about the ecology of attention.
I continue to noodle over where my attention lies, and what I’m doing to maintain autonomy over it. Attention behaves much like a resource within an ecosystem. Whatever receives sustained attention grows stronger and more complex, while what receives only scattered attention remains shallow and poorly understood.
Most people now recognize the feeling of losing an hour (or five) to that weird liminal space that opens up when you space out on your phone. To me it feels similar to that moment while driving when you realize you haven’t really been paying attention but you’ve still been going through all the motions, speeding up and breaking at the right times. It’s like we disappear, and the mechanical aspect of our bodies takes over. You open your phone for a moment and surface again much later with the strange sense that your attention has been scattered across dozens of places without ever truly landing anywhere.
Anthropologist Robin Dunbar spent much of his career studying the cognitive limits of human social life. By examining patterns in primate group sizes and human communities, Dunbar proposed that the human brain can comfortably maintain around 150 stable social relationships. Within that broader network exist smaller circles of intimacy composed of family members, close friends, and trusted collaborators.
The exact number matters less than the principle behind it. Human beings have a limited capacity for sustained attention when it comes to relationships. Each meaningful connection requires time, memory, emotional investment, and repeated interaction. Relationships are not simply ideas in the mind but living patterns that must be nourished through attention. If we’re spending a huge amount of our attention directed at machines, then this entire system needs to be reevaluated.
I’ve begun to wonder… should we start counting our relationships with machines in this number? Our connection with social media algorithms?
It feels insane to suggest, yet impossible to ignore once you start thinking about it. Because we are in relationship with these man-made machines, even if we don’t want to be. They’re extracting huge swathes of our attention by design. And there is a very good chance that our human relationships are suffering because of it. As my time on my machine increases, my time with my ~150 connections decreases.
In a few years, Dunbar’s research will have to be repeated. I have a feeling our connections will be far more limited, replaced with parasocial connections made through screens. I have no idea if this is a good thing or a bad thing. My gut instinct is that this issue goes beyond duality. We’re simply living in a new age, that looks radically different than the world I was born into.
The challenge of living well in the digital age may not be learning how to escape technology altogether. The internet remains an extraordinary tool for communication and learning. The deeper challenge lies in learning how to place attention wisely in a world where so many systems compete to capture it.
Until next time,
Char
