How Corporations Made Your Attention Their Biggest Battlefield and the Victim of You.

Today we live in a high-tech age, where the method of material absorption and media handling has taken a big leap and has greatly changed. There have been some radical changes in digital psychology – where I am personally involved as a researcher; among them, one very significant change has been me analyzing the interrelation of attention and corporate strategies for a very long time already.

In this paper, I will try to argue that the perseverance in attention has been turned into a business treasure and the consequences of such a change in our everyday lives.

The Digital Age and its Shortcut of Longevity

The older I get, the more I wonder how fragile the human information situation is. What has been reaped due to mobile phones, social networking, and instantaneous messaging is the fact that our attention was divided.

The human attention span, which decreased from 12 seconds in 2000 to a mere 8 seconds in 2021 according to the conducted research, has caused the disruption. This disruption has caused a lot of trouble but on the other hand, it has revealed a number of opportunities to some companies that are stealing our attention, which are hardly existent.

Ways of User Attention Acquisition and Retention to Get the Facts of a Corporation

From my research findings, I have extracted several strategic moves that the companies of our time employ to fix our attention span whether we know or don’t realize it:

Personalized content recommendations
Infinite scrolling features
Push notifications
Gamification elements
Artificial scarcity and fear of missing out (FOMO)
These tactics are meant to retain our attention more, sometimes, even without our acknowledgement of this fact.

Psychological and Neurological Influences

The increased competition for our attention, also, has some negative aspects. I have observed that the use of these attention-grabbing devices for an extended period can lead to:

Excessive stress levels.
Inability to focus on one task only.
Reduced capability for doing extended tasks.
Misuse of the structure and function of the brain
Introduction of this subject is vital to the better treatment of our digital lives.

Ethical Issues and Prospects for Regulations

As I become more involved in the topic, I realize that I’m getting more serious thinking about the ethical side of these attention-grabbing strategies. There is a stronger demand to have strict regulations to protect users from deceiving design techniques. Some of the countries’ law-enforcing bodies have already implemented certain measures in order to stop some specific activities like using autoplay for videos or infinite scrolling, which can crush the user’s digital habit formation.

Engagement Predictions and New Patterns

In the future, I think there are going to be several attention-economy trends, such as:
AI will evolve as the leading method for content personalization
The upsurge in the digital detox movement is said to be continuous
Intelligent attention tracking tools will be created
Developers are going to design attention-aware software and applications

Summary

I am of the impression that the market has transformed our attention into a new commodity. To begin with, one of the main tasks in this new era is to expose and interpret the ways in which our attention is subtly but consistently used and manipulated. I hereby urge you, the readers, to start a process of restoring your attention, for instance: by setting your devices to be used a certain amount of hours per day and also practicing mindfulness, to mention but a few. Through knowing the ins and outs of the situation, we can become more conscious media consumers and use our cognitive processes to the utmost.