Time Crunch

Tuesday, October 22, 2024

Time Crunch

Status update: Having to cancel things in order to deal with the attention economy.

Some things are easy to cancel—at least for me. For instance, all the Meta products. I’ve always had a native dislike for Facebook. Facebook and its partner Instagram have always just rubbed me the wrong way.

The term “attention economy” was very apt for Facebook from the first I ever read the expression. From the start years ago, for instance, Facebook would continue to send me email notifications of other people’s “activity” even after I specifically told it not to in its own settings. I don’t like those notifications, and because of that, I don’t want them as text messages or emails. But to give me the choice to opt out—and then ignore it? Unreal.

As for another subscription: it’s probably been ten years since I’ve had cable TV. When I dropped it, I took advantage of the Amazon Prime’s streaming content. It didn’t take very long before I got used to having $100 a month less in expenses—and wasting less time trying to find something to watch. The cable TV system has long offered many more channels than any given user wants, leading to decision paralysis: maybe 500 shows on different channels at once, but the feeling there’s nothing on to watch. Streaming was cheaper and easier, especially when Amazon’s catalog was still small.

Freed after a lifetime habit of TV watching, I figured I finally could read books and such, including independent online media content that required no subscriptions at first. While I wasn’t a big on periodicals, when Substack came around with The Dispatch, I found their $10 a month price acceptable. It was media content I could at least try to keep up with, including the comment section. There were other Substack newsletters I tried, mainly unpaid.

The amount of content for the price on most of these individually made for a decent value. The problem was that there was too much. I like to read a bit in the morning, but I’m looking for brevity. In the morning I’m about getting things done that require physical activity, not sitting still to read long articles.

As in other areas, life evolves and interests drift. And when it comes to media, we are nowadays inundated. There’s so much available, much of it for free or at a relatively low price. Most of us in can remember the late-20th-century media environment just before the internet, when media encompassed local radio and only a handful of television channels, plus your local newspaper.

The personal space now dominated by social media was taken up by civic involvement and church. There’s been an ongoing mystery as to why the 20th century’s civic organizations like the Lions’ Club, the Freemasons, and local bowling leagues dwindled: maybe it was just simple displacement. None of those things have the urgency of notifications from Facebook or your news alert app, and so you start to think they aren’t important at all. They didn’t have the urgency and global reach that online interactions offer.

At any rate, I recently decided to cut a few subscriptions that I enjoyed but never had enough time for. Unlike canceling a subscription out of annoyance, it was canceling out of lack of time. That is to say, if I’m going to try to read longer works for X number of hours each day, I have to budget that time between books and newsletters. These days I find books more engaging, more satisfying.

We’re all dealing with the conflict between things around us demanding to be looked at, and the hours there are to get things done. Our time is constrained. Meanwhile, there’s a surfeit of diversions. Their urgency can feel stifling at times—even downright oppressive.

Today, we feel stressed out by the demands of the attention economy. We are stressed trying to figure out what amusements to cut out, whereas our ancestors had to worry about such things as growing and harvesting the food they’d need year round on nature’s brutally rigid timeline. But they didn’t have to contend with people whose business models were based on getting and holding their attention. Did they feel as overwhelmed as we do now? They had death and starvation breathing down their necks; we’re facing the neediness of clever computer algorithms.

We live under the impression that we’re more stressed than they were. We have to deal with the urgent social pressures of our fellow creatures, after all. They merely had to deal with thinking of how to stay alive for the next month, season, or year. Just because today’s pressures are psychological doesn’t make them any less onerous.