033: Taking Control of Your Attention




Uncommon Sense: the This is True Podcast show

Summary: In This Episode: “Your attention please!” Isn’t that what everyone seems to want online? They call you “eyeballs”. Meanwhile, “they” say our attention span is getting shorter and shorter. But I don’t think that’s true for people with Uncommon Sense. Here’s a way to ignore the din and instead find the things that you are actually interested in online.<br> <br> <a class="twitter-share-button" href="https://twitter.com/share?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">Tweet</a><br> <a href="#transcript">Jump to Transcript</a><br> <a href="https://thisistrue.com/category/podcasts/">How to Subscribe and List of All Episodes</a><br> Show Notes<br> <br> * Here’s more about <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcus_Aurelius">Marcus Aurelius</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoicism">Stoicism</a>, and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtue_ethics">Virtue Ethics</a>.<br> * I mentioned my ADD. If you haven’t heard that episode, it’s <a href="https://thisistrue.com/podcast-013-add-made-true-possible/">013: How ADD Made TRUE Possible</a><br> <br> <a name="transcript"></a><br> Transcript<br> Welcome to Uncommon Sense. I’m Randy Cassingham.<br> What is it pretty much every website wants — besides some way to make money, I mean. They want “eyeballs,” otherwise known as visitors. But, yeah, then what they really want is for those visitors to click an ad …which takes them away from their site, but hey: at least they made a few pennies from your visit. And to get more and more eyeballs, they resort to all sorts of tricks to get you in there. There’s a Top 10 list of manipulations they use, and you won’t believe #4!<br> As an aside: the This is True web site currently doesn’t have ads, because it’s reader-supported. That’s what the Contribution button is for in the sidebar.<br> Eyeballs. There is a web site that’s taken this concept to a high art. Who gets the most eyeballs these days?<br> Already have your answer? Here’s mine: Facebook. And what is the essence of Facebook? Its “news feed.” The key word in that concept isn’t “news”: for the most part, it’s not. It’s whatever your friends decide to post, and when you look at those posts objectively, what percentage of their ramblings add value to your life? Worse, the cost of seeing that stream is: ads. Lots and lots of ads. That’s what has made Facebook worth, and this is after lots of bad publicity over their wanton privacy violations, they’re still worth more than a half trillion dollars. That’s the market capitalization value of their stock. Why? Because they’ve figured out how to not only get eyeballs, but get them to come back again and again, and stay for a long time — so they can click, or at the very least see, more ads.<br> So if the key word isn’t “news,” then it pretty much has to be “feed.”<br> Your feed is just that: it’s feeding stuff to you based on an algorithm that is tuned to addict you. To what? More feed, and thus more ads. It’s downright Pavlovian: you post something, and you get a “Like” or even a “Love”! Or something funny gets a “HaHa”. And the natural reaction is, “What else can I post to get Likes or other reactions?!” And sadly, so many posts these days want a different reaction: “Angry.” Is all the rancor there sapping your soul yet?<br> Facebook is a media company that doesn’t even have to create the content. You do, and your “friends” do, to “feed” to each other what they think will garner reactions to feed their addiction. And, of course, Facebook is populating that content with massive numbers of ads.<br> And that feed is what gets the bulk of your attentio...