The Right to Attention in an Age of Distraction

In the American legal system, we have a concept known as the "eggshell plaintiff rule", which addresses heterogeneity among tort victims (i.e., victims of car accidents or other negligent acts) This rule says that if you injure someone and it turns out that they have some peculiar bodily weakness (like a skull as thin as an eggshell, hence the name), you are responsible for whatever injuries result. It doesn't matter that the magnitude of the injuries was totally unforeseeable.

Although this rule offers one way to handle heterogeneity among people, it only kicks in after a recognizable tort has occurred. In the case of attentional heterogeneity, the threshold question of what type of distraction is too distracting is at issue. So it seems like it would be very difficult to figure out a workable standard here.

That said, I'm very interested in the topic, and actually recently released a new feature in my Chrome extension [1] that visually dims distracting elements on the page. I do hope that we can find a way to cut down on distractions — I'm just not sure a new legal right is the most likely path.

1: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/beeline-reader/ifj...

IOW, I wonder if it is sane to restrict these or just let people figure it out: I remember a time when everything on facebook was about zynga games and then they just went away.

I mean the ability to focus on a given task persistently has produced so many good results: Why wouldn't we want to hone and develop that by providing as many distractions as possible?

I strongly agree with the author about the importance of an individual autonomy over attention. I also agree with the author that these tools create an opportunity to empower individual autonomy to a degree never seen before. And I get out of bed everyday to make sure that these tools are used that way.

My tools:

http://usedopamine.com/

http://youjustneedspace.com/

And in cafe settings where you might be working, there's the problem of people who talk on their phones, as well as not silencing their phone, so you hear a "ding" every time they get a text, etc.

It quickly reminded me of Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Deep Work by Cal Newport. It was no surprised to find these people again in your article. In one article of mine, I have reflected on this topic as well and concluded how important attention (for instance created through deep work) can lead to a satisfied life (because of flow). [0]

Can you recommend further reading material on this topic?

[0] https://www.robinwieruch.de/lessons-learned-deep-work-flow/

For example, lets assume the consciousness is an illusion, a sort of biological trick of evolution. In that case, I'm not sure why we couldn't say that all the stimuli from advertisements, Facebook, Twitter, etc. are equal in value to "focused conscious awareness". They are stimuli of a different sort but qualitatively no different than the stimuli of "focused conscious awareness". I'm not sure why we would inherently assume that "focused conscious awareness" is of greater value. There are tons of people now who are living in a permanently distracted state and they seem to have a conscious experience that is not qualitatively different than other people's. They don't slip into a coma or get concussions or die.

Heck, maybe distraction is a better state than attention. After all, don't people complain of headaches when they focus on a problem for too long?

This is precisely what is wrong with capitalism right here - the extraction of value from an unwilling participant. (Please note that this is not equivalent to saying capitalism is completely invalid.)

It's no good to argue people agreed to this when signing up for a bank account of whatever. People need banking facilities and other services; few have the time, inclination, or education to read the absurdly long contractual terms foisted upon them by most service providers, and in any case such contracts are contracts of adhesion rather than negotiations, and it's very difficult for participants in the market to make direct comparisons between competing offerings right now. What's happening here is a form of legal theft of a person's time and attention.

As someone who suffers from severe ADHD, I particularly resent this. It's hard to explain the interior experience to someone who doesn't have an executive function disorder, but think of the magazine rack in a convenience store, with all the photographs, fonts, colors and baity headlines. You see a bunch of magazines, I see a crowd of people screaming at me and causing me to temporarily forget why I walked into the store. Over the years I've had to evolve strategies to deal with this sort of thing, like choosing my route through stores I visit regularly and pre-emptively controlling the direction of my gaze to minimize unwelcome distractions.

Now, I don't blame the store owners or the magazine publishers for this - it's very annoying, but a marketplace is a busy environment where sellers (or brands) compete for buyers' attention, and it's not their fault that I suffer from a disability. But when I'm dealing with a bank or whoever, their underlying business model is the cake and the extra money they make from advertising to a captive audience is icing on top - icing that is basically purchased at the cost of my convenience and train of thought. And even with ad blockers and so on, I'm sure you can easily think of many ways that distractions are imposed on unwilling information consumers, and how those distractions are engineered to be as unpredictable and disruptive as possible so as to capture people's attention.

Now, all of us have the experience of being distracted by things when we're trying to concentrate. But when you have an executive function disorder, the problem is twofold; not only is your attention distracted, but it's a lot of extra work to control your own reaction to the distraction. I have to do that work in public or in a shared workplace, unless I have very tolerant colleagues indeed. But maintaining that control costs effort; when I'm alone or feeling relaxed at home, those control mechanisms are not fully operational, and so an unexpected distraction can trigger an outsize response, which is itself distracting and stressful. Say you're reading an article on screen and you're a couple of hundred words in when a pop-up fades in to invite you to purchase a subscription or somesuch (note, please, the engineering of attention here; hook the reader with the content of that article in order to leverage that focused attention to the advert that is slipped in without warning). You may find this irritating enough that it makes you roll you eyes or frown while you click it away. If it happens to me at the wrong time or too frequently, I'm likely to find myself suddenly screaming FUCK OFF!!! at the screen, which is itself distracting, and now my focus has not merely been interrupted but shattered, and I have a surge of adrenaline with the pounding heartbeat, upset stomach, cold sweats and so on.

Lest this seem like an extended complaint about the world just being too damn complex, one of the odd things about ADHD is that in some contexts it lets me function better than neurotypical people. In a quiet environment like a library or when I'm painting, I can focus in total concentration for hours on end, because I've built up those mental muscles for dealing with a noisy distracting world. Equally, in what are very high-stress environments for other people I feel quite at home - I am that calm and clear-thinking person that you want to show up at the scene of a car accident or other dangerous situation, because those situations are not really any worse to me than having to stand in line at a 7-11 counter. In fact, they're better(!) because I don't have to act as if nothing is happening, something actually is happening and the external world is matched up well with my internal world. In those situations I can assess risk, tell people what to do, get people out of cars without injuring them further, move them to safety, call emergency services, and basically manage everything with no more anxiety than making coffee. Had I had this insight and resources when I was younger I'd probably have gone into photojournalism or something; I've been in several riots, and though I don't participate in them I have to say that I enjoy such chaotic situations rather than finding them frightening or confusing.

Getting back to the captive attention situation which launched this thought, I'd like to conclude with one of my tediously frequent ethical pleas: developers, please consider the implications of what you are being asked to work on. When the business/marketing people ask you to help them leverage the user's attention away from service delivery and toward advertising, you are the only person in the room with the opportunity to speak up for the consumer, and to query whether interrupting them is actually an effective and sustainable strategy, or more likely to drive people away. If you are being asked to do something that you know is going to make the user experience worse, consider asking or encouraging the business people to quantify the aggregated time cost to the user vs the hoped-for profit to your employer, even if you're a solo developer and you are your own boss.

At the very least, ask them how much revenue this strategy is expected to generate, and demand that they furnish you with that information rather than just being a passive agent of their desires. You may be able to suggest more effective and less intrusive ways to create value for both seller and buyer, which is the good, ethical kind of business that makes the world a better place. On the other hand, if you are down with extracting as much value for the consumer as quickly as possible and then moving on (unlikely if you've bothered to read this far, but possible), then you are a Bad Person and you should feel bad about yourself, if only because your selfish tendencies are likely to painfully rebound on you at some point, and changing your outlook may well prove to be more sustainable than making a quick buck.

Thanks for reading.

Sam Harris and Tristan Harris recently had a (pretty long) podcast related to this subject. Well worth listening to if you have the time.

Right to attention indeed...