The Data-Attention Imperative

Abstract

Today’s digital technologies are transforming the quantification, allocation and monetization of human time and attention. Motivated by a variety of technical and social pressures, the average American spends more than eight hours a day consuming digital media on their computer or phone. Social media overuse has been held responsible for a teenage mental health crisis, a rise in teen suicides and a more general degradation of collective attention processes essential in a political economy and democracy. In the midst of the current attentional crisis, existing bodies of law such as privacy, antitrust and free speech fail to assist us in grappling with concerns about technology overuse, addiction, technology-mediated attention disorders and the pervasive degradation of our individual and collective attention. It is tempting to reduce these disorders to problems of individual choice, delegating solutions to market-based tools or the exercise of individual data protection and speech rights. Instead, the answer requires moving past simplistic views of the market as a self-correcting device guided by individual preferences, and of data within them.

This paper focuses on the role of data in producing a progressive thinning, stretching and erosion of human attention. It argues that understanding the relation between datafication and attention can pave the way toward better law and policy in this area. The business models of social media platforms such as Facebook, YouTube or TikTok, which I call attention platforms, are organized around a cyclical imperative. They are driven to increase engagement and attentional supply to produce data analytics and generate profits, and at the same time they accumulate and use data to design more addictive and engaging platform experiences for users. Unlike traditional attention business models such as the broadcast or print media, attention platforms rely on reinforcement learning techniques, personalization, and individualized content generation to produce a continuous spiral of data, addictive behavior and revenue extraction. I call this reinforcing accumulation logic the data-attention imperative. The imperative for companies is to accumulate these two factors of production, data and attention, regardless of the human consequences.

The joint drive to accumulate data and attention suggests that regulating data and addressing digital attention disorders are inseparable problems that require a joint approach to data, content and infrastructural regulation. The paper contests approaches that single out data as an object of scrutiny and regulation. Instead, it considers data a mere material representation of a social and infrastructural context that itself needs regulating. Data acquires the shape, functions and purposes that are projected onto it by those who collect, store, process, organize, and use it in given contexts. In the attention platform context, data must not be regulated as an isolated object. The key focus of regulators must be on data’s role in translating (eroding and commodifying) human attention and behavior into monetizable classifications and predictions. To overcome the limitations of existing regulatory approaches, the Article proposes a practice of regulatory and infrastructural experimentalism. Experimentalism aims to overcome the default power of digital platform actors over human data and attention. Based on a three-fold agenda which encompasses regulating platform infrastructures, redirecting internal platform governance efforts and inserting friction in digital design, the paper aims to bring attention platform ecosystems in greater alignment with the interests of society.