Your Attention (And Self-Will) Is Depleting: A Think Piece
What do you do when you pay attention? What do you pay for? One can argue that you pay with all the things you could have done instead: the actions you didn’t take, the books you didn’t read, and the goals you didn’t attempt to complete. William James describes the “effort of attention” as “the essential phenomenon of will.”
In the 21st century, we have found ourselves in a world where our attention is capitalized, and companies compete for it. We are the products, not just as people, but as citizens, too. “In order to win the fierce global competition for our attention, design was forced to speak to the lowest parts of us and to exploit our cognitive vulnerabilities,” writes James Williams. Every notification, algorithm, and interface design of social media and the apps we consume has been created with the goal of capturing the maximum amount of attention possible. If we consider James’ concept of attention as the essential phenomenon of will, persuasive and manipulative design is limiting our agency and exercise of free will. What does this even mean?
The Social Media User
“Doomscrolling” is a modern pastime, with broad implications whose long-term effects we’re still unsure of. What we do know is that the average Gen Z user spends about 2 hours and 21 minutes a day on social media, and 9 hours per day on screens overall, according to a 2025 report on Gen Z social media usage. During this time, what happens? Think of your last scroll session—what do you remember?
If you can’t remember anything, you’re not alone; this is a common experience among most social media users. But here’s probably what happened during that time:
Your worldview and ideologies were continuously reinforced. Your algorithms know you, they know what you like, what you’re interested in, where you live, and what you’re willing to consume. The algorithm probably even recognizes that you watched 20 minutes’ worth of sourdough starter videos out of curiosity and then, when you realized you don’t have the time or energy for it, they stopped feeding you that content. If you consume content about celebrity drama, the algorithm starts to learn whose side you’re on and continues to reinforce that opinion. Every big or small opinion, hobby, or worldview gets continuously reinforced by these algorithms, creating a sense of inclusion and belonging, even if you didn’t even interact with anyone. We are led to believe that more people share this worldview that we have than actually probably do, and we are further separated from opinions and outlooks that challenge, contradict, or enlighten our own. While the internet and social media create access for us to view content from around the world, potentially diversifying our understanding of other humans, culture, and life, it doesn’t give us all that. That’s not profitable. What is profitable is emotional responses. Even that AI-voiced Reddit story of the outrageous violations of social norms is begging for you to be aggravated enough to find the second (and third, fourth, fifth...) part.
“There is no such thing as neutral technology,” writes Williams. This technology wants your attention, time, and emotion. The more time you spend rage-watching, reading humorous or malicious comments, the more information you give to companies to understand how to further monopolize your and others’ attention. This technology doesn’t want you to be happy, it wants to give you a false sense of happiness through dopamine bumps when your worldview is reinforced by others or when a friend likes your photo.
https://sgu.ac.id/the-decline-of-attention-span-in-the-digital-era/
The Democratic Citizen
Rousseau famously discusses the implications and necessity for “will” in a democracy in “A Discourse on Political Economy.” This will is necessary to be able to properly act as a citizen and to understand the good for one’s self and also the collective good. The “collective will” should be free from the interference of actors that do not have the collective good in mind for society; the collective should be free from the manipulation of their opinions. He argues that collective decisions can depart from the general will of the people if “misled by particular interests... by the influence and persuasiveness of a few clever men.”
The interactions between citizens and our political sphere are largely mediated through platforms, whether this be getting news from social media like TikTok, X, and Instagram, or even Google presenting a curated list of news sources when you try to read or research on a certain political issue. Algorithms, engagement, and companies essentially predetermine any of the information we receive, based on information they have collected from us as individuals and from our communities and countries.
This persuasive technology has its own interests that are much different than our own. As mentioned previously, it seeks to monopolize our attention, emotion, and then profit. The content it provides us is to fulfill their goal, not ours, as citizens that need to be informed voters or political citizens. Meanwhile, the CEOs of these persuasive technology platforms are having dinners with the Trump administration, representing a conflict of interest, as their role is currently mediating our political communication. If we cannot properly exert our democratic will due to the interference of persuasive unregulated technology, we can’t act as deliberative, well-informed citizens in elections.
The Self
We are in a much different world than our ancestors could conceptualize: a world with an abundance of information rather than a scarcity. Scholars such as Herbert Simon in the 1970s theorized that the problem with an abundance of information isn’t that our attention or brains would be “occupied” or “used up” but instead that we will lose control of our attentional processes.
For centuries, religion and culture acted as “constraints” — a disciplinary aspect to our lives where meditative actions and procedures allowed us to practice self-restraint, self-regulation, and boundaries. With the implementation of concepts of self-will, personal freedoms, and capitalism, the rituals of discipline and self-regulation have become increasingly rare. “When you dismantle existing boundaries in your environment, it frees you from their limitations, but it requires you to bring your own boundaries where you didn’t have to before,” writes Williams.
Neil Levy, senior research fellow at the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, states, “Autonomy is developmentally dependent upon the environment: we become autonomous individuals, able to control our behavior in the light of our values, only if the environment in which we grow up is suitably structured to reward self-control.” The digital environment we live in does not provide any reward to the use of one’s self-control, instead it feeds us with meaningless “dopamine bumps” that reward further consumption and distraction. Digital platforms have the ability to persuade our attention away from our personal goals toward platforms and digital infrastructures that aren’t designed to help us achieve those. Williams asks us to think of a GPS; we don’t necessarily know where we’re supposed to go, but this technology is supposed to help us. But if this GPS continues getting us lost, would we still use it? Why would we continue to use technology that takes us to a different, worse place, than we want to go?
What now?
Our attention is capitalized; we’re losing the ability to exercise self-will. What do we do?
Well, the first step is recognizing that there’s a problem.
Individually, we can attempt to exercise our freedom of attention by paying attention to our personal goals and values. Of course, this doesn’t necessarily mean deleting all social media or vowing to stop using persuasive technology. Just catching yourself doomscrolling and deciding to focus on your personal hobbies, writing that paper, cooking that recipe you’ve been meaning to make, or finally going to the gym, all are activities that actually benefit you.
The best way to advocate for better systems is to divert our attention to the persuasive technology companies themselves that prioritize profit over the well-being of their users. While we engage in culture wars and finger-pointing at people’s differentiating political views, we should be pointing our fingers at the companies that profit from this anger and participate in culture wars. Pressure the companies to recognize the rights of users, to protect our data, and provide transparency in how our data is collected and used. This is a long road of advocacy, and little improvements have been made, but these companies will continue to engage in these practices until they are forced not to, likely only through policy and social pressure.
