How money influences what and how we browse
Photo from Wikimedia Commons
What is the first thing you do when you wake up?
Alike me, most people reach for their smartphones. I pull my iPhone out of the charger, touch the home button to unlock it, then my brain goes on autopilot mode to check my email, Facebook, Instagram, Safari, Amazon, and various other apps. These platforms allow me to see what’s happening with my friends, the markets, the news, yet what is simultaneously happening is the recording of my patterns and screen behaviour. What I check, which I location I check from, how often I check, this is all being noted down and compiled into data.
The reality is that anyone who uses the internet has automatically and unknowingly sold their attention to internet companies. These companies harvest user data, and write algorithms to retain users’ attention according to their preferences, clicks and purchases. Money talks when it comes to the public’s attention, because media outlets purposely buy and sell attention. Subsequently, these companies sell the harvested data to “attention merchants”. Once these attention merchants have attained users’ attention, they can easily manipulate their targeted audiences’ attention and shepherd their activity.
Columbia Law School’s Tim Wu writes in his book, The Attention Merchants, that: “We've already seen the attention merchant's basic modus operandi: draw attention with apparently free stuff and then resell it. but a consequence of that model is a total dependence on gaining and holding attention”. Wu describes the “race to the bottom” as a pandemic, because merchants haul in attention with seemingly free goods, then subsequently resell that same material. Once this model is embedded in audiences’ minds, these attention merchants have slyly grasped their target audiences. They have the power to hook in audiences like a drug would to addicts, but instead audiences become information addicts of the digital age.
Despite the extreme violation of privacy, the attention merchants will do anything in their power to sustain this “race to the bottom”, for example, “AOL’s business team began coming up with ways to cash in on “big data” they had collected… (how they) sold its users’ mailing addresses to direct mail companies”. This explains why whenever we go on Facebook or Google, we’ll see familiar content that include ads from the websites we’d browsed days ago, or the products on Amazon that we had been browsing. This is especially harmful to inexperienced online users, who are unaware of sponsored social media, advertisements and brands. They are bombarded with too much information, and are unable to differentiate what is or isn’t promoted. This “race to the bottom” proliferates an oligarchy run by a small handful of providers and carriers who subliminally have control over what we do on the internet. Whichever bids the highest wins the most data.
Additionally, most of the “news” reported are simply poor reverberations from other news sources, which poses a danger of echoing fake news. This kind of particular data sorting and feeding creates filter bubbles and echo chambers, which ultimately dissuades online users to breed empathy and understand the alternative. Consequently, this creates a spiralling effect of users going against the opposition more ferociously. Once they find a niche where others only agree with them, there is little willpower and motivation to leave their own bubbles, as exemplified by how Facebook users “unfriend” other users whose views they disagree with. A solution to bridging these gaps would be to read news sources that encompass all views, and to be open to discourse despite how uncomfortable leaving one’s echo chamber might be. And most of all, to be vigilant of what and how we browse.