The battle for your attention

In 1971, long before anyone had heard of a smartphone, the economist Herbert Simon observed that "a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention." Half a century later, his remark reads less like a prediction than a description of daily life. We wake up to notifications, eat lunch while scrolling and fall asleep with a screen a few centimetres from our faces. Our attention, it turns out, has become one of the most valuable resources on the planet, and a handful of companies are competing fiercely for every second of it.

The logic behind this competition is simple. Most social media platforms are free to use; hence, their real customers are not the people scrolling but the advertisers paying to reach them. The longer we stay, the more data is collected and the more adverts can be sold. In light of this, it is hardly surprising that apps are engineered to be hard to put down. Infinite feeds, autoplay and the small thrill of a new "like" are not accidental features. On the contrary, they are the product of careful testing, designed to exploit the same psychological mechanisms that keep gamblers glued to slot machines.

Admittedly, nobody is forced to open these apps, and some critics argue that the problem is simply one of self-control. There is some truth in this: people who switch off notifications or leave their phones in another room often report feeling calmer and more focused. Nevertheless, framing the issue purely as a matter of personal discipline misses the point. It pits an individual's willpower against teams of engineers whose job is to defeat it, which is not exactly a fair fight.

What is more, the costs extend well beyond wasted hours. A growing body of evidence links heavy, fragmented use of devices to shorter attention spans, poorer sleep and higher levels of anxiety, particularly among teenagers. To be fair, much of this research is correlational, so it cannot prove that phones cause these problems rather than simply accompanying them. Even so, the pattern is consistent enough to take seriously, not least because the habits we form as teenagers tend to follow us into adulthood.

So what can be done? Some countries have begun to treat attention as a public health issue, restricting phones in schools or requiring platforms to offer feeds that are not based on users' personal data. Such measures are widely regarded as a step in the right direction, albeit a modest one. To put it another way, regulation can change the rules of the game, but it cannot play the game for us.

Ultimately, reclaiming our attention may require a cultural shift as much as a technical one. Just as societies gradually came to see smoking as harmful rather than glamorous, we may one day look back on our constant scrolling with a mixture of amusement and alarm. Until then, the least we can do is notice who profits every time we reach for our phones, and ask ourselves who is really in control.