Coincidences: How We Experience the Attention Economy
It is something which has happened to all of us. As we infinitely scroll through the sea of content on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn or TikTok etc, an advert will show itself, pushing a product or service we were recently talking about or looking up. This happened at home the other day when my girlfriend was keeping up to date with all things Instagram, where an advert for a particular brand of fruit jelly (or jello for my American readers) strolled onto her screen.
She showed me, saying how it was funny that we buy these every week, and have done so since the start of summer, and there it was, on her phone screen. Being the cynic that I am, the first thought was how did the algorithm know that we buy this product? We sat for a moment and then she realised that we’ve been using our phones to do the weekly food shop at the supermarket, using an app and scanning the products ourselves in a quest to save money through the deals presented on the app.
Somehow — I say somehow because I don’t know exactly how it all works — the data collected from our weekly shop had been seized upon by Instagram, which ultimately, as we can all attest to, pushes personalised adverts through its platform. As was said above, this happens all the time, to all of us, but for those who aren’t as cynical as I, or those who affix their finest tinfoil hat when thinking about the surveillance state, this phenomena manifests itself as a far more whimsical entity. After all, it’s a coincidence… isn’t it?
According to the Cambridge University Dictionary, there are two elements to the definition of coincidence, stating that it’s ‘an occasion when two or more similar things happen at the same time, especially in a way that is unlikely and surprising’ — like when you go for a walk and bump into your friends who are doing the same — or related to ‘chance and luck’. It is the latter element of this which is of interest here.
A common experience is the feeling that our phones are listening to us, as this article illustrates, when the author recalls a time when “a friend and I were sitting at a bar, iPhones in pockets, discussing our recent trips in Japan and how we’d like to go back. The very next day, we both received pop-up ads on Facebook about cheap return flights to Tokyo”. However, our phones aren’t perpetually recording our conversations, but rather, that there are certain ‘trigger’ words — ‘hey Alexa’ or ‘hey Google’ for instance — which activate your phone’s microphone through an app. According to Dr Peter Henway
From time to time, snippets of audio do go back to [other apps like Facebook’s] servers but there’s no official understanding what the triggers for that are […] Whether it’s timing or location-based or usage of certain functions, [apps] are certainly pulling those microphone permissions and using those periodically. All the internals of the applications send this data in encrypted form, so it’s very difficult to define the exact trigger.”
Whilst this is inherently problematic our phone’s microphone is not the only means of capturing information and producing data and, thus, insight from it. Rather, the more of our lives are made ‘smart’, the greater the number of sources of information for those who seek to accumulate it; the platforms of the attention economy.
According to Tim Wu, ‘it is now commonplace, especially in the media and technology markets, to speak of an “attention economy” and of competition in “attention markets” (where attention is spent, instead of cash)’. The concept of the attention economy is neatly summarised by the words of James Williams, who states it as the ‘environment in which digital products and services relentlessly compete to capture and exploit our attention’. This process feeds into the concept of ‘surveillance capitalism’, as detailed in Shoshana Zuboff’s totemic book of the same title, which wrangles with the notion of ‘behavioural surplus’ (illustrated below), the concept that
more behavioural data are rendered than required for service improvements. This surplus feeds machine intelligence — the new means of production — that fabricates predictions of user behaviour. These products are sold to business customers in new behavioural futures markets
Therefore, the more we pay attention to certain apps, the more data we produce, which produces better insight and thus, better algorithms which can push more tailored advertisements to us — be they return flights to Tokyo or fruit jelly. The more attention we give, the better potential return on investment. As described by Johann Hari in his book Stolen Focus, “Facebook makes more money for every second you are staring through a screen at their site, and they lose money every time you put the screen down”.
To this end, the platforms of the attention economy — especially those under the rubric of social media — have been refined to ensnare the attention of the user with features such as infinite scroll, algorithms which push attention grabbing stories to the top of your feed (often with detrimental effects) and, as argued by Hari, the fact that you can’t use them as an easy means to meet up in the real world.
However, whilst social media plays a starring role in the attention economy, other means of capturing behavioural data are more ambient, for we live within a fog of smart technologies which seamlessly blend into the background of our lives. Smart speakers, TVs, laptops and phones all serve as physical platforms for apps to capture and send insight back to the entities which birthed them.
The relative affordability of these technologies is somewhat surprising, for an Amazon Echo Dot smart-speaker is only £22 at the time of writing. However, through a process which the author of Platform Capitalism, Nick Srnicek, terms ‘cross-subsidisation’ — where platforms “reduce the price of a service or good, but another arm raises prices in order to make up for the loss” — this affordability comes at a cost. Therefore, the Echo Dot is not to be viewed solely as a product, but rather is a node of a system within the attention economy, where value is produced via insights produced through use, rather than the selling of a good or service.
So, what does all this have to do with coincidence? Well, the more insight we produce through the auspices and artefacts of the attention economy, the more ‘coincidences’ will occur. The critical thing here, and in all writing on the attention economy, is the obscurification of its mechanics and inner workings. Whilst we can write about the various elements which consist of this latest iteration of capital generation, we can only do so through metaphor. This task is of great importance, for public debate regarding these practices needs to be well informed, but as pointed out by Zuboff in Surveillance Capitalism, euphemisms abound within it.
We as observers, thinkers and concerned citizens can only conceptualise the attention economy in abstract terms, for whilst we experience the outputs of the attention economy, we cannot experience its functioning. I have previously written about Roy Bhaskar’s notion of ‘critical realism’ — here and here — where he argues that there is more to reality than our experiences of it; if a tree were to fall in a forest, and no one was around to hear it would it make a sound? Yes it would, because the majority of events occur beyond our experience of them. A clear example of this is the syphoning of data and insight produced by the artefacts and functioning of the attention economy, work done by algorithms, so even the engineers of Google, Facebook or Amazon don’t directly experience it.
Therefore, the experience of the attention economy is synonymous with the experience of coincidences. Knowledge of the attention economy, surveillance capitalism and the obscured functioning of secretive algorithms is ultimately, knowledge of metaphors, conceptualisations and euphemisms, which are utilised to make sense of this disturbing epoch. This is a cunning element, for we cannot, purely on our lived experience of the advertisements under discussion here, state that they categorically present themselves upon the back of extensive data collection and algorithmic refinement.
When presented with adverts for cheap flights to Tokyo or fruit jelly on our social media feeds, the initial reaction isn’t to dismiss them as cynical ploys by an algorithm to keep our eyeballs looking through our screens at a platform or to ‘nudge’ us to purchase the product, but rather a sense of connection to the recent, and deeply personal past. Herein lies the power of these adverts. This is temporal in nature, for they link past actions to our perception of the present for commercial gain, but in a manner which is imperceptible to us.
It would not be a coincidence if we were to openly state what products were of interest to us — by say entering into a competition to win a pair of trainers — for there would be a obvious link from the past to the present, but the act of doing the weekly shop or reminiscing with a friend in a bar lacks an obvious connection to the subsequent adverts under discussion. It is through this behind-the-scenes, algorithmic creation of connection, between past actions and advertisement, where the rubber of the attention economy hits the road.
Regardless of our previous knowledge concerning the attention economy and surveillance capitalism, we all initially experience these adverts as coincidences. Whilst this knowledge can temper and rationalise our online experiences, the coincidence is simultaneously both our chief experience of the attention economy, and a means of revealing its deeper inner workings. To this end, the more coincidences we experience in our daily lives, the less metaphysical or whimsical they appear, for how many coincidences can occur before, as in this case, a sinister pattern is revealed?
By Will Brown
Doctoral Researcher at Loughborough University
Feel free to contact me at w.brown@lboro.ac.uk if you have an questions.
