A Good First Step For Fixing Internet Attention Dysfunction
A proposal for a social media best practice that might do an itsy, bitsy, teeny, weeny bit of good
What’s the proposal?
In exchange for a “Good Internet Citizen” badge from an organization such as Center for Humane Technology, any interactive social media or gaming platform would voluntarily provide an optional, unobtrusive, always-visible indicator of “time spent” that provides a real-time tally of the amount of time a user has spent directly using its services on a given day. The counter should be cumulative for the entire day, regardless of discontinuous use. And of course, it should be optional for users, though it should be on by default.
Likewise, services should provide an API by which a user can retrieve their total use for at least the current day.
This idea is likely not novel1, and is directly inspired by ideas discussed by Tristan Harris as well as his Center for Humane Technology. So far, most “solutions” to internet dysfunction rely heavily on changing individuals’ behaviors. While this is not the ideal way to approach the problem, it is currently one of the best we have, and this proposal acknowlegdes that by suggesting a common standard for an unobtrusive request to platforms to provide users with one metric that could help them make informed decisions.
Who would this apply to?
Obvious targets such as Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, etc. Also, gaming apps and sites such as Candy Crush, NY Times Games (there are a lot of different games now). Even not obviously gamified sites like Wikipedia could be participants in this.
How could this help actual people?
The key to this question is that we are asking if this could *help* people, not whether it will *solve* all of the problems of social media internet-related attentional issues.
At least one defining feature of the internet is the regular experience of large time blocks simply “disappearing” as one reads, clicks links, and follows their attentional impulses on the information super highway in an almost trance-like state. This has always been true, in fact I can still distinctly remember the first time I truly “rabbit-holed” on the internet and had the sensation of somehow waking up to notice that 3 hours had passed.2 This was pre-youtube, and primarily via blogs and a couple of sites like DailyKos. The internet is somewhat more engaging now…
By adding a small, always visible time-spent counter on the relevant websites, a user could be reminded from time to time how much time is actually passing. This could act as a tiny bit of countervailing encouragement to interrupt the activity at hand.
There is a reason that it is hard to read a single long article on the internet but it is dead easy to scroll twitter for literal hours. Every time we read a new tweet, it feels as though it is an entirely new activity, and along with a infinitesimal dose of dopamine, we also reset our internal clock for how long we can spend on the task. This likewise applies to gaming sites, such as The NY Times Games page, which I have become much more familiar since I started World and have continued ever since. It’s easy to add one game at a time to your repertoire, but the result can be a daily “obligation” of an hour or more. And it doesn’t even seem like much time is being devoted to it, but whoops, there went the morning!
Why could this actually succeed?
First of all, it’s unlikely to succeed, especially if by succeed we mean most people will reduce their internet usage by 50% or something like that.
So if we’re being honest, most social media companies might do it just to get a publicly validated gold star in exchange for what will likely be a modest drop in the “time spent” metric for a tiny fraction of their users. Companies love doing things that are primarily performative, which can be touted publicly as a BIG DEAL as way to forestall legislative change. I don’t mind that in this case, since we are still figuring out how to solve this problem so like GDPR regulations, any law on this topic is likely to be a big burden and fairly ineffective.
Frankly it would still an enormous win.
At least some users that would be to make real, lasting behavioral changes due to the information and motivation such a counter could provide.
Also, some users would be alerted to the problem of internet attention dysfunction for the first time by such a counter. Maybe they don’t care, and they just turn it off. That’s fine, but raising awareness is an enormous achievement. The victories acheived in the war against tobacco began by raising awareness.
No, seriously why this could actually work
What I like most about this proposal is that it is actionable by a single, credible entity that is not a platform provider. It is actionable in two way:
First, simply define (refine) the proposal above as an actual standard that remains simple, and human readable but with perhaps a few more boundaries, details, and considerations added. In particular, thinking hard about the “badge” that a platform gets is crucial, since future best practices will come along and we don’t want to muddy the waters for either the platforms or users.
Second, create an external MVP implementation. My first title for this section was, “Couldn’t this just be a browser extension?” And the answer to this is “Quite possibly!” Since I just had the idea for this proposal in the last couple days and this question just occurred to me now, I need to give it some thought. I’m not a web developer, but as iOS dev I know where to start in terms of asking the question. And since this applies as much to mobile apps and multiple devices, platform support would make this easier to implement and far more robust. But in the meantime a model implementation should be pursued, and I'm sure the folks at the Center for Humane Technology would have much better resources to do such a thing well.
Interestingly though, I have not actually seen such a proposal anywhere. But I really do doubt this is a brand-new idea.
Obviously, my (at the time) untreated ADHD played a role. But given that I am not the only human with (un)treated ADHD, the issue of time-holing on the internet remains real