Elettra Bietti | February 2024

Abstract: Today’s digital technologies are transforming the quantification, allocation and monetization of human time and attention. Motivated by a variety of technical and social pressures, the average American spends more than eight hours a day consuming digital media on their computer or phone. Social media overuse has been held responsible for a teenage mental health crisis, a rise in teen suicides and a more general degradation of collective attention processes essential in a political economy and democracy. In the midst of the current attentional crisis, existing bodies of law such as privacy, antitrust and free speech fail to assist us in grappling with concerns about technology overuse, addiction, technology-mediated attention disorders and the pervasive degradation of our individual and collective attention. It is tempting to reduce these disorders to problems of individual choice, delegating solutions to market-based tools or the exercise of individual data protection and speech rights. Instead, the answer requires moving past simplistic views of the market as a self-correcting device guided by individual preferences, and of data within them.

This paper focuses on the role of data in producing a progressive thinning, stretching and erosion of human attention. It argues that understanding the relation between datafication and attention can pave the way toward better law and policy in this area.