Technology

The concept of banning algorithmic feeds is WAYYY more sensible to me than banning infinite scroll. I don't consider them part of the same conversation.

An algorithmic feed is a set of choices that can be used to manipulate, infinite scroll is in contrast a trivial detail that entirely misses the point of what drives us to addiction or unhealthy behavior.

Don't things that work to prevent overuse (i.e. ending up on the far end of the U-curve) help? Stuff like no infinite scroll, limiting the amount of non-subscribed content shown in the feed, etc.?

What is the point of asking these questions if we are unwilling to even define basic things like "overuse" or "attention span" in a scientific framework rigorous enough to build policy choices off of?

This is a moral panic, and justifying a moral panic by saying "but isn't letting people do lots of a thing bad?" is a thought terminating appeal to moderation that is impossible to meaningfully argue against.

It frames the conversation to suggest that naysayers against this particular instance of limiting people must also disagree fundamentally with the concept that everything is best in moderation while invisibilizing any question about the feasibility and ethics of forcing people to adhere to a particular set of rules meant to moderate.

Who gets to decide limits? Why should we trust their intentions? Who gives the funding for research on these topics and what ideological blindspots do they have? What is the correct limit to set when people are so wildly different? What if the laws only effectively exclude poor people from digital spaces because the laws effectively don't apply to wealthy people? What if a degree of social media use is correlated with unhealthy people but that simply taking it away with nothing to replace it destroys the one lifeline someone had for holding on? Are you ok with burning the last bridge for that person? What happens if they are trans and are growing up in a toxic town where even their own family will violent betray them if they reveal their true self?

The conversation around mental health and the human mind has degraded so much from refusing to talk about the actual things hurting our mental health that people fundamentally don't even understand how attention works anymore and have accepted a meaningless, rheified narrative put out by a bunch of computer people who don't understand the human brain and were never qualified as scientists to set such a narrative.

Do you think in this context going down the road of severely restricting social media based on overhyped fears is going to end well?

My investigation began with tracing the origin of the attention span claim. Every publication seemed to reference a singular source: a 2015 report by the consumer insight team at Microsoft Canada. The report has since been taken down by Microsoft, but a reuploaded copy is available. The report cited a marketing company, Statistics Brain, who claimed that our attention had decreased from 12 seconds in 2000 to just 8 seconds in 2015—conveniently shorter than a goldfish’s supposed 9-second attention span. But there was no peer-reviewed research behind these numbers. No empirical source. Just a claim repeated so often that it eventually became accepted as truth.

The only substantive research I found came from Gloria Mark, who studied digital screen use and multitasking. Her work suggested that people today switch between screens more rapidly (see her studies on attention to screens in 2004, 2012, and 2016), but this hardly proves a universal decline in human attention. The notion that attention can be measured in simple “spans” is itself questionable: as Yoo et al. (2022) state, “there is no singular neural measure of a person’s overall attentional functioning across tasks,” adding, “attention is not a unitary construct but rather multi-faceted” (p. 782).

https://edspace.american.edu/thecfebeat/2025/01/01/the-myth-of-the-shrinking-attention-span-shed-siliman/

The next problem with the goldfish claim is that is begs the question of what “attention” means. In the Microsoft research, that word is defined as “The allocation of mental resources to visual or conceptual objects.” It is not clear to me whether or how this applies to the task of being a juror, as at least part of the Microsoft study focuses on attention in an arena with “distracting or competing stimuli.” REPORT, 26. Indeed, there are multiple forms of attention – there can be selective attention, alternating attention, and sustained attention.

https://law.temple.edu/aer/2024/01/06/are-we-no-better-than-goldfish/