Attention abundance disorder

I asked a few people this question today – if you had to pay for TikTok, Insta, X etc with a monthly subscription fee, would you do it? Invariably the answer was no. Perhaps inevitably so, because who doesn’t like a freebie?

Then when I asked, if there isn’t anything on these platforms you consider to be worth paying for, why are you on them? There was usually a pause, perhaps a shrug, then a listing of a few minor benefits.

You can probably tell, I’m no big fan of social media. I’m active-ish on LinkedIn. I get the role the platforms play and feel obliged, given my job, to stay sufficiently abreast of developments in the field. I also have accounts so I can use them for research sometimes. These platforms do, I think, have a positive offer for small businesses in particular.

However, I’m 100% anti the amount of people’s attention they absorb with so much damage and so very little in return. Scroll, scroll, scroll. Compare, compare, compare, Not enlightening. Not edifying. Vacuous. Soul destroying.

Hello social media platforms, if you profit from an abundance of people’s attention do something good with it. Don’t manipulate it. Change what you offer to something worth paying for. Help your users raise their game too.

I mean, if the biggest number of impressions I got on LinkedIn was for a post celebrating my identifying two dishwasher parts, something is very wrong.