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the race will naturally run to the bottom; attention will almost invariably gravitate to the more garish, lurid, outrageous alternative, whatever stimulus may more likely engage what cognitive scientists call our “automatic” attention as opposed to our “controlled” attention, the kind we direct with intent.
But there is one thing scientists have grasped that is absolutely essential to understand about the human brain before we go any further: our incredible, magnificent power to ignore.
This ability—to block out most everything, and focus—is what neuroscientists and psychologists refer to as paying attention.
Depending on the kind of information, it takes our brains some amount of time to process it, and when we are presented with too much at once we begin to panic,
In promising to alleviate all of life’s sufferings, Hopkins was speaking a universal language.
he had built his success on a deep understanding of human desire.
The argument for war was made “overwhelmingly powerful by dint of sheer volume, repetition, and ubiquity.”
What Lippmann took from the war—as he explained in his 1922 classic Public Opinion—was the gap between the true complexity of the world and the narratives the public uses to understand it—
The only communications truly without influence are those that one learns to ignore or never hears at all;
That “public opinion” had been so easy to manufacture left Lippmann an abiding pessimist about democracy’s dependence on it.
“the conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society.”
We change the currents of trade. We populate new empires, build up new industries and create customs and fashions. We dictate the food that the baby shall eat, the clothes the mother shall wear, the way in which the home shall be furnished. . . . Our very names are unknown. But there is scarcely a home, in city or hamlet, where some human being is not doing what we demand.
“To make your consumer react, it is only necessary to confront him with either fundamental or conditioned emotional stimuli.”
whether they knew it or not, women usually suffered from a sense of “unimportance, insignificance, [and] inadequacy.” Successful advertisements for soap or cold cream worked by promising a remedy for such emotions, so that by buying the product a woman might achieve that “ ‘grand and glorious feeling’ which we are seeking all the time.”
Sometimes the crowd is right; often it is wrong. It remains for science to read the balance.
We were feathers all of us, blown about by winds which we neither understood nor controlled.”
For the advertisers, by far the most valuable function of advertising, then, is the shaping or creation of demands that would not otherwise exist.
the creation of strong brand loyalties, having little to do with intrinsic value, was a calculated effort to foster irrational attachments by which a brand might survive competition from other brands that were as good or better.
What is offered to adherents is not merely a good product (though often it is), but something deeper and more deeply fulfilling—a sense of meaning that comes with the surrender of choice.
Hitler understood the demagogue’s most essential principle: to teach or persuade is far more difficult than to stir emotion.
what the audience most wants is an excuse to experience fully the powerful feelings already lurking within them but which their better selves might lead them to suppress.
To be exposed to any information is to be influenced, but in crowds the possibilities go well beyond everyday experience.
it is loss of individual responsibility that makes the individual in the crowd more malleable.
Freedom might be said to describe not only the size of our “option set” but also our awareness of what options there are.
True propaganda, by contrast, aims to obliterate that marketplace and the choices as such, by making them seem unthinkable or nonexistent.
Choice may be the cornerstone of individual freedom but, as the history of humanity shows, the urge to surrender to something larger and to transcend the self can be just as urgent, if not more so. The greatest propagandists and advertisers have always understood this.
Everybody was engaged in the same act at the same time, but we were doing it alone. What a bizarre situation!
American commerce, and the attention industries in particular, would view what Leary advocated as a mortal threat.
Pepsi was being outsold by a factor of nearly six to one, giving a classic demonstration of the power of brand to undermine the concept of choice—but without anyone feeling they had sacrificed any freedoms. They were just choosing Coke, that’s all.
There’s little question that the revolt of the 1960s did lead part of a generation away from the attention merchants of the 1950s. But industry calibrated an effective response and perhaps ultimately read the public mood more accurately than any guru. For they had detected the essence of the spirit of liberation: for most people it was not an end of desire (as in some Buddhist sense), or a wish for solitary withdrawal (in a monastic sense), or even, as Leary had hoped, a spiritual longing equal to motivating an inward turn. Rather, after decades of relative conformity and one of ultimate
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desire’s most natural endpoint is consumption, and advertisers, after honing their art for half a century, knew how to convert all manner of desire into demand for products.
technologies designed to increase our control over our attention will sometimes have the very opposite effect. They open us up to a stream of instinctive selections, and tiny rewards, the sum of which may be no reward at all.
the most effective way of maintaining a behavior is not with a consistent, predictable reward, but rather with what is termed “variable reinforcement”—that is, rewards that vary in their frequency or magnitude.
take away the certainty and the real fun begins.
“What really bothers me,” he said, “is the ads are in a place where members will see them.”
in the “absence of saints or a God to look up to, for many people in western societies the void is being filled by celebrity culture.”
We used to be able to say, there’s this really important story in Poland. You should read this. Now people say, I just look up what I’m interested in on the Internet.”
As in nature, so, too, on the web: the tourist traps high and low are soon to follow; commercial exploitation is on its way. Such, unfortunately, is the nature of things.
Facebook was offering users was not a fuller and more ordered “social” life but something even more alluring: an augmented representation of themselves. Not as they were, exactly, but at their contrived best, with hundreds of friends
The idea of the self as brand did not originate with Zuckerberg, but would certainly gain currency with the Facebook generation, who would be known for not remaining in one job too long and for thinking of themselves and their experience un ironically as products to be marketed, professionally and even socially.
“Facebook makes about 1/10th of Google’s revenues even though they have twice the pageviews.
Others found Facebook (like email) a compulsion in that same Skinneresque manner—usually disappointing, but rewarding occasionally enough to keep you hooked.
Technology doesn’t follow culture so much as culture follows technology.
“All desire is a desire to be,” to enjoy an image of fulfillment such as we have observed in others.
The idealists had hoped the web would be different, and it certainly was for a time, but over the long term it would become something of a 99-cent store, if not an outright cesspool.
What was meant to be “relevant” to your wishes and interests turned out to be more of a studied exploitation of one’s weaknesses.
Your goals are things like “spend more time with the kids,” “learn to play the zither,” “lose twenty pounds by summer,” “finish my degree,” etc. Your time is scarce, and you know it. Your technologies, on the other hand, are trying to maximize goals like “Time on Site,” “Number of Video Views,” “Number of Pageviews,” and so on. Hence clickbait, hence auto-playing videos, hence avalanches of notifications. Your time is scarce, and your technologies know it.11
Getting immersed in multiple episodes or even multiple seasons of a show over a few weeks is a new kind of escapism that is especially welcomed today.”
when an online service is free, you’re not the customer. You’re the product.”
Obama neither aspired to a constant hold on the nation’s attention, nor was he willing to do what would have been necessary to achieve it. For an American president or any political leader to draw crowds, it is military adventures, vicious attacks on political opponents, and scandals that do the trick, but Obama studiously avoided all of these.
