Email’s adoption functioned as large-scale operant conditioning preparing users for later attention harvesting

Evidence

By this understanding, the gradual introduction of email was arguably one of history’s greatest feats of mass Skinneresque conditioning. We might imagine those first offices wired in the 1970s and 1980s as so many Skinner Boxes, ourselves as the hungry pigeons. By the 1990s, we would all learned to peck, or check email, in hope of a reward. And once created, that habit would not only open us up to all sorts of commercial possibilities, including various other Internet applications depending on the almighty power of check-in to regularly collect human attention. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 656

Categorization

• XREF: Fits the reader’s attention-industries thread: email as the ur-conditioning mechanism that platforms later exploit. — connects to: Attention and technology co-evolve through reciprocal causation — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 534; Internet platforms gained unprecedented power to manufacture user behavior — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 941; Likes function as variable-reward dopamine reinforcement driving user compulsion — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1459 (+6 more)

Broader Connections

• Attention extraction is a historical contingent result of human choice #expands (0.78) — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!, 190
• Endless attention harvesting inevitably triggers adaptive backlash and loss of enchantment #complicates (0.75) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 71
• Instructions induce attention processes that deepen with repeated group experience #complicates (0.72) — Pauline Oliveros, Deep Listening, 283
• Platforms exploit users’ natural empathy as a channel for behavioral tuning #expands (0.72) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 946