Ephemeral social media trains attention on the present moment via embodied swiping

Evidence

Stories also occupy tiny fragments of time (recorded videos and images come in bite-sized spells of fifteen seconds at most) and vanish without a trace after twenty-four hours. Yet, even as content itself becomes impermanent, it is the movements of immersion and repetition that set the tone for engagement with these apps. The increasingly intuitive, embodied, and rapid interaction with circulating data streams consists of vertical swiping gestures that release streams of emojis (conveying a swarm of reactions ranging from passionate approval to vehement rejection). Such streams amplify the addictive familiarity of the disseminated images, whose linear presentation offers in turn a reassuring power to the platform, as it compresses and focuses attention on the present moment—when users view stories, they typically tap or swipe on the screen multiple times in one minute. Lovink (2019) describes the experience as a form of daydreaming: “Swiping fingers assist in moving the mind elsewhere. Checking the smartphone is the present way of daydreaming. Unaware of our brief absence, we enjoy the feeling of being remotely present. We remember what it’s like to feel” (38). — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 211

Categorization

• XREF: Links to the reader’s already-catalogued soundscape/daydreaming material on attention and the present moment, and to Deep Listening’s present-centered attention. — connects to: Social media turned attention capture into mutual self-display at unprecedented scale — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 1062; Social media stories create a simultaneous temporality built on speed and impermanence — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities: Living With…, 94; Social media fracturing produces fragmented collective time held together by affective endorsement (+2 more)
• ADDENDUM: Connects to the trees/infrastructure piece only loosely; stronger affinity with the attention-engineering thread running through the reader’s silence and listening sources.
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Social media turned attention capture into mutual self-display at unprecedented scale — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 1062; Social media stories create a simultaneous temporality built on speed and impermanence — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities: Living With…, 94; Social media fracturing produces fragmented collective time held together by affective endorsement (+2 more)