Years of conditioning make attention reclamation painful even for a weekend

Evidence

While the goals of reclaiming our time and attention are easy to praise, they can prove surprisingly difficult to achieve. Even for a weekend, it can be painful to resist deeply ingrained habits like checking email, Facebook, and other social media; browsing random news stories, let alone more titillating clickbait; or flopping onto the couch to channel surf for a few hours. The difficulty reflects years of conditioning and the attention merchants’ determination to maximize, by any means possible, the time spent with them. When engrossed in work, reading a book, or playing with children, we may as well be stealing by the attention merchants’ lights. They want—need—us to be constantly poking around for dibs and dabs of their entertainment, to be tuned to commercial breaks in their programming, or to be catching up with friends in a manner that can also serve some branding effort. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 1141

Categorization

• XREF: Direct echo of the book’s opening framing of attention as a harvested raw material, and of earlier chapters on advertising’s conditioning power. — connects to: Intense attention can become immobilizing and bring one out of step with everyday life; Endless attention harvesting inevitably triggers adaptive backlash and loss of enchantment — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 71; Attention is learned rather than innate, always and for everyone

Broader Connections

• Attention is learned rather than innate, always and for everyone #corroborates (0.78)
• Intense attention can become immobilizing and bring one out of step with everyday life #expands (0.75)
• Endless attention harvesting inevitably triggers adaptive backlash and loss of enchantment #expands (0.72) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 71