Nine seconds is the maximum attention span of the Millennial generation, those born with the internet. Nine seconds, one more than a goldfish, while 70% of French people admit to being dependent on screens.
In this book, Bruno Patino describes how the attention economy works, between neuroscience and marketing. Here we see how far we have come since the early internet’s utopia of knowledge sharing and sociability.
The starting point: time spent online. In 2018, the 24 hours of an American’s day amounted to thirty. Our activities overlap in a kind of frenzy of continuous connection, with a channel-hopping that matches the solicitations sent by internet companies. Time spent on smartphones doubled between 2012 and 2016, pretty much everywhere in the world. And experts expect it to double again by next year.
The author started from the observation that the relationship we have with our smartphone and with various platforms is more a matter of addiction than of use. “, because they had to find their business model, they began to capture our attention and make money from it. But capturing our attention means capturing our time, and that is what happened”.
The business model of the platforms in question relies on capturing our attention at all times, and aims to see us connected permanently, including during time with our partner, at work, at meals, and so on. The platforms have called on neuroscientific expertise to encourage a somewhat bulimic consumption that makes us rush onto the networks. It is not a plot; it is the result of an economic logic. And “From the moment these companies have access to our behavioural data, and therefore potentially to the whole of our time since we are permanently connected: they will use tools that are already known, to try to win time over time that is already used.”
Bruno Patino draws up an implacable assessment and dissects a system that it is possible to escape. But this “short treatise on the attention market”, as the subtitle puts it, is not content with a worrying stocktake: it reconciles readers with the tremendous anthropological revolution that is digital technology.
La Civilisation du poisson rouge (Grasset) (The Goldfish Civilisation), Bruno Patino, currently editorial director of Arte France and director of the journalism school at Sciences Po.
Child and adolescent therapist, psychoanalyst
