Task 10: Attention Economy

A developing concern, though not particularly new, is the attention economy, and the value of our time and data. Profit is not simply in physical product, but rather in retaining our presence, our time, our ‘clicks’. When our time is spent on one particular application or site, a competing site will view this as a loss of market share. (Harris, 2017) There is competition, strategy, and certainly ethics that connect with this shaping of our experience and our choices. 

In that context, trying the assigned User Inyerface game was quite frustrating. The game seemed to use every trick in the book to slow down progress and draw on the time of the user as much as it could.

My initial trial did not result in completion. I’m unclear whether it was because I tried the help box, or input something in the wrong order, but ultimately it did not allow me to proceed beyond the validation pages. This was extremely frustrating as I repeatedly tried to click the correct boxes, yet each time I clicked ‘Next’, it simply returned to another validation page. In the end, I clicked innumerable times without success and invested 15+ minutes without progress.

In the meantime, the site used the following tricks to slow down the process and frustrate the user:

• Popups
• Clickables that default to the wrong thing to click to move forward
• Timers add stress and cause mistakes
• Help bots that are not helpful
• Upload/download – wrong word
• Placeholders that you have to remove rather than them automatically disappearing
• Personal details are out of order
• Flags instead of country names
• Pop-up help bot blocks progress and then withdraws very slowly
• Gender and title mismatched
• Confusing and repetitive human validation
• Validation endlessly (at least for me)

And in the end, I had only achieve this when I gave up:

But I persevered and tried again, carefully avoiding certain pitfalls and ultimately completing the game.

I reflected upon the fact that I continued to try for so long before I gave up on my initial try. Why was I willing to waste my time in that fruitless endeavor? I believe the answer to that is simply that I expected it to be worth it, and that struggling through the process would result in achieving something rewarding. I also hesitated to quit because I was at least partly convinced that the very next try, the very next ‘click’ would complete the process, and if I quit I might be missing out. My attention was held because I valued the possibility of reward greater than I valued my time at that moment.

So frustrating! What made this game so impactful was the fact that I have indeed encountered sites with elements that were being illustrated. I felt anger rising in me, even as I knew there was a point to this game. My attention is the economy, and it has value to those in the business world – I guess the key question is whether it has more value to them, or to me.

References:

Bagaar. (2019). User InyerfaceLinks to an external site. [web game].

Harris, T. (2017). How a handful of tech companies control billions of minds every day  [Video]. TED.