Pay Attention!

Introduction

Getting, Keeping, and Using Attention

Attention is the scarcest resource in the modern world today. People had very little of it before the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic and now they have even less. Our attention is pulled in a million different directions in a day, sometimes literally, as we are subject to messages, images, and information from thousands of different sources across our laptops, TVs, and mobile phones. Most American adults use Facebook. They’re on it multiple times a day and they see thousands of posts every time they scroll. Most American teens watch hundreds of hours of YouTube every year. The algorithms are designed to keep them on the website, watching videos from paid and unpaid creators and getting ads fed to them ...