The quality of one's life depends on the quality of attention. Whatever you pay attention to will grow more important in your life.

Deepak Chopra

The quote above illustrates a fundamental truism of life: the things upon which you focus become the foundational cornerstones of your life.

Bad arguments and Ignorance

I spend some time on social media.

The whole thing fascinates me. In many ways, social media -- for all of its faults -- is one of the most efficient developments that epitomizes exactly what is the purpose of the internet.

It is an instantaneously responsive network of people distributed all across the planet. You are able to set your opinions in digital stone and make them available for the entire world to see.

However, it hasn’t been all positive.

The amount of terrible arguments and ignorant opinions that grow online is… troubling. At least to me.

I have seen people who would otherwise be intelligent fly completely off the handle on social media with the worst arguments that you can imagine. They ignore facts, evidence, and sound arguments and instead spread their own version of the programmed narratives that political or social groups, or worse -- Governments -- have fed them.

The state of things is so bad that the vast majority of people who do this aren’t even aware that their views have been co-opted. They think there’s something clever about calling someone a “conspiratard” or a “DemoCRAP ” (ok, I’ve never seen anyone use that last one, and I actually think it’s kinda funny).

Do not take those people seriously

The opinions of people with bad arguments should be taken with a grain of salt.

Hopefully, you have developed your problem-solving skills, and you can use a syllogism, and you know a logical fallacy when you see one. If so, don’t waste your attention on these people.

They are not serious people.

Their words, the syntax of their statements, the format of their opinions, the insults they use -- all of it has been engineered by social scientists who are far more intelligent and influential than them.

These engineers of the petite propaganda are after your attention, because they know that when you are paying attention to some idiot on Twitter for the whole afternoon, you AREN’T paying attention to the covert things they’re doing.

Take yourself seriously. Don’t be one of those people who falls into the traps set by the narrative architects. Your time is more valuable than that.

The Attention Economy

Attention is focused mental engagement on a particular item of information. Items come into our awareness, we attend to a particular item, and then we decide whether to act. (Davenport & Beck 2001, p. 20)

If you think that your attention isn’t worth anything, whoa boy! You are sorely mistaken!

There is an entire new field of science attracting the sharpest minds in the world, and its entire focus is to construct better schemes to mine your attention like a commodity.

"...in an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it" (Herbert A. Simon).

Why do you think companies like Amazon and Facebook have made so much money and wield so much influence in such a short period of time? It’s because of YOU and YOUR ATTENTION.

That’s why data collection and data mining are such big business: because your attention is like gold, and the most powerful corporations in history are competing with each other for it, and they’re hiring the most talented propagandists and influencers in the world to design systems to strip as much of it as they can from you.

Ex-Facebook president Sean Parker: site made to exploit human 'vulnerability'

Facebook’s founders knew they were creating something addictive that exploited “a vulnerability in human psychology” from the outset, according to the company’s founding president Sean Parker.

Parker, whose stake in Facebook made him a billionaire, criticized the social networking giant at an Axios event in Philadelphia this week. Now the founder and chair of the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy, Parker was there to speak about advances in cancer therapies. However, he took the time to provide some insight into the early thinking at Facebook at a time when social media companies face intense scrutiny from lawmakers over their power and influence.

Parker described how in the early days of Facebook people would tell him they weren’t on social media because they valued their real-life interactions.

“And I would say, ‘OK. You know, you will be,’” he said.

“I don’t know if I really understood the consequences of what I was saying,” he added, pointing to “unintended consequences” that arise when a network grows to have more than 2 billion users.

“It literally changes your relationship with society, with each other. It probably interferes with productivity in weird ways. God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains,” he said.

This is where the most advanced work humanity is producing is happening.

And it’s all about YOU.

Spend your time better

These people want your attention. They want your time and energy to be spend doing what THEY want, thinking about the things that THEY want you to think about.

You have to have your own interests in mind. You have to fight back yourself. And the way you do that is by simply ignoring them.

To some extent this is easier said than done. And I know that personally. There are many times where I catch myself having been roped into a pointless argument on Twitter or Facebook. To be honest: it’s appealing to see a tasty troll dangling in front of you with such a bad argument or such an ignorant statement that it would be soooooo easy to just type up something and hit ‘reply’.

But it almost never turns out right. And I end up regretting the time I spent trying to persuade a stone wall. I could have been doing so many other better things:

• Spending time with my family
• Increasing my skills
• Praying
• Posting on Steemit
• Developing a new online feature
• Meditating
• Learning a new coding language or framework to advance my career
• Trying to kick myself in the balls

Any one of these things is a better use of my time and attention than arguing with some idiot on Twitter.

So my plea to you is to spend your time more wisely. If you feel like responding to someone on social media who is clearly either a bot/sock puppet/troll or just a brainwashed idiot, instead consider doing something more edifying and constructive with that time.

What do you think?

Were you aware of the science of the attention economy? That there are people out there spending billions of dollars just to divert your eyeballs to the thing they want you to see?

Let me know in the comments below.

Follow me @shayne