Brain Pirates

Writing this article has been complicated. Not just because it contains incredible discoveries, but because I've been constantly disoriented. From Facebook conversations that shine. From the phone calling a new message. On Twitter was a video I had to watch. And in the meantime what was happening in the Instagram? Even you who have just started reading this paragraph feel that you are already becoming focused - all of us victims of the attention pirates.

My research begins with a meeting of 15-year-old Emma at a Paris bar. At the table, close to a Coca-Cola Light, my cell phone lights up like a Christmas tree. He keeps interrupting while I'm interviewing him precisely on this subject. What gets involved in our conversation is especially the yellow-white ghost of Snapchat. Look, these are shelter”, please explain to me Emma with a annoying view. “If lost shelter, lose friends” Such names can be attributed to others - one thing that adolescents worship - hearted for best friends, red heart for best friends for two weeks in a row, double red for two months, and so forth.

Along with the hearts is the symbol of fire, which appears when Emma and her friend Anna exchange at least one daily snap. Supporting is a counter that shows the number of days past in exchange of messages. Anna and I are very friends, so I feed the fire. It's 150 days we write to each other every day! ”, advertises girls. Losing icon and spotter is not the case: Anna would be very angry and not make fun of society. If I don't write it in 24 hours, there's a client near her name to remind me to do it”, Emma explains. In their license, the shelters have become a kind of barometer of social integration. “Njoh in the boy at II's B that doesn't have one. You understand? Follow them all is a considerable commitment: “Every morning, I spend at least 10 minutes fuelling the fire”, the girl explains.

Emma and Anna are part of the so-called redfish generation? Are teenagers confused and confused, unable to focus their attention on a conversation, a lecture, or a book? They're drugged by those screens they're checking every quarter of an hour to see if any information has come to you, the source of a social flux? The worst thing is they don't even have conversations. Sometimes children send pictures of the wall or ceiling just to keep their spots off the ground, complains Tristan Harris, red hair and friendly smiles. We can think about it: “Ah, today's teenagers use Snapchats the way we talked for hours on the phone” But there were not 200 engineers at the time working behind the screens, studying the psychology of the youngest, and doing everything they can to depend on the” app.

Harris is a former Google designer. Graduated at Stanford University and specialising in “the action between human being and computer” has started denouncing through TED Conference and TV shows that he calls <x2). According to Harris, it has to be reversed: what if it wasn't the fault of teenagers who were confused, but companies like Apple, Facebook and Google, who do everything to steal free time from our brains? For younger people, it's hard to make Snapchat's logics and tois against it. From the company's point of view, it makes perfect sense: it's as if an electric company did everything to get its clients to leave all possible lights on. You can't ask these companies to go against their interests, even though they make money by manipulating children's brains”, the former designer points out.

The result is that statistics on the level of attention are increasingly disturbing. Over the past 17 years, we have lost four seconds of concentration: in 2000 we were able to pay 12 seconds of constant attention to a certain task. Today, as a Microsoft study revealed, the average is 8 seconds, worse than a red fish, capable of focusing for 9 seconds. According to another research, we are cut off about every 12 minutes after receiving an average of 40 messages a day and we are unable to read as 89% of French people. After every invasion of our mental space, we need 23 minutes to refocus on what we are doing, as the research of Gloria Mark, the University of California Irrine, demonstrates.

The writing of this article is quite cphiliatic. So I take a short pause to check Facebook: open the app and I'm glad to see that I have two announcements. Someone who thinks of me? Actually, no: the first message is the social network, which criticises me that I'm posting nothing for 7 weeks”. The second comes from a somewhat unknown contact that, contrary to me, has convinced Mark Zuckerberg and published something. Limited by Doing ControlThat thumb move that allows me to read the old pastry that appears on the page. Half an hour later, I'm not even out yet: I'm looking at a hypnotising video on preparing chocolate candy, which is open on my own thanks to the diabolic option “aulay”. “Scroll, autoplay, and fake announcements are all Facebook-made tools to keep you as long as possible and make you hang”, Ramsay Brown explains, hipster California view, thick chin, but maintained, and sky-colored hat. Brown is an American engineer who studies addiction to apps.

But let's get back to work. Stéphone Xiberras is the EUTC Director for Creative, a public agency that has 900 employees, distinguished clients and received many awards for his campaigns. But Xiberras doesn't have much hope: “Traditionally it's always been us, the publicity, world champions and attention. We know how to calculate the probability with which a house will buy a product that it's seen in a magazine only by the level of expansion of their eye babies. But today we feel completely outdone. On the screen of a cell phone all information is of the same importance - news from an assassination, a friend's messages, a photo in the Instagram. Already, to attract people's attention, more refined strategies --”.

Everything seems to lead in the same direction: attention has been transformed into a precious natural resources, equal to water or oil. A debauched resort, thus gaining value. Emma's brain time has to deserve it. The idea of “the attention economy” has emerged around 1995 with the development of the internet, but has always been at the heart of the capitalism war. “At the end of 8000 you had to check the employee's attention to make it productive, then create a wish for his spare time, to push him to buy the goods he had produced”, explains Yves Citton, French Literature Professor at the University of Grenoble and author of “I écologist de lèattenation<5> (Sewell 2014). “At the moment, attention is a resource only considered on an individual scale. When they stick to their mobile phone, Emma and Anna are blamed, but the problem never arises at a collective level. The idea of ecology serves precisely to remember that even attention is, in all, an environmental issue: Anna and Emma are faced with objects that draw their attention to generate profit, to make them dependent on app”.

In what way? Many have started to ask. “The states must force technology companies to deal with the ecology of attention by passing laws, as they have done with the Kyoto Protocol or the Paris Climaterical Change Agreement”, Harris claims. According to him, a website or an app demand should be classified, just as the environmental impact of automobiles or refrigerators is classified. Harris is also fighting for social networking, that is, for access to Facebook or the Instagram without necessarily losing all contact and migrateing to a more humble approach to focus.

Others develop useful instruments for special users. In 2016 Ramsay Brown and his colleagues developed a Space app, a small icon to protect your attention that forces you to take a good break before connecting to social networks. A good vacation for whatsApp, two for the Instagram, because your image is in the game here. In the spring of 2017, Brona and his team have gone to propose their own Apple creature so that he could put them on sale at App store. The famous company's response was: “Any app designed to help people use their mobile phone less can't be sold on App store”. After the news started spreading to the U.S. media, Apple decided to authorize him to drop Space. In France I have tried to interview Google and Facebook representatives on these subjects. The case has not drawn their attention.

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