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attention hijacking techniques

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This came up a couple times in my Google+ feed and was then posted on BoingBoing.  All sources I trust (explicitly if not implicitly).

https://medium.com/@tristanharris/how-technology-hijacks-peoples-minds-from-a-magician-and-google-s-design-ethicist-56d62ef5edf3

The article is about different ways that online media "hijack" users attention.
The average person checks their phone 150 times a day. Why do we do this? Are we making 150 conscious choices?
It's been interesting to think these issues over while reading "Metaphatics Metaeverything".  (... I guess this is one benefit of being very slow in reading it -- I can be inspired by a number of different resources as I go along.)

While hardly a scientific or sociocultural breakthrough, one of the main thoughts is that by "aggregating" attention and keeping people involved, social media turns communication into a commodity.   Other recent news is related:
In thinking about what's going on here and its relationship to "fourth quadrant" phatics, it seems relevant to think what corresponding kinds of interactions might have been going on in other societies without these attention aggregating machines.  

For example, the title of the book "A Thousand Plateaus" is inspired by Bateson's anthropological observations in Bali.  (Geertz also references this work.)  Here's how D&G put it:
Gregory Bateson uses the word "plateau" to designate something very special: a continuous, self-vibrating region of intensities whose development avoids any orientation toward a culmination point or external end. Bateson cites Balinese culture as an example: mother-child sexual games, and even quarrels among men, undergo this bizarre intensive stabilization. "Some sort of continuing plateau of intensity is substituted for [sexual] climax," war, or a culmination point. It is a regrettable characteristic of the Western mind to relate expressions and actions to exterior or transcendent ends, instead of evaluating them on a plane of consistency on the basis of their intrinsic value.
Intrinsic value could be another possible (positive) gloss for asemantic in the description of phatic behavior.  Actually, what I think is going on with these "intrinsic values" is something else -- closer to Simondon's theory of information and Sloterdijk's theory of proto-architecture -- namely that phatic behavior does not "inform" the other, but instead has the purpose of giving a mutually-sustaining form to the social order.   Computer scientist Aaron Sloman points out in a couple places that something at least somewhat along these lines is how the word "information" was used in everyday language by people like Jane Austen.

But the "regrettable characteristic" mentioned by D&G seems to be involved in reshaping information-producing systems into profit-making and wealth-concentrating machines.


In some earlier writings I ranted quite a bit about "ethics" and "meta-ethics" and so forth.  I'm not sure if that's worth revisiting.  But it does seem worth keeping in mind the idea of "phatics" when reading the above-linked article on "ethics" -- and also (as a kind of "reading question") to think about how "contact" plays into addictive behaviors.  I plan to expand some of these thoughts in "phatica4" but I didn't want to lose the link above in the meantime.

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