(Part 3)
How Wellness when Always-On relates to other Mega-trends and Big Questions:
Because The Next Computer is likely to be iPad and other mobile-first devices, they will have native support for social media apps, which have turned notifications into a dark art for holding people’s attention. Apple’s solution to this has been Screen Time, which chiefly measures the time you spent on your phone, along with a list of your most-used apps. With iOS 13 Apple now also nudges you whether you really want notifications from an app – perhaps by tracking if you haven’t responded to past notifications. Over and above this, apps like Moment not only measure phone pickups and screen and app usage, but also have coaching programmes to help you kick your phone (or tablet) addiction. Regardless, none of this is a substitute for you being conscious about your computer usage, and apps being actively designed to get and hold your attention.
Conscious Discovery and Curation is extremely important to wellness. Not only because of its sheer abundance, but also because the incentives are stacked towards making it as outrage-worthy and negative as possible. It is now difficult to find mainstream news institutions, whether in print, on TV or online, that do not optimise for attention in this manner. But there are encouraging signs of individuals who recognise this, who have opinions on what is important and what is not, and while finding them is hard, following them is not.
The Internet has made it possible for people to build an Audience directly and get their message out, independent of mediating institutions. Even so, it goes both ways: we have recently have seen one notable example of such an individual disintermediating his institution, and another placing an institution in between. The About page of the email newsletter services startup Substack links to more examples of independent publishers.
Speaking of which, email newsletters and podcasts are making a comeback from over ten years ago because of a sense of fatigue with the constant emotional manipulation and lowest-common-denominator algorithms of social media. These are part of the Dark Forest of the Internet, private, in that they are not typically not available as publicly indexable web pages. As conversation shifts away from the noise and hostility of Twitter and the envy-stoking of Facebook, it is shifting towards closed groups on messaging apps like Telegram in order to maintain a sense of sanity and focus. (Telegram has for many years been the medium of choice for cryptocurrency projects, but it’s expanded to several interest groups, including becoming a test-prep platformin India.)
So there we have it. Wellness when Always-on requires being aware of the distractions of our Next Computer, how we Discover and consume new content and the Dark Forests we retreat into, even as we build direct relationships with people who know that that Audience is their Capital.
In an age where our attention is the most valuable commodity of all, with entrenched systems and institutions that cultivate, hijack, farm, package, sell and resell it, paying that very attention, being conscious, is more important than ever before.
(Part 5 – TBD)