Tribune. The game is getting tough for Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg: after the Cambridge Analytica scandal, after the capture of the Capitol by the Trumpists, it is now the whistleblower Frances Haugen who brings to light the harmfulness of her ex-employer. Awareness is accelerating in all layers of society, and particularly among politicians, too long carried by a feeling of indifference, then of fascination, towards an economy that they did not understand and of which they almost ignored. all. The damage caused by the economic model of free social platforms is becoming apparent: a model only finding its subsistence in the monetization of the time spent on its content by the maximum number of users, and that without taking any account into account. the nature of this time spent, its quality and its negative impacts both at the collective level (incitement to hatred, criminal networks, disinformation) and at the individual level (mental health).
But by focusing on Facebook only and accusing the company of “Moral bankruptcy”, risk of repeating the well-known pattern of the black sheep and of sanctions and regulations that will fail to confront the major problem facing humanity, and of which Facebook is only one of the innumerable vectors: the exhaustion of our attention resources.
Because if ecology raises the question of the exhaustion of our natural resources, it is incomprehensible to note that this does not add that of our attentional resources, attacked from all sides by a design of vulnerabilities exploiting our psychological and social weaknesses. and cognitive to build ever more addictive experiences.
Permanent acceleration
Just as we see the end of fossil fuels, the depletion of land and oceans, the scarcity of living things, digital technology and its screens are pushing our solicable attentions to their limits, our “Available brain time”. By moving from a society of work to a society of leisure and entertainment, by transforming industrial capitalism into cognitive capitalism, we undergo a permanent commodification of our brain activity, which, unlike physical activity, never runs out. .
Through instant messaging, we maintain a permanent link with our closest circles and can maintain an unprecedented amount of weak links. For intellectual professions, corporate social networks and videoconferencing tools make it possible to move from one project to another, from one interlocutor to another, from one continent to another, without any friction, bringing into a working day infinitely more than what was made to fit into it, if only before the emergence of the Covid-19. The functions of accelerating video and audio streams are now used by the greatest number and some series on Netflix only see a minority of their audience watch them at “normal” speed. Even the music which, by nature, can only with difficulty support this acceleration, changed its rules of composition so that the melody is exposed there in the first seconds in order to avoid zapping.
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