For most of human history, information was scarce. News and knowledge were distributed in bite-sized pieces, leaving people plenty of time to occupy themselves with other things. Now, the tables have turned. Digital technology means we are awash with intelligence, and can access the most obscure of factoids almost instantaneously. As such, it is human attention – as opposed to the information it absorbs – that has become the valuable resource.
So says James Williams in Stand Out of Our Light, a book that examines how Big Tech has infiltrated individual and collective consciousness. Williams concludes that we now face so many demands on our attention that we have lost control of how we process information, and have been rendered “weak-willed and impulsive”. The liberation of human attention, he declares, “may be the defining moral and political struggle of our time”.
Stand Out of Our Light was published in 2018. Since then, the grip of technology has only got tighter. A survey by price comparison website Uswitch found that adults in the UK now spend an average of five hours a day looking at screens, in addition to any screen-related work. This is up from three hours in 2020 and 90 minutes in 2012. Much of this time is still spent watching television, but social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok and Twitter also hold a magnetic appeal.