Digital Slot Machines: Social Media Platforms as Attentional Scaffolds
Voinea and colleagues develop a philosophical comparison between social media platforms and slot machines, both described as hostile attentional scaffolds: structures in the environment that shape where attention goes, built to serve the designer rather than the user. The mechanism they identify is the same in both cases, a system of intermittent and unpredictable rewards that maximises engagement. The second part of the argument concerns emotion, and is the part this vault is most likely to use: attention is captured most effectively by emotionally charged material, so a system optimised for attention is necessarily optimised for emotional provocation, and distraction follows from that rather than from content being interesting. The third part moves from individuals to groups, arguing that emotions spread through networks and that shared attentional capture produces collective attitudes, with online moral outrage as the worked example. It is a conceptual paper rather than an empirical one, and should be cited as an argument.
Voinea and colleagues develop a philosophical comparison between social media platforms and slot machines, both described as hostile attentional scaffolds: structures in the environment that shape where attention goes, built to serve the designer rather than the user. The mechanism they identify is the same in both cases, a system of intermittent and unpredictable rewards that maximises engagement. The second part of the argument concerns emotion, and is the part this vault is most likely to use: attention is captured most effectively by emotionally charged material, so a system optimised for attention is necessarily optimised for emotional provocation, and distraction follows from that rather than from content being interesting. The third part moves from individuals to groups, arguing that emotions spread through networks and that shared attentional capture produces collective attitudes, with online moral outrage as the worked example. It is a conceptual paper rather than an empirical one, and should be cited as an argument.
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https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-024-10031-0
DOI: 10.1007/s11245-024-10031-0