In 1971, the economist Herbert Simon observed that "a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention". Half a century later, his remark reads less like an observation than a prophecy. In an era in which information is abundant and virtually free, the scarce resource is no longer content but the human capacity to attend to it — and an entire industry has emerged to capture that capacity.
The business model of most social media platforms is deceptively simple. Users pay nothing; advertisers pay for access to users' attention. Consequently, the platforms' commercial incentive is not to inform or to satisfy, but to maximise the time people spend scrolling. Features such as infinite feeds, autoplay videos and variable rewards — the unpredictable arrival of likes and notifications — are not accidental design choices but carefully engineered mechanisms, some of which borrow directly from the psychology of gambling.
Critics contend that the cumulative effect is a gradual erosion of our ability to concentrate. Constant task-switching, they argue, imposes a cognitive cost: each interruption requires the brain to reorient itself, and the residue of the previous task lingers, undermining performance on the next. Others are more sceptical, pointing out that similar anxieties accompanied the arrival of newspapers, radio and television, and that the evidence for long-term damage remains contested.
What is less disputed is that deep, sustained attention has become a competitive advantage precisely because it is increasingly rare. Writers, programmers and analysts who can work for extended periods without distraction produce work of noticeably higher quality. For language learners, the lesson is equally pertinent: reading a long article from beginning to end, without reaching for a phone, is not merely a test of vocabulary but an exercise in reclaiming one's own attention.