The Attention Economy Has Won. Now What Do We Do About It?

A decade after researchers began documenting the neurological effects of algorithmically optimised content feeds, we have amassed extraordinary evidence that sustained attention is declining across age groups — and almost no policy consensus on what democratic societies are entitled to do about it.

I want to be careful about nostalgia. Every generation has believed that its preferred medium of distraction was more virtuous than its successor's, and the history of moral panics about attention — from the penny press to the radio serial to the television — should make anyone cautious about assuming that the current concern is categorically different. And yet I cannot make myself dismiss it, because the evidence that it is different keeps compounding.

The latest contribution comes from a longitudinal study published in JAMA Psychiatry covering 11,000 participants aged 8 to 45 across twelve countries, tracking self-reported and experimentally measured sustained attention over a fifteen-year period. The findings are consistent with every comparable study I have read in the past five years: sustained attention — the ability to maintain focus on a single cognitively demanding task for more than a few minutes — has declined measurably and significantly across every age cohort, with the steepest decline in those who entered adolescence after 2012, the year smartphone penetration crossed 50 percent in most developed countries.

What this means for democracy is something I do not think we have adequately confronted. Democratic deliberation — the actual business of reading a policy document, following a parliamentary debate, evaluating a candidate's record — requires precisely the cognitive capacity that the evidence suggests is eroding. We cannot have the public sphere we need with the attention spans we are developing.

The policy toolkit is not empty. Age verification requirements for social media platforms, algorithmic transparency mandates, bans on certain engagement-maximising design patterns, and school device restrictions are all in various stages of implementation across different jurisdictions. But they are being implemented without a coherent theory of what we are protecting and why, and without a democratic conversation about the trade-offs between freedom and cognitive self-defence that such interventions inevitably require.

That conversation is overdue. The fact that it is hard to have — that it requires sustained attention — is not lost on me.