Thoughts on Dopamine Culture
Why it was bound to emerge
With a tsunami of content provided by the Internet it is adaptive to increase our processing speed by spending less time with each item. Let me put it this way:
If you have the same attention span as people had before the Internet took off, then you’re not paying attention!
Recently, I came across Ted Gioia’s February essay, The Rise of Dopamine Culture, where he does not recognize shorter attention spans as adaptive. He describes a historical journey from art to entertainment to distraction/addiction. He calls the stages of this journey “slow traditional culture,” “fast modern culture,” and “dopamine.” His illustrative drawings/charts, especially the last one in his post, convey this journey.
Before movies, radio and television, a work of art was something to be contemplated. You spent a lot of time with each painting or each book.
With the mass media, each work of art took less time to consume, but we consumed more of them. (Compare a 30-minute TV program to a novel.)
With Internet media, out attention span shrinks dramatically. We get a series of dopamine hits from short videos.
Gioia’s post is mostly a rant against dopamine culture, creating an “us vs. them” narrative, where “them” is the tech companies that supply dopamine culture and profit from it. As L.M. Sacasas remarked,
It claims too much, I think, in painting a picture of hapless individuals at the mercy of large tech companies. While the compulsion and force of habit is strong, I think for most of us it falls short of being usefully called addiction. Consequently, we have more agency over the conduct of our lives than a dopamine culture framing seems to suggest.
Sacasas offers this analysis:
the most notable feature of our media environment is that we live under the condition of information superabundance with an element of the late Philip Rieff’s analysis …that we inhabit an anti-culture…in the sense that it does the opposite of what Rieff understood the role of most traditional cultures to be: impressing upon individuals a set of proscriptions to channel their desires.
…In a culture of information superabundance, we need above all else the discipline to say “no” or to set limits upon our engagement with the vast proliferation of digital media. But the anti-cultural spirit has left us ill-prepared to say “no” to anything.
The significance of “information superabundance” cannot be stressed enough. For the last quarter century, the trend has been for as much content to be put on line in one year as in all previous years put together. I assume my readers are sophisticated enough about exponential processes to know what a staggering cumulative change it is when you have more than 20 consecutive doublings. Martin Gurri’s political insights in The Revolt of the Public were based on his appreciation of this phenomenon.
How would you expect people to cope with this information superabundance? I go back to saying that if you have maintained the same attention span as someone had before the Internet took off, then you’re not paying attention!
Andrew Chen looks at this from a business perspective. The flip side of shorter attention spans is that customer retention has become a major challenge in the Internet environment. Every day, content providers fight a new battle for audience attention.
For example, In My Tribe continues to gain subscribers, and by the time you read this it may be up to 7000, including over 300 who pay. But at least 10 people a week unsubscribe, with the most common reason being that it takes too much time. And on average, each subscriber views only about half of the posts. (This often is more than offset by the number of views that a post gets from non-subscribers. Apparently, these essays get a lot of digital word-of-mouth. Thank you.)
Given all of the content on line, it is natural that we should be trying to do more sampling and spending less time with each source. And it is natural for those of us who supply content to try to adapt to that.
If this were 1990, I would be trying to communicate with you by writing books. Instead, I use substack. I schedule posts about 5 days in advance, and I use those 5 days to try to tighten them up, editing out digressions, redundancy, and unnecessary repetition.
In the eighteenth century, you might have had time to read every book that was published in a given year, if only you could acquire them. In 1960, you could have followed every television series, if only you wanted to keep getting up and down to change channels between the three networks.
Today, it is mathematically impossible for one consumer to pay heed to more than a tiny fraction of available content. Put another way, the probability of the same item getting the attention of two different random individuals is very low. A high degree of specialization on the part of both consumers and providers is bound to emerge.
Also, it is mathematically unlikely that we would want to spend only the same amount of time with media that we would have 25 years ago. If the ratio of experiences available on line to those available in the physical world has gone up more than a million-fold, we are bound to shift much of our attention from the physical world to the online world.
Yes, from the perspective of an ancestral human, this is weird. Heck, it is weird for someone born 70 years ago.
Where will it lead in terms of the distribution of cultural, economic, and political power? There is a case for hoping that power will become highly dispersed. But some developments point in the opposite direction. I am not ready to make a prediction.
substacks referenced above:
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This proposition is misconceptualized, and as such comes across as though written by someone who doesn't spend much time observing how young people of average intelligence and impulse control are affected by constant use of modern tech. It is confusing two different things using the term "attention span". On the one hand there is this concept of a kind of subconscious but 'rational' opportunity-cost calculator and bail-out-decision mental module. You start reading a book, and after a while you assess how much you are learning or being entertained or whatever, compare that expected level until completion to your sense of whether there would better ways to spend that time and how quick and easy it would be to find something better, and if so, feel a kind of gestalt pressure to dump it in favor of something else.
On the other hand there is a human capability of maintaining focus and concentration in a manner consistent with classical virtues and avoiding typical vices, with diligence and determination without getting distracted or giving up prematurely out of laziness or defeatist attitude, the strength of which is a combination of natural aptitudes but also dependent on willpower, social reinforcement, habitual exercise, exertion, practice, and training.
The first idea could be called, "ever higher attention opportunity cost". That's not the dopamine problem. The second could be called "attention span capacity atrophy" - and that's a problem, because there are plenty of times an individual would want to or benefit from exercising that capacity when useful, but which their temptations-marinated lifestyle discourages them from developing and maintaining.
In this way it is like making the ridiculous statement that if you aren't responding to the modern availability of cheap, plentiful, delicious calories and sedentary occupations by overeating, getting morbidly obese, and being unable to walk up three fights of stairs (like an increasing number of Americans), then you aren't properly or adequately adapting to modern circumstances.
That's a totally absurd way of thinking about it. Instead, we say that it is the common human impulse from our evolutionary programming to eat as much and exert as little physical effort as possible that is *mal-adaptive* in the current environment, not that the impulses are fine and the unhealthy behaviors stemming from those impulses are 'adaptive' to present circumstances.
The problem of vice tends to be a willfully blind spot in a lot of commentary influenced by libertarian leanings, which is reasonable in a way because none of the implications are pleasantly reconcilable with the typical prescriptions. But avoiding the issue leads to a lot of analysis just crashing on the rocks of actual human reality.
I have a small quibble with the notion that in the pre-television and radio era books and works of art were contemplated by people for a long time. I think a more accurate description would be “most people never saw works of art save public monuments, and most people who could read only had a Bible and maybe another book available. Most entertainment and culture was of the ephemeral variety.” In other words, people talked and gossiped, sang songs, watched cock fights and horse races, read the occasional pamphlet if they were of the sort and in the areas such things were handy, and generally did more actual socializing. Only the wealthy had access to enough books and art to keep themselves occupied for any amount of time with them.
Possibly a minor point, but “making your own fun” was far more important back in the day for most people because the notion of an entertainment industry is a fairly new one.