Over the past few years, social media has given rise to an age of content creators. Many platforms are lead in influence by a select group of people with a large following, promoting glorified lifestyles of anything from travel to parenting. I, like many others, find myself captivated by content like this. Hours go by in my day where I’m caught in an onslaught of videos produced by creators about their recent “Amazon finds” and latest “home décor refresh,” having completely lost track of whatever I initially opened the apps to find.

Lately, I’ve been considering how this kind of engagement could be used to reclaim the attention that’s been stolen away from us by the systems that these platforms support.

In my other posts, I’ve discussed the invasive business model of the big tech industry, where it’s economically incentivized to grab our attention with customized feeds, then sold to the highest bidder to fuel these algorithms that keep us scrolling. Johan Hari’s Stolen Focus notes the implications of this strategy as having fractured our individual ability to focus and disrupted our collective societal attention. We’ve also learned that despite being aware of their own implications, company executives aren’t interested “in the effort to recalibrate the platform[s] in the name of the social good” (Hari).

Could it be possible to change this model anyways? Is there a way to leverage the content being produced, or maybe the creators putting this content out?

We know that content creators have substantial influence over a wide reach of audiences. There’s potential to redirect their focus, in some capacity, to push for a movement against the current business model of big tech, and to advocate for implementation of one that works for us, not against us.

Oftentimes, many content creators rely on their platforms as paying jobs, earning income from collaborations, selling ad space, affiliate marketing, and more. I think there’s an opportunity here to engage in authentic optimism, where creators could use these partnerships to maintain their personal brands and simultaneously promote organizations that are pushing for humane technology. This market could provide an incentivizing source of untapped endorsements for creators. With digital well-being being backed by such influential people, and by connecting users with like-minded individuals in the social media community, a new wave of people demanding ethical technologies could spark real change.

Of course, this thought process had led me to consider my own role in advocacy as someone who aspires to produce social media content professionally. I am still searching for answers to this, where I can allow myself creative freedom while changing the technological landscape for the common good. I urge you all to consider this too and figure out how you can help pave the way for a new era of digital media that feeds our ability to focus, instead of fracturing it. I believe that the collab between content creators and changemaking is a good place to start.

Works Cited

Hari, Johann. Stolen Focus. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2022.