The Price of Our Attention PDF

Speech Title: The Price of Our Attention 1.​Introduction It feels like everyone is competing for each other’s attention. I mean, here I am competing for yours with this speech. But you don’t really tend to realize it until you find yourself doing the same. A couple weeks ago, s...

Speech Title: The Price of Our Attention 1.​Introduction It feels like everyone is competing for each other’s attention. I mean, here I am competing for yours with this speech. But you don’t really tend to realize it until you find yourself doing the same. A couple weeks ago, some of my friends and I joined a game making competition and had two days to put together our own game. We were all working as hard as we could when suddenly, one of our friends burst into the room. His eyes were glazed over and we couldn’t identify his expression. He sat down at a nearby table with his phone and started scrolling intensely. We were confused, so we tried to ask him what happened, but it didn’t seem that he could hear us. Worried, we peeked over his shoulder to see what he was looking at. And we found that he was scrolling through videos on Instagram. And they’re all those weird reels that ask you to share them to your @s or whatever. You know, the ones that go “5 shocking facts that will tingle your toes. Number 15 ate my grandparents,” or something like that. So we just stare at him for a few moments. It seemed that it would be harder to win over his attention than to win first prize. “And I find this struggle for each other’s attention to be a problem not only in this situation but in our culture as a whole.” As our technology has evolved, we have become more and more dependent on the powerful tool that social media is. We use it to communicate with peers and relatives, we use it for research and entertainment, celebrity gossip and memes. But at the same time, this tool happens to be a double-edged sword, or rather a revolver in a game of Russian Roulette. For all the thrill that we get from the fired blanks, the bullet will eventually go off. Today, I would like to show you all how social media is inhibiting our ability to have positive relationships with ourselves and others. We’re going to take a look into the chamber and explore how social media affects our perception of the world, the consequences of these changes, and what we can do to fix these issues. 2.​Problem Overview I think the best place to start here is by looking at our odds. It wouldn’t be too wild of a guess to make if I said that everyone in here has a social media account of some kind. Even if you don’t have Instagram, you still probably have a messenger app like Discord or WhatsApp to stay in contact with your friends or family. And yet, despite how much we seem to depend on it, a Pew Research Center study found 32% of teenagers and 64% of adults in the US believe that social media has had a negative impact on themselves and the people around them. Distant Relationships The main appeal that most people have is that social media allows them to connect with friends that have moved away or family members in another country. Socially awkward teens have reported that it is easier for them to make friends through these online platforms. But what happens a lot of the time is that once you start texting and scrolling, it’s hard to stop. Have you ever walked up to your friends or parents while they’re on their phones? You go, “Dude, you gotta hear about what just happened the other day!” and they’re sitting there like “Mm-hm, uh-huh” and not really paying attention to what you say. And by the time they put their phones down, you forgot what you were going to tell them. From Pew, 51% of people in committed relationships report that their partners are distracted by their devices while having conversations, and similar issues have been reported with parents and children. Echo Chambers and Opinion Polarization Another issue that arises is that of the echo chamber. The Cambridge Dictionary defines an echo chamber as “a situation in which people only hear opinions of one type, or opinions that are similar to their own.” It’s part of human nature to want to escape conflict and find a community that you can fit in with, and the Internet has a community for everything. But the problem is: the internet has a community for EVERYTHING. That includes the most radical, crackpot, conspiracy theory-style beliefs, which can spread misinformation. And the problem with only experiencing similar beliefs is that it makes it harder to deal with new ones, making discourse and disagreements more unsafe. Social media algorithms end up enhancing this issue, as the way they work is to give consumers the same type of content over and over again. I mean, just think of that weird uncle or aunt at your Thanksgiving dinner who can’t stop going on about how they learned on Facebook that Walt Disneys frozen body is hidden somewhere in Disneyland or something. And no matter what you and the rest of your family try to do, they won’t stop arguing about it. “But I’m telling you, it’s the truth!” “UNCLE JOE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD PLEASE JUST EAT YOUR GREEN BEANS!!!” Just imagine how annoying it would be to run into hundreds of people like that? But there are more serious issues that come with constant social media use. Self-Image and Mental Health Mental health is a major concern for most teenagers, due to school, home, and personal struggles. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services states that 49.5% of adolescents have had mental health issues at some point in their lives. Due to not having access to adequate mental health resources, many turn to social media to share their experiences, give and receive support, or just take their mind off of their problems with the world around them. However, research from UC Davis’s Health Center shows social media ends up aggravating issues such as depression and anxiety, or even causing new ones. Social media platforms, Instagram and Facebook in particular, are excuses for people to only show the best parts of their lives and apply all the filters they want to their flaws. Only seeing the highlights of people’s lives like this ends up making those of us who use these platforms more often gain the sense that their lives aren’t interesting enough. This makes them feel worse about themselves and keep using social media more, trapping them in a cycle that keeps getting harder to escape from until they just can’t take it anymore. 3.​Effects Suicides: CJ Dawley and the Contagion Effect On January 4th, 2015, Christopher James Dawley shot himself. A 17-year-old from Wisconsin, Dawley was considered by those close to him to be quite smart, fun-loving, and charismatic. However, he became addicted to social media throughout his years in high school. His parents have stated that he would regularly stay up until 3 a.m. messaging users on Instagram and share explicit images. He began to worry more about his body image, a feeling that was worsened by leg pains he started having in December of 2014. On the morning of January 4th, Dawley snuck up to his room while his parents put away Christmas decorations. He messaged his friend saying “Godspeed,” posted “Who turned out the light?” on Facebook, wrote a suicide note on his college acceptance letter. Finally, smartphone in one hand, gun in the other, CJ Dawley took his own life. There’s been multiple cases like this as of late. The CDC reports that from the years 2000-2021, the suicide rate in individuals between 10 and 24 years old has increased by 52.2%, the same years in which social media use has been growing. It’s no coincidence, either. Social media algorithms take note of when vulnerable individuals look up topics like “depression,” and they continue to recommend posts and videos connected to them. Even worse, they can push posts and users that promote destructive behavior like eating disorders and self-harm, normalizing them in the eyes of susceptible adolescents. They get pushed away from the ones closest to them as they continue to get lied to. And they’ll just keep running into these posts again and again and again as they keep scrolling. They can’t help it. It’s just how the system runs. Our youth is in danger, falling victim to the unregulated issues with these platforms. They might be advertised as free, but the real price we pay is with our attention, our health, and our lives. 4.​Solutions Maybe our parents were right. Maybe it was those damn phones this whole time. Social media is making it harder for us to be able to see ourselves and our relationships in a positive light. So how do we fix this? I think the way we do this is to put our immediate lives first. With social media, we become so focused on the lives of people who aren’t there that we forget about those who are. We need to prioritize the connections we have with the people in our lives and not let these platforms distract us from them. The best part is that there is an easy way to get around this. The reason social media is so addicting is because they continuously release large amounts of dopamine into our brains, the chemical that causes happiness. However, you can gain these same quantities of dopamine through fulfilling activities outside of your phone. This can be spending time with loved ones, going for a walk in nature, finishing a challenging project, or even making your own game. Two months ago, I deleted Instagram from my phone to test this idea, and it has had a major impact on my life. I have found that I have been able to go out more, finish my work more quickly, and spend more time with my friends and family doing the things I love. You don’t have to entirely remove these platforms, but what you can do is set time limits for yourself. But the most important thing to know is that you are worth the effort to improve yourself. If you happen to be dealing with any of the issues I mentioned before, please reach out to the ones closest to you. It may be hard to open up, and you might feel a bit nervous, but you have to know that there will always be someone who can help. 5.​Conclusion So going back to that game competition. I don’t mean to say that my friend is a bad person for what he was doing. He’s really a great guy with a lot of motivation and talent. His advice ended up helping our game get first place. He’s one of the greatest friends I’ve ever had. And if I have been trying to say anything for the past 10 minutes, it’s that we need to value connections like this, and not let something like social media get in the way of them. So what we need to do is celebrate who we are and what we have. We have to know what we are really worth, despite what these digital strangers might make us believe, and stop selling ourselves short.