I don't have any particular useful conclusion to this because hey, we are humans, we like attention to various degrees, we also built the Attention Sucker 9000 and now we need to live in a world where it exists.

Be aware of things which are addictive but also mentally exhausting in the long term, I guess?

Not even online conversations, I sometimes find myself sitting in real-world scenarios where people do this.

And I've seen the counterpart; someone is saying something that's complex and not immediately rewarding and you watch everyone reach for their pocket, for the device that acts as an ever-present soma bath, because it's providing a baseline level of "entertained" higher than this.

(Frequently watching in first person. I am absolutely not above exactly the same behaviour)

As someone immensely distractible and prone to hyperfocus I live in a world where notifications are a form of torture and it's a rare day I don't end up silencing something or other because I'm... just... trying... to... (grits teeth)... work.

But I've started to notice how much conversation in this world is a series of notifications. *zzt* be angry about this! *zzt* disagree with me, I dare you! *zzt* ooh, did you know how that thing you said can be misinterpreted? FIND OUT!

To take a sudden turn, I struggled with this on YouTube. Intensely angry, deliberate "worst possible interpretation" comments under videos.

The biggest change I made, one which pretty much fixed this instantly, was having a little message that I pre-moderate everything.

And that surprised me, because I thought I was the target. Nah. Nobody cares if I see anything negative, they care that *other* *people* see it. Like yeah, it's negative attention, but it's *attention*.

And that's the problem: in order to cut through the background soma of doomscrolling, short-form video and endlessly buzzing group chats we resort to increased saliency. Like those films, we do things that *demand* attention.

The angry reaction, the nitpicky miss-the-point explain-the-irrelevancy comment, the utterly out-of-nowhere rant; they are all things which cut through and grab attention but are also immensely tiring in any sustained duration.

I know it's trendy to bag on recent Marvel movies but I think this is the problem I have with them; they constantly demand attention as if another device is about to snatch it away.

There's carrot: look at this fast-paced action scene, listen to this song you love, ooh fast cut brain stimulate yay.

But also stick: don't you dare look away, we might infodump a massive pile of plot you need to understand the next hour at any moment and never explain it again.

Fatigue quickly sets in.

I was thinking of this yesterday as I watched a terrible movie from the mid-20th century, a perennial "worst films of all time" club member.

What got me is it wasn't fatiguing to watch. There was a baseline assumption that wherever I was watching, the film had my full attention and it didn't need to constantly compete with other stimuli.

(Or, y'know, I would be in the back seat of my car at the drive-in and in that case it's not even worth trying)