The Attention Economy with Chris Kanich: Why is it so hard to put your phone down?

Welcome, Chris. Nice to see you.  

Today’s guest is Chris Kanich — a computer science professor at the University of Illinois Chicago, whose research covers cybersecurity, algorithmic fairness, and the role of AI in education. He’s even built a platform for himself on social media where discusses these topics and the work he’s doing, and really so much more that allows others to follow along. In this episode, we break down the attention economy — how it’s engineered to keep us scrolling, and what that means for our screen-driven lives. 

Chris Kanich 0:53 

Hi, Grace. Nice to see you.  

Grace Khachaturian 0:54 

So glad to have you on the podcast today. I am so excited for the topic that we’re covering. I think it’s so prevalent for so many people in our society. We’re going to unpack the very layered topic and curiosity of why it’s so hard to put your phone down. As we begin this conversation, I would love to first start with a little bit about your why, putting your story in context, what personal experience has inspired the work that you’re currently doing? 

Chris Kanich  1:22 

So my why on this is really that as a millennial, I grew up with the Internet. I got my first computer when I was in fifth grade, and I was kind of a sheltered kid, a little bit weird. But you get into this world where there’s just a bunch of other people who are out there on the internet doing this or that or the other thing; they’re just as incredibly excited about something as I am. And over time, as it has evolved, I’ve really seen that the promise of the internet is that it allows as many people as possible to be their wonderful, weird selves, which is great. 

Grace Khachaturian  01:57 

And I love how you have really leaned into kind of creating a platform yourself. Why is it so important to you to create a space for people to be their wonderfully weird selves? 

Chris Kanich  2:09 

I think it’s important, right? Like this moment in time is like, we need all hands-on deck. Everybody has to be at their best selves trying to figure out, how do we deal with AI, how do we deal with the way the government works? How do we deal with just putting food on the table. In order to do that well, we can’t just keep doing what we’ve always been doing. We can’t just have the same set of people in the room. We got to get different ideas, different expertise, different everything in the room. And so I don’t really care where you come from, what you think about, I want you to come in and say, Oh, hey, can you work well in this team? Can you come up with a new way to solve the problem we’re dealing with right now? That’s incredibly important. 

Grace Khachaturian  02:50 

Yeah and I think that’s as you mentioned just welcoming everyone to the table. And the internet is that unique space that allows everyone to come to the table which is very neat. Let’s dive into the big curiosity here that I think so many of us may encounter, especially when we have our phones. We can’t seem to put it down. Why can’t we stop scrolling? 

Chris Kanich  3:02 

The easiest, best, most direct answer to that one for me is that there are a lot of people getting paid a lot of money to keep you scrolling. So this is one of those things where it’s not a personal failing, it’s not a weird quirk you have. It is by design. Because all of these companies, the longer your eyeballs stay on that screen, the more money they are making. And so that is kind of what we’re up against in this world. And yeah, it’s the attention economy. The attention economy is really all of the infrastructure and the businesses and the incentive structures that surround display advertising on the Internet. There are immense amounts of wealth to be made by advertising products, advertising other websites, whatever have you. But all of that is predicated on, I’m going to show an ad to you. I know that you’ve seen that ad, and I need you to voluntarily choose to continue consuming my content in order to continue seeing my ads. So that specific loop of I need your eyeballs in order to make money, and the more eyeballs I have, the better I can target these ads, the more time you’ll spend on it, the more money I’ll make. That loop is the attention economy. 

Grace Khachaturian  4:37 

Let’s talk about the like mental stimulation side of it, I know, especially when we enter the world of social media, we are entering into a whole new landscape here, of, oh, I got a new follow, or oh, someone likes my post or someone commented. What role does that mental stimulation side have on our feeling of needing to go back? 

Chris Kanich  04:45 

That’s a huge aspect of this, right? I think there’s two really big things that are happening in this kind of environment. One of them is that, especially as somebody who grew up with the internet, I knew what the internet before tech billionaires existed was like, it was just kind of straightforward. It was a little bit ugly, it was a little bit rough around the edges, but it was the information that you needed. There wasn’t some whole business model that was supporting putting as much in front of you as possible. So, as Facebook became really popular, as all of these things evolved, they figured out, oh, what are these new ways that we can give people just this little bit of a dopamine hit, the idea of the infinite scrolling news feed, the like button. These are not things that just have always existed. Somebody invented them. They did an experiment saying, oh, hey, when I put this little plus one in front of somebody, they get really, really excited about it. And I think the other aspect to this, is the randomized response aspect of it. You’ve got a Skinner box. If you always click something and you always get a reward, you always click something, you always get a reward. You don’t get addicted to it, right? But if there’s a randomized reward, sometimes you get one, sometimes you don’t. Sometimes your post does great. Sometimes it doesn’t. This response that you get really hooks you in there and makes you feel like you got to come back and get more, because you don’t know whether that next post is going to be amazing or whether it’s going to get two likes and you’re going to be super sad. 

Grace Khachaturian  06:17 

That is such an interesting aspect of it. I opened my phone and it’s like, gosh, I was just having a conversation about this, and now it’s coming across my screen. Is this coincidental? Is this creepy? What is this? 

Chris Kanich  06:30 

There have been a lot of really great studies of this. I think everyone that works in this area has heard this, oh, hey, I was having this conversation that all of a sudden I got an ad for whatever. And we’ve looked at this. We’ve tried over and over and over again to say, Oh, are they picking up on the microphone or picking up this, picking up that? But at the end of the day, what everybody has found is that this is not a prevalent thing, especially when it comes to your smartphone, we are very confident that the microphone isn’t picking anything up, it’s not recording, it’s not sending that, whatever have you. And the few studies that I have seen that are really compelling in this area are saying that, okay, well, you might have made this connection something you were talking about, but you’re talking about it because you’re interested in it, and there’s a reasonable chance that, if you’re interested in it, oh, maybe you clicked on something two hours, six hours, 24 hours ago that is related to that, but you don’t remember it the same way as that physical out loud conversation. So, I think human brains just are amazing, and that they’re great at making connections between things that are very apparent to them. And what we’ve seen time and time again is that these are creepy coincidences. 

Grace Khachaturian  07:45 

That is very interesting, though, because I was one of those people that just assumed, hey, they’re just picking up on what I’m saying in my conversations and matching my algorithms to it.  

Chris Kanich  07:55 

They’re not using your voice, but they’re using literally everything that you ever do directly on your phone to come up with those things. So it’s not creepy in that it’s listening to your voice, but it is creepy from my perspective, in that every single like the amount of milliseconds that you spend looking at something on TikTok or on Instagram before you start scrolling up, how fast you’re scrolling, whether you’re laying on your side, whether you’re sitting up, all of these signals that they can pick up, they do pick up, and they do feed into these algorithms that are really amazing in terms of how well optimized, how well engineered they are into keeping you coming back. 

Grace Khachaturian  08:34 

So how do social media algorithms work?  

Chris Kanich  08:38 

So this is a really fascinating topic. This is something that I didn’t traditionally take a look at, but just trying to fully understand how it’s doing such a great job of hooking you in. The best thing that we know right now in terms of the absolute state of the art is that we have these machine learning based algorithms where they’re going to pull in a whole bunch of signals and they’re going to say, okay, based on everything we know about every single video that every single person in the entire world has watched, for instance, on TikTok or Instagram reels, take your pick. They know, okay, which ones are liked by which people, and we can cluster those. We’re going to find things that are similar. And their goal, then is to figure out, okay, who is Chris similar to out there? And what can we recommend to him that’s likely to be interested, interesting to him, because everybody else who likes the same things Chris liked, like this one. So that matching aspect is a really, really important part. Who you’re getting matched with isn’t as important as just the fact that they have all of this information. So part of what they’re doing is trying to figure out how interested you are in specific things, to kind of put you into this bin and make new suggestions for you.  

One of the more recent advances on this, and I think a lot of people will recognize this once I start describing it, is that traditionally, those algorithms worked on like a day or several hours time span, but what the newer algorithms are, and I’ve absolutely seen this myself on YouTube and on TikTok, they are set up such that as soon as you start watching a specific type of video, within seconds, all of your recommendations, whether you’re scrolling through or the recommendations on the YouTube homepage, will reflect that new thing that you have hooked onto. And I think this is really where a lot of that, getting its hooks into you, getting you to go deeper and set another half an hour, put off your assignment for another two hours, whatever have you. This is where it’s coming in, they’re reducing that friction for you to just dig deeper, learn more, stay on the platform, continue watching ads, continue feeding them data so that they can continue to bring as many people in, as many eyeballs as possible, to watch as many videos and ads as possible. 

Grace Khachaturian  10:58 

How can we be smart consumers?  

Chris Kanich  11:01 

The best way that I would say to be a smart consumer is really to have that acknowledgement that these platforms aren’t neutral. They have incentives to keep you there, and their incentives are not necessarily the same as yours, like if you’re trying to get your to do list finished off for the day, their job is not to help you finish that. Their job is to keep you doing what they want you to do. And so that doesn’t make things easier, but it does make you feel more like, it does give you more agency. It does allow you to decide this and say, look, this system that makes me feel a little bit, you know, less anxious, or a little bit calmer because I watched a cat video or whatever have you, is giving me some benefit. But that’s not the only thing that’s happening here. So, I think the first step as a smart consumer is to acknowledge that you’re not in hostile territory, but you are in neutral territory. There’s these companies that are trying to get out of you, what they want to get out of you, and I think just taking that as Okay, I’m going to limit my engagement with these platforms. I’m going to do all the normal social, non-computer tricks, like I could say, oh, I’m going to tell my partner hey, ask me at the end of the day how long I spent scrolling on YouTube. And my goal is for it to be an hour a day, right. Start there and make, make your way down something like that. We have ways that exist that allow us to, you know, meld up, mold our own behaviors that need to be used to counteract the way that all these systems are molding our behaviors.  

Grace Khachaturian  12:44 

What impact do you think age has on the attention economy and our ability to stop scrolling? 

Chris Kanich  12:53 

That is a great question. I think age in general has a lot to do with two really big aspects. So, one of them is, oh, hey, I’m a medium-elder millennial. I remember a time when I had to use a Rand McNally Atlas to figure out how to get someplace or all that stuff. And so my developmental years were spent in a completely different attention ecosystem. And so I think people that are in roughly this age range, like your early late 30s, early 40s or so, they are going to remember a time before they were just getting force fed to stuff. And so I think there is a real difference there between growing up with smartphones that are always connected to the Internet all the time and that’s going to be one big one. The other really, really big one is the effect of COVID on people’s development, right? I think being sent to effectively, your nuclear family and the Internet, those were the two ways that you could interact with the world for, you know, between several months and, you know, a couple of years. And that aspect of when it hit different people in their development, whether they were really, really young and they don’t even remember it, whether they were in middle school, whether they were in high school, whether they’re in college, as an instructor at the college level, I’ve been seeing, it’s almost like, you know, when you go through a canyon, you see all the different layers of rock that got deposited, different layers like, Okay, well, this group of kids went through college and COVID, okay. Well, they have these types of impacts. This group of kids went through high school, like, late high school and COVID. Or. Early high school and COVID, and they had a different impact on their lives from this. And I think we’re just going to keep seeing how that works until it’s worked its way out of out of our lives, and we’ll just keep on dealing with it as best we can. 

Grace Khachaturian  14:50 

Do you think that there are policies that would be useful maybe even in schools, that would help limit scrolling for kids? 

Chris Kanich  15:01 

So I think it’s a fantastic idea. Honestly, I think the most compelling studies I’ve seen are the ones where you just ask the students themselves, what do you get out of scrolling? What do you get out of the fact that you have social media, and all of your classmates have social media. And the one big takeaway that I’ve seen is that they don’t like it, but they do it because everyone else does. But if it gets banned, that’s something where there’s going to be some growing pains. There’s going to be some parents that really want to have that 24/7, immediate access to their kids, which is understandable, but from what I’ve seen students, parents and teachers alike, all feel better about themselves when phones get banned in schools. The other big beneficial side to this that teachers have definitely seen is that the attention span of the kids in their classroom goes way, way up because they actually aren’t being pulled into these you know, attention, these dopamine Skinner boxes, as much as they possibly can with every notification, every ping that goes off on their phone. 

Grace Khachaturian  16:09 

Yeah, I could absolutely see how that would be beneficial for all involved, almost like taking that school policy and implementing it in in a way that works for your own life. Do you think implementing some sort of boundary for your phone would be helpful in terms of how much we scroll?  

Chris Kanich  16:25 

Oh, absolutely. I think this is something that, as a very enthusiastic citizen of the internet for a very long part of my life, I have always felt like, oh, there’s this pull of, oh, I’m using it too much. And the one big trick for that is, okay, well, if I’m going to block a bunch of sites so that I don’t spend too much time on them, I’m the one who blocked them, so I usually know how to unblock them. That’s the real tricky part. There are tools I know, screen time on Apple devices do give you the ability to do these types of things, but there’s always a code you can put in to reset it, whatever have you. But what I have seen in my own experience is that putting those speed bumps, even if you have a little one in front of going and doing some scrolling, is incredibly important. And I think it’s a great idea. The biggest hump for anybody is really the first few hours, first few days, first week or so of this new set of habits. Right? If you can get through seven days of when I go to bed I don’t pull my phone out, it’s going to be so much easier the eighth day, the ninth day, the 10th day. So going back to what I was saying earlier, having some social encouragement from friends, maybe create a club like create a group chat where everybody posts a screenshot of their screen time limits, and asks each other, checks in with each other. That’s something that we could use to regain control of our lives and do it in a social manner, which is what humans are good at.  

Grace Khachaturian  18:06 

That’s a great idea. I think it would be a little bit exposing at first, but then it’d be motivating. All the more motivating to get better and better with maybe those boundaries… You’re just learning to be a healthy consumer. When internet entered your world in fifth grade, did you ever imagine where we’d be?  

Chris Kanich  18:25 

I absolutely no idea. I think for a lot of folks in, say, computer science on the tech side of the world, we definitely started out as, oh, we’re kind of outcast, kind of weirdos, kind of on the side. And then we had this kind of moment in the limelight of, oh, you know, nerds are cool, all that great stuff, but now we’ve kind of shifted over into, oh, those nerds, those nerd billionaires, are trying to run the world, and they’re not necessarily ready for all that comes along with that, right? We can’t use technology to solve all of our problems. We need to use technology to help humans solve the problems.  

Grace Khachaturian  19:04 

Well, Chris, it’s been so interesting to really dive into why it can be so hard to stop scrolling and understanding the attention economy and the many factors that make it all the more difficult to step away from screens.   

We love to end every episode on a fun note, and that’s music. So if you were to pick a theme song that best represents your story, what song would you pick? 

Chris Kanich  19:25 

I would absolutely go with Bo Burnham’s “Welcome to the Internet.” 

[MUSIC: “Welcome to the Internet”]

His career has been pretty amazing to watch. As somebody who is this internet native just take on just everything that comes through this. I think he has a really great handle on how your hooks, how the hooks get into you on the internet, and especially something that I’m not really aware of, but he certainly is, is the fame that you can get on the internet, and how intoxicating that can be, and how for a lot of people, it is not healthy, but they’re not going to stop anytime soon. So it’s wonderful, it’s terrifying, it’s beneficial, it’s all these things, but it really comes down to how you use it, how you protect yourself, and how you build your own awareness about how everything is working around you.  

Grace Khachaturian  20:30 

So good. Well, Chris, we’re so grateful for your time here today, sharing your expertise and diving into such an interesting curiosity. Thank you for your time.  

Chris Kanich  20:38 

Thanks so much, Grace. Great talking to you.  

Grace Khachaturian 20:40 

You too.  

Learn more about Chris Kanich and where to follow him on his own social platforms in the show notes at today.uic.edu. 

[MUSIC: “Welcome to the Internet”]