Pay Attention: a Call to Regulate the Attention Market and Prevent Algorithmic Emotional Governance

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Michel, Franck, Gandon, Fabien
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
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author Michel, Franck
Gandon, Fabien
author_facet Michel, Franck
Gandon, Fabien
contents Over the last 70 years, we, humans, have created an economic market where attention is being captured and turned into money thanks to advertising. During the last two decades, leveraging research in psychology, sociology, neuroscience and other domains, Web platforms have brought the process of capturing attention to an unprecedented scale. With the initial commonplace goal of making targeted advertising more effective, the generalization of attention-capturing techniques and their use of cognitive biases and emotions have multiple detrimental side effects such as polarizing opinions, spreading false information and threatening public health, economies and democracies. This is clearly a case where the Web is not used for the common good and where, in fact, all its users become a vulnerable population. This paper brings together contributions from a wide range of disciplines to analyze current practices and consequences thereof. Through a set of propositions and principles that could be used do drive further works, it calls for actions against these practices competing to capture our attention on the Web, as it would be unsustainable for a civilization to allow attention to be wasted with impunity on a world-wide scale.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2402_16670
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Pay Attention: a Call to Regulate the Attention Market and Prevent Algorithmic Emotional Governance
Michel, Franck
Gandon, Fabien
Social and Information Networks
Over the last 70 years, we, humans, have created an economic market where attention is being captured and turned into money thanks to advertising. During the last two decades, leveraging research in psychology, sociology, neuroscience and other domains, Web platforms have brought the process of capturing attention to an unprecedented scale. With the initial commonplace goal of making targeted advertising more effective, the generalization of attention-capturing techniques and their use of cognitive biases and emotions have multiple detrimental side effects such as polarizing opinions, spreading false information and threatening public health, economies and democracies. This is clearly a case where the Web is not used for the common good and where, in fact, all its users become a vulnerable population. This paper brings together contributions from a wide range of disciplines to analyze current practices and consequences thereof. Through a set of propositions and principles that could be used do drive further works, it calls for actions against these practices competing to capture our attention on the Web, as it would be unsustainable for a civilization to allow attention to be wasted with impunity on a world-wide scale.
title Pay Attention: a Call to Regulate the Attention Market and Prevent Algorithmic Emotional Governance
topic Social and Information Networks
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.16670