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Reclaim Your Mind- The World Wants Your Attention

Where you place your focus makes a difference

Kerry Needs
4 min readAug 2, 2019
Photo by chester wade on Unsplash

Have you ever seen the shadowy B-Movie classic, ‘They Live’? A young man finds a pair of sunglasses that allows him to see the media as it really is, revealing continual subconscious programming by ‘aliens’ that are controlling his attention.

As laughable as the film was in the 1980’s, the notion that our consent is indeed being engineered is beginning to gain significant traction.

In the talk ‘The War For Our Attention’, Mads Holmen shares the addictive nature of sites such as Netflix, Youtube and Facebook:

“As these platforms are funded by advertising, their incentive is to get us to spend as much time as possible using them, even if it’s not productive. One of their tactics is to serve you bite-sized distractions that I call ‘sugary content’. It’s stuff that’s very clickable, easy to consume and leaves you still feeling hungry”

Tristan Harris agrees. In ‘It’s Time To Redesign The Attention Economy’, he says that it’s not what these platforms show us that are important, but what they leave out. Since these online platforms are geared by algorithms, then we automatically consume what they can push forwards as important. He asks

“The question is, what

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Kerry Needs
Kerry Needs

Written by Kerry Needs

Freelance Copywriter | Experiments in #lifestyledesign, #productivity and #flow. Occasional #poet. Get in touch: www.kerryneeds.com

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