Methods & Experience

Attention junkie meets social media – a fatal combination

First published October 29, 2022 · Kurt Brand

How attention junkies are made

In their childhood, people are raised to become emotional attention junkies: they are rewarded for behaviors their parents consider desirable, while deviating behaviors go unrewarded, are ignored or are even punished. These rewards and punishments can take many forms – from verbal attention and affection (or their withdrawal) and material rewards (or sanctions) to physical caresses (or corporal punishment).

As a result, people learn very early in life that they receive attention and love above all when they behave the way other people expect them to, or the way social norms and conventions dictate. When we get good grades at school, for example, we are praised or even rewarded with money or presents – which conditions us early on to equate conforming behavior or performance with worth, appreciation and love. Perhaps we are also praised and rewarded for being particularly polite, or tidy, or whatever. There are many situations in which such parenting patterns are applied.

During the first three years of our lives – which, fatally, we can no longer remember because of so-called “childhood amnesia” – our personality is shaped by individual events and experiences that anchor themselves as patterns in our subconscious, i.e. below our threshold of perception. We learn very early that we receive attention, appreciation and love primarily when we are “good” in the eyes of others or behave as expected – and no attention, appreciation and love when we are not.

When parents and caregivers, consciously or unconsciously, work with love and the withdrawal of love to produce compliant behavior in their little ones, they shape little opportunists and attention junkies who make their own well-being dependent on the reactions of those around them and consequently crave positive feedback from other people.

How many parents manage to give their children unconditional love in the truest sense of the word: You are lovable and you are loved, no matter what happens, no matter what you look like, no matter how you feel and no matter how you behave? And yet there is nothing we long for more than to be loved for who we are. “I want a partner who accepts and loves me as I am, and for whom I don’t have to bend over backwards!” – who doesn’t know this pious wish?

As we grow up, we increasingly define for ourselves what we consider “good”, but our childhood conditioning naturally keeps us captive, because it operates in the subconscious and is therefore beyond cognitive control. That is why, even as adults, our understanding and perception of “good” and “bad” is largely based on judgments that other people instilled in us or “introjected” (keyword for further research: introjects).

The best examples are probably our appearance, our professional achievements and our social status. Unfortunately, in our very superficial world, those people receive more attention and approval who are attractive and slim, dress fashionably, wear make-up or expensive perfume and thus match the prevailing ideal of beauty. Or those who are regarded as particularly successful and can display their social status with corresponding status symbols (e.g. clothing, car, home, food, travel …).

This is almost laid in our cradle, which is why we find it so hard to let go of these patterns and standards of judgment. Who doesn’t remember the prettiest girl or the best-looking boy from their school days, or the top students, who were often disparaged as “swots” by those who couldn’t keep up with them? On the other hand, do you still remember the “wallflowers” in your class, who were neither pretty nor able to shine with good grades? Those who were not blessed with good looks or good grades and weren’t sports aces sometimes took refuge in the role of class clown, to score at least with originality within the class (and with the opposite sex). Or they took themselves out of the race altogether by deliberately dressing sloppily or neglecting their bodies. Not least to make differences in social status between rich and poor less obvious, there are countries where pupils wear school uniforms.

The problem: If you have linked your appearance, performance or social status to your worth as a human being, every little rejection in these areas will cut you to the heart.

Some people want to be loved, admired or at least noticed. If these emotional junkies are denied the attention and love they thirst for so badly, they feel unhappy. Some then begin to castigate themselves and become, for example, extremely overweight or underweight, or slide into other forms of problematic behavior.

So we are born into a world that links worth to appearance, performance and social status. That is why there are more cosmetic surgeries than ever before, and providers of slimming, fitness and wellness products and services are making a fortune.

Many people hunger for attention, positive affection, appreciation and love and therefore turn into workaholics or try to paper over their emotional emptiness with unrestrained consumption, sex or drugs. Unfortunately, these substitute gratifications don’t work and in the medium term only lead to more emptiness and frustration. Other people throw themselves into the hustle and bustle of social networks and try to attract attention there at any price. Every follower, every “like”, every comment and every shared post is experienced as self-affirmation. I post, therefore I am.

The logic of the attention economy

In 1968, the American artist Andy Warhol coined the famous phrase about the “15 minutes of fame” that every person strives for, or is granted, in the course of their life. The phrase also criticizes the fleeting nature of fame and media attention, which quickly shifts to another object as soon as the viewer’s attention span is exhausted. Since then, the expression has been used especially in the entertainment industry and pop culture, but it can just as easily be applied to social media platforms. Since the beginning of the 21st century, together with smartphone manufacturers, they have been filling exactly this gap in the market by suddenly giving their users a stage on which to gain worldwide visibility and reach with little effort.

However, the price for this is high, because social media platforms generate the lion’s share of their revenue by placing targeted advertising in their users’ news feeds – advertising that is above-averagely likely to make the user buy the advertised product. This perfidious mechanism is called “microtargeting”. For microtargeting to work, the platforms of course need to find out what makes their users tick. They do so by recording every interaction of every user on the platform: every post, every like, every comment and even every mouse movement, or how long a user hovers over a particular piece of content. The data collected is combined with that of other users into peer groups, and the accuracy with which the future behavior of people in a peer group can be predicted is astonishing, if not frightening. Over time, the platform algorithms learn better and better which buttons to push to trigger a particular behavior in a user – this may sound like a conspiracy theory, but it is simply the everyday madness of so-called “persuasive computing”, which is used by almost all social media platforms.

The more users interact on the platform, the more personal data the algorithms can harvest. Emotionally aroused users who feel triggered by certain content interact particularly intensively – and that is exactly why social media algorithms favor emotionalizing content that triggers as many people as possible. As a consequence, trashy, polarizing or provocative posts get significantly more visibility and reach than objective, substantive and fact-based posts.

Quite a few users – especially on Twitter, but also on Facebook and LinkedIn – continuously exploit the attention economy to gain visibility and reach by deliberately feeding the culture of outrage with calculated provocations that are highly likely to trigger and emotionalize other people – anything for a riot. I have observed this effect countless times (and occasionally used it myself), and it contributes considerably to the division of society by inciting people against each other.

What is particularly perfidious is that the platforms tap into the mechanisms described at the beginning, which play out in their users’ subconscious and are therefore not subject to conscious cognitive control. When the naive attention junkie meets a social media platform whose main interest is to penetrate as deeply as possible into its users’ privacy through social behavior control in order to sell as much advertising as possible, the consequences are serious – wasted lifetime and wasted life energy being the two most harmless of them.

The consequences – for individuals and for democracy

In their effort to stand out from the crowd of “wallflowers”, attention junkies (often without noticing it themselves) resort to ever more extreme or radical means, making themselves vulnerable. Even more bare skin, even more radical slogans, even more provocative depictions – the sky is the limit. If you consider the risk of becoming a victim of stalking and cyberbullying to be small and insignificant, I would recommend, first, that you take a look at the official statistics and perhaps talk to your children.

Second, you should be aware that a single such incident can be enough to change your life and that of your family. If you write 100 job applications as an employee, one of them can lead you to your dream job. If you submit 100 proposals as an entrepreneur, one of them can secure your livelihood for the coming months or even years. If you engage in 100 controversial discussions on social media platforms, the probability that you will encounter a psychopathic narcissist who enjoys tormenting other people is pretty high.

In real life, divorces, adultery, dismissals, demotions, inheritance disputes, money matters, club politics or other situations in which people feel treated unfairly or disadvantaged awaken base instincts and drives – often to the point where the only goal is to inflict maximum damage on the opponent or even to destroy them (“I’m going to finish you off, you pig!”). The internet and social media platforms deliver the ammunition for this on a silver platter – and the internet never forgets.

Another problem is that social media algorithms can influence democratic majority decisions by deliberately making content more or less visible to swing voters who are particularly susceptible to certain triggers. In the Brexit referendum on June 23, 2016, for example, 17,410,742 British voters (51.9 %) voted to leave the EU and 16,141,241 (48.1 %) voted to remain – with a turnout of 72.2 %. Had only 634,751 voters, i.e. 1.89 % of the 33,551,983 voters, decided differently, the United Kingdom would not have left the EU.

Another example, also from 2016, is the election of Donald Trump as the 45th President of the United States. In the popular vote, Donald Trump received 62,984,828 votes (46.1 %) and thus clearly lost to Hillary Clinton, who received 65,853,514 votes (48.2 %). However, Trump managed to win 304 electors in the Electoral College, while Hillary Clinton won only 227. The US Federal Election Commission’s analysis of the 2016 presidential election shows how close the decision was: Had Hillary Clinton received just a few thousand more votes in the three swing states of Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan, she would have had a majority in the Electoral College and won the election.

Last but not least, as already mentioned, social media platforms polarize and divide society. If you are interested in this aspect, you will find further information in my article “Der Einfluss sozialer Medien auf die Spaltung der Gesellschaft” (The influence of social media on the division of society), published on September 13, 2018 (t1p.de/hmvr, in German).

So what is the way out of this misery?

A word to parents: Your child is more likely to imitate what you do than what you tell them. So if you are unable to avoid the fatal mechanism of conditional attention, affection and love when raising your children, at least be a good role model when it comes to your own social media consumption. If you stare at your smartphone or computer in every free minute, chances are high that your children will adopt the same behavior.

Apart from that, it would certainly help if children and young people could acquire the necessary media literacy at school to recognize the business models of social media platforms and to understand the resulting risks and dangers for themselves, their social environment and society. This, however, would first require teachers themselves to build up the necessary knowledge.

Media literacy alone is not enough, though, because their early conditioning usually subjects children and young people to peer pressure that compels them to use social media platforms such as Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat or TikTok, or messenger services such as WhatsApp, so as not to lose touch with their class or clique.

In my opinion, it cannot be the task of schools to repair the conscious or unconscious mistakes parents made in their children’s early upbringing and conditioning. What seems important to me is that children get the opportunity – in sports clubs, for example – to find out where their talents lie and to develop self-confidence and self-esteem. As long as we do not accept ourselves and cannot give ourselves genuine love, every affirmation, recognition and affection simply flows through us, because it is not the love we really long for.

Even as children, we have the basic need to be loved for our pure being, and this need will never disappear. As adults we are no longer dependent on our parents, but most of us have never learned to accept and love ourselves as we are. Instead, we look for (and find) fault – especially when we compare ourselves on social media with “influencers” and their artificial make-believe world.

Perhaps this is the greatest challenge in the development of the human personality in the 21st century: learning to break free from the external standards to which we have tied our self-worth, and to define and recognize our true self-worth so that we are at peace with ourselves. Only then can we escape the pied pipers of the digital attention economy and surveillance capitalism.

Complementary readings

Most of the following articles are only available in German; English versions are indicated where available.