The Cost of Our Attention: Modern Media and the Business of Retention

Written by Tyler Whitfield

Account Executive

Photo courtesy of Camilo Jimenez via Unsplash.

Screen time is a common topic of conversation. Many people check their daily usage in their phone settings, but even if the number seems high, they often brush it off or make a false promise to cut back. According to a 2024 survey from Statista, the average American adult consumes 12.31 hours of media daily, whether that’s television, newspapers, magazines, or radio, which equates to around 70% of their waking hours.

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, media consumption has risen by more than an hour per day. At this current rate, it’s estimated to surpass 13.40 hours per day by 2026. 

The Psychological Toll of Too Much Media

The over-consumption of negative media has led to a psychological phenomenon known as “mean-world syndrome.” Mean-world syndrome (MWS) is when an individual perceives the world as being significantly more dangerous than it is statistically proven to be. MWS can manifest in individuals as anxiety disorders, depressive episodes and self-isolation.

Recent observational studies have correlated excessive media consumption during the COVID-19 pandemic with higher levels of stress and depression disorders. Juwon Hwang, an assistant professor of media science and health communications at Boston University, studies the excessive exposure of news media during the COVID-19 pandemic and the correlation to an increased sense of emotional dread.

“Consuming news via television and social media was tied to increased distress,” Hwang wrote in her 2021 study. “Emotional distress was most pronounced among individuals high in information seeking and television news use.” 

During lockdowns, many people turned to the media for both information and entertainment — arguably to an unhealthy extent. Were they consuming too much, or was there just too much content being pushed at them?

The Business of Keeping Us Hooked

The media communications industry is oversaturated. Every day, consumers choose between a multitude of social media platforms, news organizations and streaming services. The breadth of choices has led to consumer attention being more valuable than ever before.

Most media companies — whether they focus on social media or news — use strategies designed to keep people engaged, such as gamification, dopamine surging and algorithmic bias reinforcement.The dopamine release pattern caused by these features can lead to media addiction. Media addiction is commonly associated with social media, but also stems from news and other media types that apply addictive techniques.

Most media organizations make money from ads rather than subscriptions. Tim Wu, a Columbia law professor and contributor to The New York Times, refers to these organizations as “attention merchants” because their business models involve selling high-traffic real estate to advertisers.

Since these platforms profit from engagement, they are built to keep users watching, reading and scrolling for as long as possible. But spending too much time consuming media can take a toll on mental health and can distort one’s worldview.

“How we spend the brutally limited resource of our attention will determine [our] lives to a degree most of us may prefer not to think about,” Wu wrote in The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads. “We are at risk, without quite fully realizing it, of living lives that are less our own than we imagine.”