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The number of times I picked up my phone and scrolled on Tik Tok, Instagram, and Snapchat in between writing this blog post is diabolical. I am about to sit here and write about how digital technology, specifically social media, has become so normal that it almost prohibits us from doing daily activities while I am actively getting distracted every five minutes by my phone. Ironic, isn’t it? Well anyways, it’s true, as you can tell; social media has completely changed our world in ways that are good but also quite bad. I don’t like admitting that it has created bad habits, but it has. I don’t want to admit that I have taken a 30 min scroll break in between every 20-minute work time increment, but I have… Scrolling on social media platforms has become so normal because it is so easily accessible, and we don’t even realize how much of our attention goes towards it. Technological companies that work in social media’s number 1 goal is to grab our attention and hold it. This is exactly what connects to the “attention economy” idea that Tristian Harris talks about in his TED talk, which you can watch here to learn more about his fascinating concept.

The documentary on Netflix called The Social Dilemma perfectly shows how even though we don’t actively pay a fee to use social media platforms such as Tik Tok, Instagram, and Snapchat; those companies benefit purely from our attention. Using Tik Tok and Instagram for example, the app is completely filtered around our interests, our likes, and our searches. Those three things give these platforms perfect personalized feeds to keep us longer and gain more and more attention. I was really interested in learning how these platforms claim they personalize feeds, so I decided to look at Tik Toks Help Center which gives reasons ranging from current location to popular content.

This trails into and back to how easily we get distracted by social media. This idea, like I mentioned before, is the “attention economy”. It doesn’t matter if I am writing this blog, doing my accounting textbook reading, or just watching a show or movie on Netflix; I constantly get distracted by notifications on my phone from Instagram or text messages from my friends and family. What I am trying to get at here is the question of if our attention needs protecting?

(Image of my social media screen time from the week)

The answer is not to just delete all platforms of social media, because like I said in the beginning, social media also has good qualities. It is a form of entertainment, it exposes us to information (even though most of the time it’s fake news), and it connects people from all over the world. Instead, we need to just be more aware and understand that companies are intentionally trying to capture our attention for long durations of time. This may just be that the most intriguing thing about media literacy in 2026 is why it is so hard for us to look away from our screens instead of simply comprehending what we see.