This paper advances a simple claim that becomes harder the longer one studies it. In the present attention economy, serious artists have only three rational postures toward social media. They can operate it as a competitive business that partners with other businesses. They can boycott it and build alternatives. Or they can drift into habitual scrolling that taxes practice time, narrows risk, and erodes the conditions of creative excellence. The triad is not a slogan. It follows from the economics of platform incentives, from cognitive neuroscience on attention and improvisation, and from experimental and observational evidence on screen time, mood, and performance. The argument is addressed to working artists and to the institutions that serve them, with jazz presented as a proof case because improvisation makes attention visible. The conclusion is Emersonian in spirit. What you own of your art you own by your attention. Where you rent out attention, you lease your future. The stream is loud, but the studio is quiet. Choose the quiet that grows the tone. Where the day goes, the art goes. Make a covenant with your hours and keep it.
Information is abundant, yet attention is scarce. That simple asymmetry sets the stage on which every artist now works. Herbert Simon saw the inversion long before the interface, writing that a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and the need to allocate it efficiently. The phrase reads like prophecy because platform markets took that scarcity as their raw material. Business models that clear ad auctions sell not content but the probability of a return glance. Notification schedules are tuned for salience and recurrence. Product teams do not optimize for unbroken practice. They optimize for the next check. A century of psychology on intermittent reinforcement meets an engineering culture that is very good at experiments at scale. The combination pulls attention into short cycles and measures success by the depth of the rut. The intellectual scaffolding for this claim is public. Simon’s argument about attention scarcity is canonical. Contemporary work in business ethics names the addictive design of social platforms a managerial and policy problem rather than a user willpower problem. Political economy diagnoses describe a regime that treats experience as extractive data and experiments with behavior modification at scale. None of this requires melodrama. It is enough to say that when a market pays well for your next click, it will invest in the conditions that make you click. The artist pays in foregone hours of practice. (NMH-P, Cambridge University Press & Assessment, EECIS)
The numbers trace the outline of a life. Global audits indicate that the typical internet user in 2025 spends roughly two hours and twenty one minutes per day on social media, a figure that fluctuates by region yet reliably absorbs a working month every year. The same audits note a slight decline from recent peaks, but the absolute tax on attention remains large. Meanwhile, the way those hours fragment matters as much as their sum. Field logging studies associated with Gloria Mark’s group report that people now remain on a screen for an average of about forty seven seconds before switching. Early 2000s baselines approached two and a half minutes. Every switch imposes a cost that carries into the next task. The literature calls it attention residue. The residue is small and stubborn and it adds up. Multiply seconds by days and you can hear the difference in a player’s time feel. (DataReportal – Global Digital Insights, Steelcase, University of California, IDEAS/RePEc)
The welfare effects of social media have moved from speculation to causal estimates. Deactivation experiments show that turning off Facebook for four weeks raises subjective well being and reduces platform use even after the study ends. An election season study that deactivated Facebook and Instagram for six weeks reports similar results, alongside trade offs in political information. A laboratory adjacent field trial that capped total daily social media time near thirty minutes found reductions in loneliness and depression relative to controls. These are not universal harms or universal benefits, they are credible directional effects. For a professional artist the direction matters. If habitual exposure nudges mood downward and pulls focus into shorter cycles, then the expected value of casual use is negative for any practice that requires long unbroken intervals. (American Economic Association, Gwern, Stanford University, guilfordjournals.com)
The mechanism has a name and a scale. Fear of missing out is not only a folk term. It has a validated measure and replicable links to compulsive checking, negative affect, and the kind of fragmented attention that produces effort without depth. FoMO predicts social media intensity and frequently mediates the relationship between usage and distress. The loop is familiar. Anticipation drives checking, checking drives interruptions, interruptions degrade focus, degraded focus reduces the probability of deep practice, and reduced deep practice increases the appeal of shallow novelty. The loop is psychological. The loop is also commercial. Where urgency is profitable urgency becomes default. (Self Determination Theory, ScienceDirect)
At this point the argument shifts from the general to the musical. Improvisation is attention in public. Functional MRI studies with professional jazz pianists show a pattern in which self monitoring regions of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex quiet while medial prefrontal areas associated with self generated expression become more active. Reviews of ensemble performance emphasize the joint action of anticipatory imagery, integrative attention, and adaptive timing. These capacities are trained over thousands of quiet hours and expressed in the most fragile minutes of a live set. They are not compatible with constant intrusion. Attention residue is not a metaphor when a bandleader is trying to hear around the corner of a substitution or a drummer is shaping the trajectory of a ride pattern against a soloist’s long line. The brainwork of that moment depends on unbroken preparation. The feed is a broken preparation machine. (PLOS, SciSpace)
Publishers of spectacle do not wake in the morning intending to harm practice. They wake intending to increase engagement. That intention has consequences for how ideas spread. The mathematics of virality favors novelty and arousal. Structural analyses of online diffusion introduce formal measures of how cascades travel through networks and repeatedly find that spectacle travels efficiently. The empirical fact that false news spreads farther and faster than true news on Twitter is not an indictment of every user. It is a reminder that attention has a taste for surprise and that the diet is easy to salt. In such an ecology, the artist who submits the day to the stream will be trained by the stream. The aesthetic becomes what the system can measure quickly. What can be measured quickly is not always what is worth doing slowly. (INFORMS PubsOnline, Politics at MIT)
Narratives and labels amplify the pressure. In a prior text that circulates as a PDF, the author warns that a population can be “enslaved by the media” and “herded like sheep,” and that what passes for awareness online often activates limbic systems without building understanding. The rhetoric is heated and the observation is sober. When survival cues are repeatedly triggered on a screen, rational appraisal yields ground to reflex, and people “are swept and overcome in bouts of passion” that feel like action but frequently stall at display. The attention economy did not invent that pattern, it industrialized it and put it on a schedule. Artists who aim to protect the conditions of their craft must understand that labels travel faster than listening and that a label rich environment punishes ambiguity, which is another name for possibility.
What follows from these premises is a decision tree that collapses into three branches. The first is to operate social media as a business that works with other businesses. That stance treats platforms as distribution and deal flow, not as lifestyle. It binds output to real offers, partners, and calendars, and it manages exposure with strict limits that protect contiguous practice blocks. It assumes that the economics of attention are adversarial by default and therefore insists on unit economics for time. It privileges first party relationships, owned lists, venue networks, and a catalog on sovereign rails. It uses the platforms but does not let the platforms use the practice room. Artists who choose this posture can benefit from institutional support designed for that choice. Programs exist that translate media literacy into earnings and equity and that teach creators to convert reach into assets rather than habits. One example is Legacy Builder from The Department of Jazz, a program that frames online distribution within a broader business education for working improvisers. The page is public. The curriculum is explicit about professionalization. The logic is general enough to adapt to other art forms. (Whop)
The second branch is to boycott strategically and to build alternatives. This is not romantic refusal. It is a practical stance with empirical support. The deactivation and time limit experiments cited above show small but credible improvements in mood and stress. For many artists, the traded hours are worth more as practice and life than as engagement inventory. Abstention pairs naturally with a distribution stack that belongs to the artist or the field. Mailing lists, community radio, venue owned discovery, independent media, co operative patronage, and direct communication with buyers of tickets and recordings are not quaint. They are modern, and they have a cost structure that respects practice. The European Union’s Digital Services Act is one example of policy that edges platforms toward transparency in recommender systems, yet even a friendlier regulatory climate does not remove the need for personal posture. Markets move faster than statutes. Artists must decide anyway. (Digital Strategy, European Commission)
The third branch is the default. Drift. Scroll instead of practice. Replace risk with spectacle. Accept a schedule of interruptions written elsewhere. Here the literature is plain. Average daily use north of two hours pulls days into fragments and puts a tollbooth on deep work. Focus windows measured in seconds make even simple tasks sticky and leave cognitive residue on the next task. False novelty can be purchased at any hour. Real novelty arrives only after expensive repetitions. The outcomes diverge over seasons, and the divergence is audible. What once sounded like risk begins to sound like reaction. The artist senses a thinning vocabulary and compensates with volume. The audience senses it too, then starts asking for smaller novelties at shorter intervals. The market obliges. (DataReportal – Global Digital Insights, Steelcase)
Some will object that social media is connection and discovery and that many communities flourish online. They are right. The effects are heterogeneous and context matters. The deactivation studies report trade offs. Artists in early career stages may rely on feeds to find collaborators and opportunities. Others will argue that browsing is a source of inspiration, that wandering is part of the job. They are right as well. The problem is not connection or wandering. The problem is the default intensity and the opportunity cost of replacing long hours of craft with short hours of novelty. Incubation helps ideas when it sits inside a rhythm of concentrated effort. Incubation without effort is drift. There is no contradiction in recommending purposeful wandering inside a day that protects deep practice. There is a contradiction in pretending that an interruption rich environment does not reach into the rehearsal. (American Economic Association, guilfordjournals.com)
At the institutional level, the field can lower the opportunity cost of saying no to drift and yes to depth. Conservatories and departments can fund time protected residencies and reward contiguous hours rather than velocity of posts. Venues can invest in non platform discovery that keeps the audience intimate enough to listen. Labels, managers, and schools can teach first party data skills, contract literacy, and catalog management as part of musicianship. The Department of Jazz frames this stance as legacy building rather than as austerity. That language is healthy. Legacy is the name for art that outlives the cycle time of a feed. Legacy is also an accounting term. Ownership is balance sheet, not metaphor. A field that teaches ownership teaches respect for attention. The visible storefront may include modern education platforms and community memberships. The strategy is older and clearer. Guard the practice room. Translate attention into assets. (Whop)
Policy is not a substitute for posture, yet it is not irrelevant. Ethical critiques of the attention economy ask managers and regulators to treat addiction like a moral problem, not a growth hack. Surveillance capitalism analyses show how data extraction and prediction markets generate incentives to shape behavior at scale. European law edges toward transparency and user choice in recommendation. In a world where design can modify behavior, it is not superstition to assume that design will at least try. Artists cannot wait for a regulatory settlement. They can insist that their institutions teach the economics and the ethics, and they can set their own prices for their time. (Cambridge University Press & Assessment, EECIS, obs.coe.int)
A word about speech. Artistic practice is not merely a sequence of motor refinements. It is a habit of mind that learns to hear itself think. In the jazz literature this is often described as the release of unhelpful self monitoring so that a line can find its contour in real time. The fMRI pictures are not the music, but they are a reminder that a brain needs conditions to move between inhibition and expression. Attention is one of those conditions. So is boredom. So is the long, oddly silent work of strengthening a weak measure until it no longer collapses under tempo. In that sense attention is not only capital. It is conscience. To spend it on spectacle that does not feed the instrument is to trade away precisely the grace an audience pays to hear. (PLOS)
There is a final thread to tie. In the uploaded text that many readers will know, the author laments a culture in which citizens are herded by media and in which superficial displays of awareness displace deeper work. The paper before you does not retell that narrative with the same nouns. It parses the machinery. Advertising systems can target the limbic system and call it relevance. Engagement loops can recruit primal cues like threat and belonging and call it community. The result is urgency without stewardship. The antidote is not withdrawal from the world but mastery over the terms of engagement. That is the Emersonian point. Self reliance is not isolation. It is the discipline to own the conditions under which one works. In an age that auctions attention, the artist’s first condition is time. Guard it with the zeal reserved for life and liberty. The day was given for work of consequence. Spend it accordingly.
The conclusion is clean enough to memorize. There is no neutral posture. To use social media as a business, with partners and a plan, is to bend a tool to a craft. To boycott, with parallel rails that you own, is to preserve the studio in which risk matures. To scroll as habit is to let the market choose your hours. Jazz clarifies the choice because improvisation makes attention audible. The ride pattern tells the truth about how the day was spent. Practice is freedom. Ownership is legacy. Attention is the only studio that scales.
Allcott, H., Braghieri, L., Eichmeyer, S., & Gentzkow, M. The Welfare Effects of Social Media. American Economic Review 110(3): 629–676, 2020. Deactivation of Facebook for four weeks increased subjective well being and reduced use. (American Economic Association, Gwern)
Bhargava, V. R., & Velasquez, M. Ethics of the Attention Economy: The Problem of Social Media Addiction. Business Ethics Quarterly 31(3): 321–359, 2021. Argues that addicting users through design is a moral problem for firms and regulators. (Cambridge University Press & Assessment)
DataReportal. Digital 2025: The State of Social Media. GWI estimate of 2 hours 21 minutes per day for the typical user. Feb 5, 2025. (DataReportal – Global Digital Insights)
Keller, P. E., et al. Musical Ensemble Performance: Representing Self, Other and Joint Action Outcomes. On anticipatory imagery, integrative attention, and adaptive timing in ensemble coordination. (giacomonovembre.com)
Leroy, S. Why is it so hard to do my work? The challenge of attention residue when switching between work tasks. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 109(2), 2009. (IDEAS/RePEc)
Limb, C. J., & Braun, A. R. Neural substrates of spontaneous musical performance: An fMRI study of jazz improvisation. PLOS ONE 3(2), 2008. (PLOS)
Mark, G. Attention Span and related interviews and summaries. Average focus windows of roughly forty seven seconds on screens, down from about two and a half minutes in 2004. (Steelcase)
Przybylski, A. K., Murayama, K., DeHaan, C. R., & Gladwell, V. Motivational, emotional, and behavioral correlates of fear of missing out. Computers in Human Behavior 29(4), 2013. (Self Determination Theory)
Simon, H. A. Designing Organizations for an Information Rich World. 1971. Classic articulation of attention scarcity in information abundance. (NMH-P)
Vosoughi, S., Roy, D., & Aral, S. The spread of true and false news online. Science 359(6380), 2018. False news diffused farther and faster than true across millions of tweets. (Politics at MIT)
Goel, S., Anderson, A., Hofman, J., & Watts, D. The Structural Virality of Online Diffusion. Management Science 62(1), 2016. Formalizes how cascades diffuse beyond broadcast trees. (INFORMS PubsOnline)
Zuboff, S. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. PublicAffairs, 2019. On extraction, prediction, and the modification of behavior at scale. (EECIS)
Hunt, M., Allcott, H., et al. No More FOMO: Limiting Social Media Decreases Loneliness and Depression. Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology 37(10), 2018. RCT capping time near thirty minutes per day reduced loneliness and depression. (guilfordjournals.com)
European Commission. Digital Services Act overview and transparency obligations for recommender systems. 2022–2024. (European Commission, Digital Strategy)
The Department of Jazz. Legacy Builder. Professionalization pathway for artists who choose a business posture toward social media. (Whop)
Kyle Benford’s, A RESPONSE TO A GLOBAL CULTURE OF IGNORANCE… (uploaded PDF). On media herding, limbic activation without understanding, and the need to reclaim attention from spectacle.