Do we really live in a attention deficit world? While reading an article on The Economist about the impact of social media on democracy, I came across the idea of 'attention economy' and how it widens the political polarization by connecting you to people who share similar ideas and showing content that leads to a confirmation bias.

It is rather scary how the algorithm that google and facebook uses, gathers so much information about its users. Any how this data contributes to your own political, ideological tunnel vision. The content you view and are repeatedly shown leads you away from alternate ideas and people who could potentially challenge the said ideologies. And you could easily become targets of bot generated fake news meant as confirmation of your own ideas, without the user knowing that the news is fake.

While so many of us spend so much time on fb and google for information we need, there is little to nil transparency about the authenticity of content or the source of content provided by the companies. Nor do we have any information about where the data provided by us ends up, how and where it may be used and how it could potentially affect us.

This begs the question - how much is social media contributing to extremism. Is the unregulated landscape of netspace really the boon it is made out to be?

What about the way prominent leaders are grabing our attention away from key issues by using up bandwith on controversial non issues, while quietly implementing significant issues. Are we as consumers being blinded with our own hands. \

Is net regulation the solution?

Our attention bandwidth is limited. Social media is designed to grab and hold our attention. And once it has our attention, the content and the attention is  source of revenue for them. So is changing the revenue models for these social media platforms the solution??

How do we navigate this landscape without losing the very ideals we seek to preserve? How do we sustain a vibrant democracy here?