I have two YouTube videos in my Watch Later that I have ironically been procrastinating on watching: replacing doomscrolling with writing (how to finally write your novel) and Self Education: Your Best Defense Against Brain Rot. Both videos take an almost combative stance against the use of social media, largely because spending time on the platform du jour often devolves into doomscrolling for hours until your brain rots.
Researchers in the area of emotions and cognition have long maintained that there are strong links between feeling and thinking. One approach in particular, the "broaden and build" theory, maintains that when you're upset about something, you view the world in terms of tiny details, but when you're happy, everything is covered in a big, rosy glow. It's impossible, the theory says, to draw a bright line between thoughts and emotions due to this process.
"One of the biggest problems we have to be aware of is alarm fatigue." That warning from a product manager became my introduction to scalable design. The problem was deceptively simple: a single alert might be well-designed, but displaying ten of them on one screen would quickly overwhelm users, causing them to miss critical information. Here's a quick test for your interface. Show it to someone for two seconds and ask: "What needs attention first?"
Those relationships map out context, and context builds meaning in language. For example, in the sentence "The bank raised interest rates," attention helps the model establish that "bank" relates to "interest rates" in a financial context, not a riverbank context. Through attention, conceptual relationships become quantified as numbers stored in a neural network. Attention also governs how AI language models choose what information "matters most" when generating each word of their response.
Walking through the halls of DMEXCO this year, one thing was striking: DOOH was not just present, it was everywhere. Panels, research sessions, and discussions with agencies all pointed in the same direction, out-of-home has firmly entered the digital mainstream. Even major players such as Ströer and WallDecaux dedicated an entire DOOH Summit to share insights and underline the medium's growing importance.
The contention that underpins the book is that our most valuable resource isn't time. It's attention if only we could take back control of where we place it. Montminy saw this in herself while researching the book, swapping in and out of the many, many hats of her own working week. We are in a crisis of distraction, she says. We are constantly task-switching. Our attention has been hijacked in so many ways.
Monitoring your phone to check whenever it lights up seems innocent enough -- a minor habit, utterly devoid of consequence. But is this seemingly harmless gesture actually working against you, subtly undermining your privacy, focus, and even your phone's longevity? Placing your phone face down is a small change that can have surprising ripple effects on your digital well-being and device health.
