Paper Topic Ideas

The Attention Economy and Smartphone Addiction

I've been hearing a lot about smartphone addiction, the attention economy, and "taking your attention back" from your devices, and I thought it could make an interesting paper topic. For me, listening to just one podcast about this topic lead me to so many other sources on related topics. 

How I got interested and what I did next

1. I listened to Ezra Klein's podcast with Cal Newport on his book Digital Minimalism, which is about learning to take back your attention from digital devices. After listening, I checked out Newport's book from the library to go deeper into the topic.
2. I found this episode really interesting, so I looked at Klein's podcast feed and found another podcast episode related to attention, social media, and the Internet. This one was with Jenny Odell, who was talking about her book How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy. I took Odell's book out of the library, too.
3. I wasn't familiar with the term "Attention Economy" and I wanted to know more about how it related to our current social media and digital landscape. So I did a quick Google Search to learn more about it. I looked at this Wikipedia entry on the Attention Economy. Wikipedia mentioned some issues with the citations and sources in this article, and I knew it wouldn't be a great source if I was writing a paper, but I saw some names and terms I might want to look into. For instance, in the "See Also" section, I noticed "Time Well Spent", an organization started by a former Google employee concerned about smartphone addiction. I'd seen "Time Well Spent" and smartphone addiction mentioned in Odell's book, so it seemed worth exploring further. I learned "Time Well Spent" is now called the "Center for Humane Technology" and clearly has an opinion about technology and attention. They say "Today’s tech platforms are caught in a race to the bottom of the brain stem to extract human attention. It’s a race we’re all losing."
4. I also looked at an article by Nielsen Norman on the Attention Economy, which seemed to be a basic overview of how digital products work to capture our attention. Nielsen Norman says they are a "UX research and consulting firm trusted by leading organizations world-wide to provide reliable guidance on user experience". They are well known and respected in the field of UX research. But it's also clear their business is advising companies on how to study user behavior, and potentially increase their profits by using that behavioral information. So it's worth considering their potential bias about this concept, too.

Expanding, balancing, and narrowing my topic

I would definitely need to do more research and make some decisions to help narrow this topic down to write a paper. I might look more into smartphone addiction, since I find that more interesting than how the "attention economy" works, and I might narrow that down by the psychological effect of smartphone use on certain populations (age, etc). I would try to find some scientific studies on the psychological effect of smartphones to get a more balanced and data-driven view of this topic, since most of what I've been reading and listening to has been about the negative effects of smartphone use on human psychology and attention. A search for "Smartphone Addiction" in the "Opposing Viewpoints" database available through the Articles and Databases page on the library website showed me there are many articles on the topic that I could explore further to help me narrow my "smartphone addiction" topic down.