The gambling industry does not exist in a vacuum, nor does the consumer of products. Every business seeks to grab our attention – through advertising, social media and other ways. As individuals, we are saturated by claims on our attention. Our shared psychology in the digital age is marked by fragmented impulses, by accelerated time, by an imperative ‘normality’ that works against any hope of rest or peace.
The 24/7 stream of hooks on our attention is relentless. In the case of gambling, this is supplemented by products themselves which are designed to be addictive. They offer, paradoxically, a single point of attention which is, like any addiction, the release from the never-ending pressures of time, the chaos of information.
Drawing on fifteen years of field research in Las Vegas, anthropologist Natasha Dow Schüll shows how the mechanical rhythm of electronic gambling pulls players into a trancelike state they call the “machine zone,” in which daily worries, social demands, and even bodily awareness fade away.
Competition for our attention is intense and part of trillion dollars budgets of digital industries. If you have never made an impulse purchase from the internet you are very much the exception. We have to acknowledge the possibility that our growing restlessness is a digitally induced dis-ease with time. What are referred to as clinical diagnoses, attention deficit disorder or hyperactive attention deficit disorder, may be now normalised attributes of digitized citizens (to varying extents in individuals).
In practice, we are primed by digital technology to be restless and compulsive. It is not a question of individual responsibility or strength of character. The exploitation of this primed state is the core driver of the attention economy.
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