For anyone interested in diving deeper into this topic, I highly recommend the book "The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction" by Matthew Crawford. Of all the books I've read this year, this one has stuck with me the most--it's a fascinating study on the attention environment & its influence on our notions of identity.

https://www.amazon.com/World-Beyond-Your-Head-Distraction/dp...

The world beyond your head is fantastic. http://www.amazon.com/The-World-Beyond-Your-Head/dp/03742929...

There's a lot of head-in-the-sand, kneejerk appeals to individual responsibility here, which is understandable on a forum populated by the people who are perpetuating the most egregious examples of the behaviour the author is lamenting. This ignores the author's point, which I'm assuming is the point of these responses.

Instead of just making some abstract appeal to 'individual authority', how about actually engaging with what they're saying?

"A handful of corporations determine the basic shape of the web that most of us use every day. Many of those companies make money by capturing users’ attention, and turning it into pageviews and clicks. They’ve staked their futures on methods to cultivate habits in users, in order to win as much of that attention as possible."

This seems like a salient point that is worthy of proper discussion and analysis. I've recent been reading a great book [1] about it, that is forcing me to reconsider a lot of positions I took for granted, as one of those building the web, complicit in a whole bunch of this madness. I highly recommend looking into this more, as, in my opinion, we're becoming victims of our medium in the most McLuhan-esque sense.

[1] The World Beyond Your Head - http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-World-Beyond-Your-Head/dp/037429...