By Chana Wakslak, Senior Business Editor and Business Manager
Scroll. Click. Tap. Refresh. Before you know it, an hour disappears. That continuous scrolling is a multibillion-dollar business strategy. From Instagram to Spotify to TikTok, companies are invested in what’s called the “attention economy,” where the most valuable resource isn’t money, it’s your time.
Advertising has always depended on views, but since the start of the digital age, the business model has shifted. Instead of fighting for shelf space, companies fight for screen time. The more time you spend on their platform, the more ads they can sell, and the more data they can collect about you.
Tech giants like Meta, Google and TikTok don’t just want a share of your day — they want to dominate it. Notifications, autoplay and infinite scroll were all designed with the same goal: to keep you from leaving.
The science behind this is deliberate. Features like TikTok’s For You Page and Netflix’s autoplay trigger dopamine hits in the brain, creating habits that are hard to break. These tools are engineered by teams of behavioral scientists, User experience (UX) experts and algorithms fine-tuned to predict exactly what will make you keep watching, scrolling or listening.
Even platforms that don’t look like social media are competing. Spotify wants you to listen to playlists it curates instead of turning to YouTube. Every app and service, from news sites to video games, is now designed to capture and keep your focus. Amazon wants you to browse just a little longer until you make that impulse purchase.
This war for attention has consequences beyond your screen time. It shapes politics, culture and even our sleep cycles. On the business side, it explains why companies like Meta and Google are among the richest in the world: they’ve mastered turning your focus into profit.
The social media time suck has profound implications on our lives. Studies show that students who are more addicted to social media tend to be less thoughtful in general. This addiction may also impact our ability to be productive, creating a pull to pick up our phones just as we’re finally getting into a project.
This constant digital distraction leads to feelings of procrastination, anxiety or simply that there’s never enough time — especially considering Gen Z spends almost nine hours a day online. Behind these seemingly personal issues is a corporate battle for your most limited resource: your attention.
With artificial intelligence now curating content more precisely than ever, the competition is only intensifying. We can expect to start seeing smarter recommendation engines, more immersive platforms and a blurrier line between entertainment and advertising.
The only remedy right now is mindfulness and proactiveness. This means taking specific actions, like deleting the apps that waste your time or leaving your phone behind when you go out. Jonathan Haidt champions this approach and has inspired a massive movement to ban phones in schools through his recent book The Anxious Generation. If each of us takes this approach, together we can take on our generation’s biggest struggle.
The question for our generation isn’t just which app will win — it is whether we can win back control of our own time.