As you surface from an hour inadvertently frittered away… you’d be forgiven for assuming that the damage, in terms of wasted time, was limited to that single misspent hour.

But you’d be wrong.

Because the attention economy is designed to prioritize whatever’s most compelling — instead of what’s most true, or most useful — it systematically distorts the picture of the world we carry in our heads at all times. It influences our sense of what matters, what kinds of threats we face, how real our political opponents are, and thousands of other things — and all these distorted judgements then influence how we allocate our offline time as well…

So it’s not simply that our devices distract us from more important matters. It’s that they change how we’re defining “important matters” in the first place.

From Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks 📚. If this is true (and I think it is) then its effects are proportional to the degree to which an individual (or community) in question is “very online”. Blue-check journalism Twitter springs very much to mind here.