A major day-to-day struggle for me is retaining self control at my computer. As one who generally works primarily in the digital media space, distractions are not only infinitely abundant but also very easy to get lost into. Not only does everything happen to be “a few clicks away,” they are such efficient traps by design.

In the grand scheme of things the stress and discomfort induced by such an ecosystem of intentional distraction (decades of attention economics at work) may seem somewhat petty, but maybe it’s worth investigating. Behavioral psychology and the marketing industry as a whole have been around for a while now, but the digital context within which we experience it today on such a massive scale is still fairly new. How can the discomfort caused by our interactions in these systems and the resulting feedback loops that psychologically impact users for clicks and eyeballs be recreated in such a designed experience in order to enlighten rather than obscure and distract?

I figured the best way to address this question would be to replicate such a web experience with exaggerated effects. The experience I designed has a progressive structure— the user follows a linear path while the uncomfortable elements build. From page to page the user is slowly conditioned to increasingly intense visual, auditory and intellectual stimuli. In the future I intend to also incorporate more heavily political content to attempt to emulate the “philosophical dizziness” brought forth by an overload of information/”soft propaganda”/conspiracy theorist fanaticism from all sides of the political spectrum at once. Ideally the experience would go on until the user is too uncomfortable to progress any further.

The experience would be contained in an embraced magic circle. The circle involves an already existing reality within which it exists (the web and it’s capacity to cause you to procrastinate), but the difference within the magic circle is that you are forced to confront an active awareness that you’re wasting time, or simply how you waste time in general, and how it makes you feel.