GoMeZonTok: The tracking of our attention and how it is creating a new culture

The consolidation of the internet by a few tech giants has been the biggest development of the new millennium. The online world was once a vast, unclaimed frontier. Now, it resembles a vast suburban area of neat gated communities.

These technology giants are each shaping human behaviour on a planetary scale. The bigger they get, the more relentless they are in achieving and retaining attention. Let’s call this group by a name - GoMeZonTok.

Officially , algorithmic curation by GoMeZonTok - be it content, search results, shopping lists, short videos etc - was intended to drive meaningful reach and provide a better customer experience. Instead, in each case, the servant algorithm has become the platform’s master.

Google was the first to redefine the scale of what was possible. By mastering search, it didn’t just become a tool — it became the verb itself. "Google it" replaced "search for it." That vice like grip on human curiosity soon expanded with YouTube - both platforms together handling over 90 percent of global search queries. Today, Google processes a staggering 8.5 billion searches every single day.

Meta built a universe around social connection. Facebook led the surge, stitching communities together and eventually connecting nearly half of humanity. Not happy with just that, Meta expanded its turf in a classical ‘buy or bury’ manoeuvre — acquiring WhatsApp to dominate conversation, and Instagram to capture the explosion of image and video sharing.

Today, Facebook alone has over 3.05 billion monthly active users — that’s almost 40 percent of the world's population logging in, scrolling and engaging.

TikTok entered the stage from a blind spot - the only non American major in the mix and redefined entertainment for a new generation. Short-form video became the new normal in youth culture. TikTok now commands almost 20 percent of global app usage time among the young, crossing 1.7 billion monthly active users — on course to hit 2 billion by 2025. It is the fastest-growing platform in history. Its preferred content method of purely force fed short form videos is now the preferred norm across all platforms.

Amazon, began as an online store and quietly and systematically, became ‘the everything store’ — controlling nearly 40 percent of U.S. online retail. E-commerce and quick commerce surged to a daily habit.

Yet, these titans don't just compete for revenue dollars — they also cannibalise each other in a Darwinian fight for the survival of the fittest. The mortal combat over attention is illustrative of the underlying connection.

Amazon muscled into Google and more than 60 percent of U.S. online product searches now start directly on Amazon, bypassing Google entirely.

TikTok took on Google especially on recommendations and discovery — where to eat, what to buy — 51 percent of Gen Z users now prefer TikTok over traditional Google Search. This ranges from apparel to fragrance, gadgets to sneakers.

A recent report in the Economist stated that in 2023 two-thirds of Gen-Z Americans told Circana, a research firm, that TikTok had influenced their fragrance-buying habits more than any other platform. Beauty is by far the bestselling segment on TikTok Shop, the platform’s e-commerce feature. “Bottles that go viral on #PerfumeTok are quickly snatched off shelves.”

Meta is, in turn, taking back from TikTok with Reels (across Instagram and Facebook) now accounting for 50 percent of the time users spend inside Meta’s apps.

Google is benchmarking TikTok and YouTube Shorts have exploded to 70 billion daily views globally in 2024, trying to pull short-form supremacy back into Google’s corner.

Amazon is snatching ad revenues from Meta as the retail giant’s share of U.S. digital ad revenues rose to 14.9 percent in 2024 — up sharply from 11 percent in 2022 — even as Meta’s share showed signs of fatigue. This is a big ‘trade marketing’ ad revenue stream.

As can be seen, the digital ecosystem is not static. It’s a battleground of shifting loyalties and aggressive land-grab tactics, played out on search bars, social feeds, shopping carts, and endless video scrolls.

But the basis is exactly the same - attention is farmed, harvested, and sold - by the same few players, over and over again.

It has led to ‘monopoly’ of attention sold on rate card. Nothing wrong with that since this is precisely what legacy media was trying to do all along. In fact , a huge positive has been that barriers to publishing have been lowered by the emergence of the internet, low cost of handheld phones and copious data.

Every person with a smartphone is a publisher, content producer, influencer, and media agency rolled into one.

But not all that glitters is gold. The core issue is the scale and scope of the collective GoMeZonTok dominance. The modality for each of them is absolute surveillance . Whereas, the earliest era of the internet was more like a DIY, diffused collection of ‘static only’ webpages where novelty led to virality, with the emergence of the new social era of the 2000s, siloed feeds began to rule. First came Myspace, Friendster, etc. followed by Facebook and Twitter (now X). ‘Social networks’ quietly became ‘social media’.

The outcome is your disempowerment.

You are reduced to consuming passively. What you see and click is rarely your own choice. Vast networks of algorithms constantly mine your data, placing you into evolving cohorts and segments — ‘boxed to sell’ versions of yourself.

The truth is that your online self is not you. It is how you are made to be. The algorithm actually owns your network and your feed.

The algorithm is shrewd, but not sentient. It doesn't think — it only measures.

It tracks exactly where your attention lingers: where you scroll, where you stop, where you click, where you spend more time, and where you feed your current curiosity. Then, it simply gives you more of the same, tightening the loop.

On top of this, with AI, we may see a dramatic new hyper-consolidation or a revolutionary disruption of the way in which the online world works.

To marketers, this should be a flashing, wailing siren. Nothing is more important to brand building than access to media. In a world where everything is pre-sorted to appeal to customers they won’t see much outside their algorithmically defined silos of preference.

Even my article will come to you as a post because an unknown algorithm will decide it fits your profile, is current to your interests, and is what you ‘ought to see’.

Due to the pressures of social media and the self-reinforcing biases of recommendation algorithms that drive streaming, culture is becoming more similar than different.

Culture is "the collective customs ideas, beliefs, and achievements of a people." Today, we are being handed a monoculture with artifacts, characters, voices, and stories that our specific demographic finds recognizable and relatable. Monolithic because it’s smoothed over into sameness, and hence, also a monotonous culture.

Do you wonder why, despite the plethora of choice, most of us are enjoying more of the same songs, movies, and TV shows?

Ideas, themes, stories that can be cut, pulped and puréed are easiest to monetize. This is because what you know is what you are likely to keep consuming—hence the overwhelming popularity of sequels.

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The streaming platform and its various signature franchises form a walled garden where there is no cross-pollination. A classic example is music. The homogenization of music is caused by data - a consequence of the fact that streaming, radio, and record companies can access more information about their listeners than ever, faster than ever.

There is nothing wrong with chasing a larger, segmented audience to make more money. But the difference is how fast the iterative loop happens, and how interlinked and pervasive the control mechanisms are, in reality.

If culture is created by an algo — it’ll be basis popularity, engagement, scale and speed. Yet everything popular is not profound and what is profound is not necessarily popular.

The data that decides your feed is shaped by proprietary algorithms, black boxes, not transparent and precise evaluations of human taste. This monetisation of attention and pre-sorted decision on a drip feed is AI-enabled as well.

With ‘Agentic AI’, whichever human is in the loop may be further cut off and this monoculture is set to become larger in scale.

Culture is now a small outcome of Big Data on a planet of 8 billion humans and 4+ billion smartphones.

When culture is made robotic, we have only a choice between the bad and worse. We will be limited to consuming things that are fully engineered to attract our attention and monetized into profits.

So many parts to delightful culture : newness, rebellion, disruption, and serendipity can never be provided via algorithmic outcomes.

Culturally, what we least expect can impact us the most. But, engineered recommendations can only lead us down a path of sameness.

We have to consciously break bounds and attract diversity, emotional challenges, abstraction, and even contradiction to make sure our minds don’t atrophy.

Frictionless consumption pushed by automated feeds is easily manipulated.

Anything that is a ‘hit’ is copied, scaled and repeated until they become wallpaper. Familiarity is comforting only for the mentally tired.

Algorithmic feed is not fundamentally or inherently bad. I think it can help us a lot. But its intent and its application have diverged. Instead of the new, the refreshing, and the contrarian—what we are shown is more replication of what we already consumed.

A human gatekeeper, can highlight a new voice, bring up something that’s totally unusual as an act of conviction or an embrace of risk. An algo never does that . The algo only values scale.

David Ogilvy said the best ideas come as jokes. The algos definitely lack a sense of humour. Let’s not lose ours.

Shubhranshu Singh is CMO, Tata Motors CVBU. He writes Simply Speaking, a column on Storyboard18. Views expressed are personal.

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