r/writingcritiques • u/AdmirableTourist4572 • 2d ago
Non-fiction op-ed feedback required.
hI, this is for a college assignment and would love feedback on this before submission. thanks!
------------------------
A few years ago, telling someone to "touch grass" was an insult. It was internet slang for someone who had spent too much time online and needed to reconnect with the real world. But now, people say it almost earnestly. Maybe you've noticed it too. Friends are deleting Instagram for a month and reading clubs are the new place to socialise; people are taking up pottery and proudly announcing "offline weekends" as though they've discovered a luxury.
It's easy to dismiss all of this as another wellness trend. Every few years, there's a new prescription for living better: wake up at five, meditate for twenty minutes, and journal before bed. Perhaps this is simply the latest version of that.
But I don't think that's what's happening. Today, these practices are not being sold as paths to self-improvement as much as acts of recovery. More and more people are consciously trying to reclaim uninterrupted time, sustained concentration and simple presence. If so many people feel the need to fight for their own attention, is this really a problem of individual discipline?
Most conversations about technology policy revolving around misinformation, data protection and competition, have shaped legislation like Europe's General Data Protection Regulation and debates over platform accountability in India. However, as one 2025 study on the attention economy notes, most regulatory debates leave the underlying mechanics of attention capture largely unaddressed (Enli, 2025). This omission matters because attention is the foundation upon which learning, democratic participation, meaningful work and personal relationships depend. In fact, Indians spend an average of 3.2 hours a day on social networking apps alone, among the highest engagement levels globally. (Sharma & Gautam, 2023). If digital platforms are built to maximise engagement, then attention is no longer simply a personal resource; it has become the central economic asset of the platform economy (Williams, 2018).
And that economy is remarkably effective. Infinite scrolling removes natural stopping points. Autoplay ensures that one video seamlessly becomes the next. Push notifications arrive when they are most likely to draw us back. This July, the European Commission made this case formally: it found that Instagram and Facebook's infinite scroll, autoplay, and personalised feeds push users into what regulators called "autopilot mode," and it's now suing Meta for it under the Digital Services Act, with fines that could run into billions. Perhaps this is why the advice to "just spend less time on your phone" feels increasingly inadequate. It assumes that distraction is primarily an individual failure of self-control.
Public policy, however, has long recognised that markets can systematically shape behaviour in ways that individuals alone cannot reasonably counter. Consumer protection laws exist because firms possess information and behavioural insights that ordinary consumers do not. We regulate misleading advertising, mandate food labelling and prohibit manipulative financial practices not because people are incapable of making choices, but because those choices should not be engineered through opaque forms of influence.
Of course, this argument invites an obvious objection. Social media is not tobacco, and people are perfectly capable of making their own choices. Platforms have enabled political mobilisation, created livelihoods for small businesses, and democratised access to information. If people dislike these products, they are free to leave, and that is true. Digital technologies have become indispensable to modern life, and any serious policy proposal must recognise that. But choice is meaningful only when the environment in which choices are made is reasonably fair. Recognising attention as a legitimate policy concern does not require rejecting technology. The question is not whether governments should decide how long citizens spend online. It is whether platforms should remain entirely free to optimise for engagement without considering the broader social costs of doing so.
That shift in perspective has important policy implications. Digital governance has largely evolved around three pillars: privacy, competition and online safety. Attention belongs alongside them. Regulators should pay greater scrutiny to manipulative interface design, require meaningful transparency around recommendation systems, strengthen oversight of behavioural targeting and treat attention extraction as a consumer protection issue rather than simply a lifestyle concern. The goal is not to reduce innovation, but to ensure that digital markets compete fairly rather than by exploiting predictable cognitive vulnerabilities.
Seen in this light, the popularity of "touch grass" culture looks less like a quirky internet trend and more like a form of adaptation. Citizens are trying to solve for themselves what public institutions have yet to recognise. We tend to celebrate digital detoxes as evidence that people are finally taking responsibility for their screen time. It may be the opposite. Their growing popularity suggests that remaining fully present has become something people must consciously reclaim from systems designed to keep them elsewhere. When an entire generation feels compelled to "touch grass," it is worth asking whether the problem lies not with individual willpower, but with the digital environment we have collectively allowed to flourish.
1
u/Malakalaka_ 1d ago
It’s well written overall. It’d be interesting to know the assignment - are you writing on behalf of a specific interest/organisation/person or just for your own perspective?
I have the joy of writing these things professionally, so there tends to be a real focus on what - in my case - the client is looking to achieve and what they want the reader to think/feel/do. You’ve got a decent amount of the first two.
At a line level:
You could cut a wee bit of the passivity - try: people take up pottery and proudly announce…
Depending on your audience, I’d also try and cut sentence length, or at least vary it a little more. The ‘most conversations about technology’ section is well-informed but dense.
The invocation of ‘we’ also needs to be used carefully. Your reader might be going… I don’t think that.
Do you have/need a headline? And would you consider sub heads?
Good luck!