I think it was a bit of a sleight of hand to make it about time. Because time is quantifiable. You can give 5 minutes of your time but I figure most people can attest that has little to do with how much actual attention you’re giving. And it’s attention that we crave. That’s what social media is built upon. When you really love and enjoy something or someone, you’re thinking of it, even if you’re not actively engaged with it. And on the other hand, if you give something attention for long enough, you do start to develop some kind of an attachment on it ( which easily becomes unhealthy too, like doom scrolling ).
Attention isn’t always good, being followed around by a person who can’t pick up social cues who wants to give you all of their attention doesn’t feel good
A girl who wants to hang out with her friends being given unwanted attention by men doesn’t feel good
If I am driving down the road and a cop decides to give me his attention which in the process of, takes away my time and money I am surely going to be upset
Time matters because it’s a limited resource, someone giving you their time means that they have decided to give some of that limited resources to you. It doesn’t always need to be in the form of attention, if I hire a maid and they save me 2 hours of time I don’t need them to sit there and give me attention
Actually this is kinda what I was thinking when I wrote the last bit. I was specifically thinking about ASMR and how ASMRtists are at risk for unhealthy attention and attachments from people who look at them for hours and hours. However it’s a bit besides my point. Your attention remains valuable to you (one hopes) but obviously unwanted attention is… well, unwanted. There’s a big tangent of course on if someone giving unwanted attention to someone else is really giving their attention to that person, or are they giving their attention to their personal, subjective idea about that person (I’d argue the latter, because I prefer to give attention as a concept a somewhat virtuous vibe - because I want to encourage people to value their attention).
So is attention. We can multitask to some degree but sooner or later the plates will start falling. But as I said, you can put a number on time but you can’t give 3.5 attentions to something. For the human mind it’s easier to grasp the idea of “giving time” because you can measure, compare and contrast it*. Attention just is, and it’s extremely subjective specifically because in daily life it’s very hard to know if someone is objectively giving their full attention to something or are they just physically present while engaging with something entirely different in their mind.
Edit: Important of course to note that we can only measure time because we developed a system for it. “10 minutes” doesn’t exist in reality. There’s just things that we observed to behave in certain, predictable ways and we built systems to represent the behavior, like the idea of the 24h clock.