Contact IMCE
To share any general feedback, comment, or if you have a question or would like to get involved in our work, then please use the form below to get in touch. We are a small team, but will do our best to reply promptly.
Media
If you are a member of the news media, please use the email address below to leave a detailed message. Include your name, press affiliation, phone number, questions, and deadline. We look forward to hearing from you.
Post
IMCE
St John’s Innovation Centre,
Cowley Road,
Cambridge,
CB4 0WS,
United Kingdom
Mailing List
A monthly letter on how minds learn, adapt, and stay free in the age of intelligent machines — news and research from IMCE.
The Social Dilemma
Something feels off about adding our content to the noise, so we had to take a position. to maximise engagement feels difficult to reconcile with those aims. Some presence, but low deliberate ‘attention harvesting’. We need to practice what we preach. Perhaps it is the quality of the materials we produce that matters most – what people find real value in they will talk about and share. We have decided to use Youtube and to use LinkedIn, but not use any other platforms. We hope to also follow the same values when we begin print publishing this December, only distributing through vetted channels (so no Amazon). Our work is about protecting attention, cultivating clarity, and helping people develop a healthier relationship with technology. Spending our days competing for attention on platforms designed.
LinkedIn helps us reach researchers, educators, collaborators & supporters. Yet professional exchange can become entangled with self-promotion, selective storytelling and the pressure to present a continuously successful, enthusiastic version of ourselves. Meaningful work needs room for uncertainty, setbacks and questions that remain unanswered.
YouTube provides access to an extraordinary range of knowledge, creativity and educational material. It also places that material within a commercial environment where advertising, recommendations and continuous viewing can pull attention beyond our original intentions. A valuable resource can also encourage habits we would not freely choose.
CHOICES
Facebook’s business model depends on profiling, segmentation, and shaping behaviour at scale, repeatedly putting corporate interests ahead of user well-being. From data exploitation to polarising content amplification, Facebook exemplifies the kind of extractive digital architecture that erodes and degrades human agency.
Driven by curation and comparison, Instagram turns life into a performance scored by metrics. Its design amplifies envy, self-judgement, and the erosion of self-worth, especially among younger users. What appears to be a window into people’s lives is, in reality, a distorted mirror — one training you to measure your value in virtual attention.
Engineered to maximise engagement, TikTok is one of the most sophisticated attention-shaping platforms ever built. Its rapidly learns your preferences, emotional cues, and response patterns. Alongside Instagram and YouTube Shorts, it plays a major role in shortening attention spans and driving compulsive scrolling.
Built on velocity and provocation, X rewards the loudest, quickest reactions. Its design amplifies conflict, outrage, and polarisation, turning conversation into performative bursts shaped to maximise visibility. What feels like dialogue is often just data generation, feeding an attention engine optimised for momentum, not understanding.
Our approach is to participate deliberately: share substantive work, describe its progress honestly, and help people find resources and conversations worth their time. We aim to support understanding and connection while resisting the pressure to manufacture urgency or publish simply to remain visible.
Our website remains the main home of IMCE’s work, and email is the best way to contact us directly. You do not need to follow us on social media to get involved.