The Attention Economy

Definition

Attention online is an organization of energy, inlinks, and movement towards something that has demonstrated itself as worthy of social consideration. Each inlink accentuates the social gravity of the person and how they will be treated when involved in a crowd situation. Systems with efficient energy transmission can get things done more quickly than other systems.

Origin

Herbert A. Simon set out the underlying economics in a 1971 paper, "Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World," delivered at a Johns Hopkins colloquium and published in Martin Greenberger's Computers, Communications, and the Public Interest, pages 37 to 52. Simon won the Nobel in economics in 1978.

His move was to shift the conversation away from information overload, a supply problem, toward attention, a scarcity problem. In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else, a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is the attention of its recipients, so a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of sources competing for it.

Simon illustrated it with rabbits. His neighbours acquired a pair, and the household came to live in a rabbit-rich world. Whether a world is rich or poor in rabbits is relative to the lettuce available, so a rabbit-rich world is a lettuce-poor world, and the obverse of a population problem is a resource-allocation problem.

He also identified the cultural obstacle to seeing this. Attitudes toward information reflect a culture of poverty, formed on stories like Abraham Lincoln walking miles to borrow a book and reading it by firelight.

Simon's proposed remedy was an information processing system that would condense a large volume of material down to its critical elements, on the argument that computers must be taught to behave at a higher level of intelligence. The line of work he was describing is now the recommendation engine, which allocates attention rather than conserving it.

Karl Deutsch, responding on the same panel, offered a correction worth keeping: attention is a series of operations considerably larger than a spotlight of focus.

The market

The step from Simon's observation to an economy is the point at which someone else does the allocating.

If attention is scarce and information is abundant, then attention is the thing with a price. Advertising had always operated on this basis, buying access to it in blocks of column inches or thirty-second slots. What networked systems changed is the granularity and the measurement. Attention became purchasable per impression, per second, and per person, and the measurement became continuous rather than sampled.

Michael Goldhaber's 1997 essay in First Monday pushed the argument further, holding that attention is the primary currency of the networked economy and that money follows it rather than the other way around. Thomas Davenport and John Beck's The Attention Economy (2001) and Richard Lanham's The Economics of Attention (2006) developed the framework for business and rhetoric respectively.

Inlinks and gravity

The definition above describes the accumulation mechanism, and it operates as a market only because attention is not distributed evenly.

An inlink is a public allocation of attention that can itself be counted, which is what made PageRank possible and what makes follower counts function as currency. The counting produces the compounding described in Social Gravity: attention accrues to nodes that already hold attention, because the count is visible and the visibility is what new attention responds to.

The consequence for crowds is the one the definition names. A person's treatment in a crowd situation is determined in advance by an aggregate that everyone present can see, and the aggregate substitutes for whatever assessment would otherwise have been made.

Objections

Hal Varian's version of Simon's point is the one that holds up best: technology for producing and distributing information is useless without some way to locate, filter, organise, and summarise it. Filtering is genuinely valuable. The question is who the filter serves.

Empirical work on attention dynamics remains limited, partly because attention is hard to measure and partly because the available proxies, clicks and dwell time, measure engagement rather than attention. The mechanisms driving temporal changes in collective attention, and how communities respond to those changes, are not well understood.

The consequence usually named is a new form of poverty defined by unequal access to attention. The other consequence is on the demand side: when the metric that determines revenue is time spent, every design decision is evaluated against how much attention it captures rather than how much value it returns for the attention taken. See Frictional Surfaces.

Related Reading

• Social Gravity
• Local vs. Global Connectivity
• Frictional Surfaces
• Low Resolution Indicators
• Information Anxiety 2
• Interaction in 4-Second Bursts: The Fragmented Nature of Attentional Resources in Mobile HCI
• Alone Together: Technology and the Reinvention of Intimacy and Solitude
• Present Shock
• Society of the Spectacle
• Decoding Advertisements
• Sign Wars: The Cluttered Landscape of Advertising
• Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920-1940
• Consuming Life
• The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom
• Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge
• Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder
• Ambient Findability
• Collaborative Reality
• Minority Report

Key texts

• Simon, Herbert A. "Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World." In Martin Greenberger, ed., Computers, Communications, and the Public Interest. Johns Hopkins Press, 1971, 37-52.
• Goldhaber, Michael H. "The Attention Economy and the Net." First Monday 2, no. 4 (1997).
• Davenport, Thomas H., and John C. Beck. The Attention Economy: Understanding the New Currency of Business. Harvard Business School Press, 2001.
• Lanham, Richard A. The Economics of Attention: Style and Substance in the Age of Information. University of Chicago Press, 2006.
• Wu, Tim. The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads. Knopf, 2016.