Paying attention to the attention economy
“A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention…”
~Herbert Simon (1971)
Part I: Understanding the Attention Economy
At any given moment, on any given day, each of us is deciding—sometimes intentionally, but often, reflexively—where to allocate the precious resource that is our attention. And, whether we think about it or not, the choice to pay attention to one thing inherently means that we are choosing not to pay attention to something else. Even now, as I sit at my desk to write about the idea of attention, my attention scoots between various tasks: a quick text to a friend, a response to a forgotten email from another; a quick check of the status of an event and a short peek at a video my daughter sent me on Instagram. Which, naturally, leads me to spend another minute catching up on my feed, which then leads me to spend an additional five minutes down the IG rabbit hole, which turns into ten minutes, during which time, I consume exactly what it is that I’ve been digitally served. Suddenly, the thing that I think of as a resource to be managed and doled out as I see fit—my attention—has become a valuable commodity that is both manipulated and monopolized in ways that are not always apparent to me.
What is apparent to me is that sometimes it feels like an act of sheer psychological rebellion and self-discipline to stop clicking and scrolling long enough to stay or return to where I really want to be.
Which is. Here at my desk. Writing.
So now, here I am, 15 minutes poorer, and in need of much more time than that to reel my attention back in and cultivate the focus I need to think and write about the very thing I have just squandered—my attention.
This is the attention economy. And, thinking about it reminds me that my attention is, in fact, a singular and exclusive cognitive process and that multi-tasking is probably a myth that I’ve believed in for far too long. Furthermore, because there are only so many minutes in the day, my attention is finite and—relative to the information-saturated world I live in—quite scarce. Trust me, companies that are trying to capture and contain our attention, especially in this digital age, understand this perfectly and use all the weapons in their arsenal to manipulate, monetize and monopolize the precious and scarce commodity of our attention.
The concept of the attention economy was first theorized by psychologist and Nobel prize winning economist, Herbert Simon in 1971. His idea was that as the world becomes more information-abundant, our ability to effectively attend to it becomes more limited. It is crazy to think just how profoundly relevant his ideas have become in recent years, but at the time, he clearly understood the incredible possibility of a nascent computer processing and information age. In his 1971 essay, “Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World,” he wrote:
“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 rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.”
The idea that we have this scant and increasingly overwhelmed resource to spend on a seemingly endless barrage of digital information can make the problem seem insurmountable. But the truth is a problem that is even bigger than that.
Here’s why: Not only is the singular resource of our attention miniscule in comparison to the enormity of the information available to us, but the power and efficacy of our attention really can’t hold a candle to the sophisticated and endlessly agile and manipulative mechanisms of the platforms that serve us up all this information. We engage in social media for fairly simple and straightforward reasons: to socialize, or to do business; to find our passions or to celebrate our milestones; to share our art, our travels—our ideas. We want to learn and connect and although by now, we understand that social media has a significant downside, many of us believe that its ability to connect and inspire us outweighs its potential to harm us.
The attention economy, on the other hand, has other things in mind. Ben Eicher, a writer/philosopher, interested in the historical underpinnings of capitalism, writes extensively and in great detail about the specific tools employed by big tech to capture and contain our attention:
“The attention economy begins with the deliberate design of environments that seize and hold awareness. These are not neutral or impartial platforms. They are architectures of capture which are calibrated to exploit human neurochemistry. As Sean Parker, Facebook’s first president, candidly admitted, the platform was designed to “consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible.”³ Every major platform has since adopted this principle by building interfaces that hook users and maximize engagement.”
What this means is that, as individual users, we are almost powerless to resist the dopamine rush that clicking and scrolling and liking produce. We become addicted to being in these spaces and given a spare second during any given day, we habitually pick up our phones to go there.
Eicher’s piece goes on to describe these mechanisms of capture—infinite scroll and auto-play, which make is easier to keep going than to stop, push notifications, personalized ads and content that provokes emotions which are most likely to hook us: fear, outrage and novelty—and then asserts that these techniques have been designed and perfected to keep our attention tethered. But that’s only the tip of the ice burg. According to Eicher, once captured, our attention is served only content that is channeled through a system of valves and pipes, algorithms and other mechanisms that amplify some types of information and suppress other types —throttle, mute or erase, Eicher says—but all specifically designed to lead us to rooms, which are the proverbial echo chambers so many have written about. Eicher terms it containment:
“If capture is about pulling us in, containment is about holding us down. It is not the prohibition of speech in the old sense of banning books, shuttering presses or silencing dissidents. Now it is the quiet management of what circulates and how far and how fast. Containment governs not whether you can speak but whether anyone will hear you.”
Eicher asserts that containment helps these entities achieve control by directing attention only toward profitable or compliant narratives. And, it’s not all about money, he insists. Rather, it’s about a desire to construct the narrative of consensus reality: “When platforms capture attention and contain expression, they are not only optimizing engagement. They are constructing the very frames of intelligibility by deciding which stories matter, which words resonate, which futures feel possible. That is the monopoly of meaning: not just the right to profit from attention but the power to define reality itself.”
Wow.
Even though Eicher’s ideas can make the challenge of understanding and resisting these forces seem overwhelming or even impossible, they are a good starting point, I think. Recognizing that our attention is both precious and limited and that the entities serving up information are not neutral or impartial is the beginning of this understanding. Delving into the sophisticated mechanisms utilized to capture, contain and control the narratives we are served is the next element and although I know that I’ve only scratched the surface here, for me, this information is a clear signal to start thinking more intentionally about specific strategies to navigate the attention economy more effectively.
Next month, in Part II of this blog, I plan to write about some of these strategies and how I hope to integrate them into a critical literacy unit in my 12th grade ELA class.
References
Herbert A. Simon, “Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World,” in Computers, Communications, and the Public Interest, ed. Martin Greenberger (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1971), 40.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/curtsteinhorst/2024/02/06/lost-in-the-scroll-the-hidden-impact-of-the-attention-economy
https://econreview.studentorg.berkeley.edu/paying-attention-the-attention-economy/
https://beneicher.substack.com/p/attention-economies-and-the-monopolies
