Attention economy


The attention economy refers to the incentives of advertising-driven companies, in particular, to maximize the time and attention their users give to their product.
Attention economics is an approach to the management of information that treats human attention as a scarce commodity and applies economic theory to solve various information management problems.

Description

According to Matthew Crawford, "Attention is a resource—a person has only so much of it."
Thomas H. Davenport and John C. Beck add to that definition:
Attention is focused mental engagement on a particular item of information. Items come into our awareness, we attend to a particular item, and then we decide whether to act.

The economic value of time can be quantified and compared to monetary expenditures. Erik Brynjolfsson, Seon Tae Kim and Joo Hee Oh show that this makes it possible to formally analyze the attention economy and putting values on free goods.

Theory

Research from a wide range of disciplines including psychology, cognitive science, neuroscience, and economics, suggest that humans have limited cognitive resources that can be used at any given time, when resources are allocated to one task, the resources available for other tasks will be limited. Given that attention is a cognitive process that involves the selective concentration of resources on a given item of information, to the exclusion of other perceivable information, attention can be considered in terms of limited processing resources.

History

The concept of attention economics was first theorized by psychologist and economist Herbert A. Simon when he wrote about the scarcity of attention in an information-rich world in 1971:
n 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.

He noted that many designers of information systems incorrectly represented their design problem as information scarcity rather than attention scarcity, and as a result, they built systems that excelled at providing more and more information to people, when what was really needed were systems that excelled at filtering out unimportant or irrelevant information.
Simon's characterization of the problem of information overload as an economic one has become increasingly popular in analyzing information consumption since the mid-1990s, when writers such as Thomas H. Davenport and Michael Goldhaber adopted terms like "attention economy" and "economics of attention".
Some writers have speculated that transactions based on attention will replace financial transactions as the focus of economic system. For example, Goldhaber wrote in 1997: "...transactions in which money is involved may be growing in total number, but the total number of global attention transactions is growing even faster." For a 1999 essay, Georg Franck argued "income in attention ranks above financial success" for advertising-based media like magazines and television.
Information systems researchers have also adopted the idea, and are beginning to investigate mechanism designs which build on the idea of creating property rights in attention.
In 2022, Rice University professor Adrian Lenardic and two co-authors wrote for BigThink that attention economics adversely affected scientific research: "The attention a scientist’s work gains from the public now plays into its perceived value. Scientists list media exposure counts on résumés, and many PhD theses now include the number of times a candidate’s work has appeared in the popular science press. Science has succumbed to the attention economy." They add that study results are publicized without proper peer input or reproducibility.

Negative externalities

In economic theory, market exchanges may have unintended consequences, called externalities, that aren't reflected in the price consumers pay upfront. When these consequences have a negative effect on an uninvolved third party, they're called negative externalities, with pollution being a common example. The attention economy generates negative externalities for society that impact both individuals and communities.

Social media addiction and mental health impacts

One negative externality of the attention economy is social media addiction. Given the monetization of human attention, social media platforms are designed to maximize user engagement, namely by influencing the brain's reward system. When users receive positive feedback on social media or view novel content, their brain releases dopamine, leading them to stay on the platform for extended periods of time and come back to it repeatedly. Social media addiction has been linked to negative mental health outcomes such as depression, anxiety, and low self-esteem.
The Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma illustrates how algorithms from search engines and social media platforms negatively affect users while maximizing online engagement.

Amplification of disinformation

During the 2010s, social media in conjunction with online advertising technologies inspired significant growth in the business model of the attention economy. A study conducted by researchers at Hanken School of Economics found that when the attention economy is paired with online advertising, the resulting financial arrangement can lead to the circulation of fake news and the amplification of disinformation for profit.

Surveillance capitalism and ethical considerations

Another negative externality of the attention economy is the rise of surveillance capitalism, which describes the practice of companies collecting personal data to buy and sell for profit.
To capture user attention, companies collect data — such as demographics and behavioral patterns — and use it to create personalized user experiences that align with their interests based on the obtained data. Companies also sell this data to third parties, often without the user's informed consent. These practices raise ethical concerns about privacy, misuse of data, and misrepresentation of communities.

Attention for marginalized communities

Within the attention economy, engagement metrics influence the visibility of content and narratives. Algorithms in the attention economy are designed to maximize engagement, often prioritizing content that resonates with dominant cultural identities. As a result, marginalized groups may face challenges in having representation of their perspectives and concerns. For example, Black creators on platforms such as TikTok have reported that their content had significant reductions in engagement after posting about the Black Lives Matter Movement, suggesting that they were shadow banned. Furthermore, limiting the visibility of marginalized creators reduces the amount of attention they receive. This, in turn, hinders their ability to engage in activism and spread awareness about issues affecting their community to the broader public.

Intangibles

According to digital culture expert Kevin Kelly, by 2008, the attention economy was increasingly one where the consumer product costs virtually nothing to reproduce and the problem facing the supplier of the product lies in adding valuable intangibles that cannot be reproduced at any cost. He identifies these intangibles as:
  1. Immediacy - priority access, immediate delivery
  2. Personalization - tailored just for you
  3. Interpretation - support and guidance
  4. Authenticity - how can you be sure it is the real thing?
  5. Accessibility - wherever, whenever
  6. Embodiment - books, live music
  7. Patronage - "paying simply because it feels good"
  8. Findability - "When there are millions of books, millions of songs, millions of films, millions of applications, millions of everything requesting our attention—and most of it free—being found is valuable."

    Social attention, collective attention

Attention economics is also relevant to the social sphere. Specifically, long-term attention can be considered according to the attention that people dedicate to managing their interactions with others. Dedicating too much attention to these interactions can lead to "social interaction overload", i.e. when people are overwhelmed in managing their relationships with others, for instance in the context of social network services in which people are the subject of a high level of social solicitations. Digital media and the internet facilitate participation in this economy by creating new channels for distributing attention. Ordinary people are now empowered to reach a wide audience by publishing their own content and commenting on the content of others.
Social attention can also be associated to collective attention, i.e. how "attention to novel items propagates and eventually fades among large populations".

Applications

In advertising

"Attention economics" treats a potential consumer's attention as a resource. Traditional media advertisers followed a model that suggested consumers went through a linear process they called AIDA. Attention is therefore a major and the first stage in the process of converting non-consumers. Since the cost to transmit advertising to consumers has become sufficiently low given that more ads can be transmitted to a consumer than the consumer can process, the consumer's attention becomes the scarce resource to be allocated. As such, a superfluidity of information may hinder an individual's decision-making who keeps searching and comparing products as long as it promises to provide more than it is using up.
Advertisers that produce attention-grabbing content that is presented to unconsenting consumers without compensation have been criticized for perpetrating attention theft.