Attention Economy
exploring the inner workings and dynamics of companies building products engineered to hook us, addict us, and hijack our attention to sell more ad inventory
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Attention Economy
There are those who believe the social web is reaching its terminal point. I hope they’re right. Platform after platform was designed to make it easier and more addictive for us to share content with one another so the corporations behind them could sell ever more of our attention and data. In different ways, most of these platforms are now in
... See moreNew York Times • Opinion | the Great Delusion Behind Twitter - The New York Times
Once I started to think in terms of TTI, it upended the entire concept of attention for me and forced me to acknowledge that maybe people’s attention spans weren’t getting shorter after all.
Framed through the lens of TTI, audiences don’t suffer from a dilemma of shortened attention spans, but rather a dilemma of increased choice (see the abundance crisis above).
To optimize for viral growth, today’s social platforms are designed to feature entertainers and sensationalized content in a one-to-many fashion to generate more ad impressions... this is inducing divisiveness and reducing human interaction to just tapping on a like button.
Dan Kurani • A Kinder Internet
How we allocate our attention defines us even more than our purchases do. People have different amounts of money, so the things we buy don’t reflect values in the same way for everyone. The same purchase might represent a tremendous sacrifice for one person and a mere afterthought to another. But we all have the same widow’s mite of attention to distribute among the many things competing for it: family, friends, education, health, careers, church, politics, great books, lousy books, clickbait headlines, and viral posts about ridiculous people doing ridiculous things for no particular reason. Our limited attention budget forces us to make choices, and those choices both reveal our values and create our characters.
