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
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.
Sometimes we don’t quite process that billions of people on the planet get unlimited entertainment, voice and video calling, maps, restaurant reviews, weather, news, an encyclopedia, mail, messaging, and more for *free* just because 1-2% of us click an ad every now and then.
Aaron Levietwitter.comPeople in my profession say all the time that they can't do their jobs without Twitter, and it drives me so crazy because I think most of them are worse at their jobs because of Twitter. The reason is that Twitter, as do other forms of social media, gets you to lose control of what you care about. You lose that intentionality with your own... See more
Clay Skipper • Ezra Klein’s Formula for a Good Day Involves These Four Things
Contracting our attention into the moment is hard, but it increases its potency, just as the brevity of words increases the potency of an idea, creating deeper grooves in the mind. If brevity is the soul of wit, then presence is the soul of experience. We cannot be fully ourselves until we are fully in the moment—attention nowhere but here.
Isabel • distillation
