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
sari and
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.
andrea and
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.com
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).
One of the weirdest things about the Internet is that even though we’re just a click away from the greatest authors of all-time, from Plato to Tolstoy, we default to just scrolling Twitter
David Perelltwitter.com
Something I’ve noticed, however, is that exclusively using TikTok doesn ’t mean I’m only exposed to TikTok-specific trends and culture. In fact, many of the dust-ups from other platforms still make their way onto my For You page. Rather than a standalone platform, as it was in its early days, TikTok has become the ocean into which—and out of
... See morekate lindsay • TikTok is the town square now
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
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