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 I experience the web today
how-i-experience-web-today.com
the degree to which attention discourse is invested in a clear “subject” looking at an “object”: a binary relation that many of those other methods have challenged.
Dirt • Dirt: Disordered Attention
Business model shapes outcomes. In a subscription based model, you build tools people use and pay for. In an ad-based model, you build engagement hacks.
As Tristan Harris put it:
“we've moved away from having a tools-based technology environment to an addiction and manipulation based... See more
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.
sari and
I guess I meditate because attention is my art form. I’d even wager that much of what we call art — paintings, novels, poetry — are secondary, byproducts of rarefied attention. Attention, then is the primary art form.
Why I Meditate
the most convincing thing I've read on why to meditate
insught from Eugene Wei on the incentives of ad-based social networks:
to raise your revenue as a social media company monetizing from ads (CPM), you have to drive the M part up, because the C is going down. And that means more and more we see all these companies fighting to be more addictive and entertaining.
We experience the externalities of the attention economy in little drips, so we tend to describe them with words of mild bemusement like “annoying” or “distracting.” But this is a grave misreading of their nature. In the short term, distractions can keep us from doing the things we want to do. In the longer term, however, they can accumulate and... See more