Module VIII·Article II·~2 min read
Attention Economy: Culture in the Age of Time Scarcity
Digital Culture and the Post-Internet World
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Attention as a Scarce Resource
Herbert Simon predicted the "attention economy" as early as 1971: "A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention." Today this is an obvious reality. Every day, 330 million tweets are created, 500 hours of video per minute are uploaded to YouTube, 4 billion likes are made on Facebook. Attention is the only scarce resource in a world of informational abundance.
Tim Wu ("The Attention Merchants"): the history of advertising is the history of colonizing attention. Newspapers of the 19th century, television of the 20th, the internet of the 21st—every medium built a business model on selling someone else's attention to advertisers. "If the product is free—then you are the commodity."
Shoshana Zuboff ("Surveillance Capitalism"): the business model of Google, Facebook, and the like is not just the sale of attention. These are "predictive products": user behavioral data is transformed into behavioral predictions, which are sold to advertisers. This is a new form of capitalism based on data as raw material.
Cultural Consequences of the Attention Economy
"The Dory Effect"—a decline in the ability for prolonged concentration. The average length of YouTube videos viewed was shrinking year by year, until the algorithm learned how to hold attention longer. Books compete with video games, television series, TikTok for the same attention.
Genre consequences: cultural formats adapt to attention. Twitter created a culture of 280-character thoughts. TikTok created a culture of 15–60-second content. This is not neutral: formats determine what can be expressed.
Neil Postman ("Amusing Ourselves to Death", 1985) anticipated this: television changed political discourse, turning it into a show. "Medium creates message"—television demands a 'performance', not an 'argument'.
Question for reflection: How does the attention economy affect your ability for deep reading and thinking? What practices help you protect "attention" for complex tasks?
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