”… a wealth of information means a dearth of something else - a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.” (Herb Simon (1971))
Michael Goldhaber, who, in a series of essays in the late 1990s, argued that a new “attention economy” was emerging alongside the traditional economy of goods and services. “Ours is not truly an information economy,”
As a commodity
Attention as a commodity, it is increasingly competitive to compete for everyone’s attention. People are not just the products but also the producers of the product (data).
Attention is the main currency of production — what limits you from doing everything at once. Attention, then, is a common pool resource. It is non-excludable (anyone can bid for their attention) and rivalrous (limited attention).
More in Odell’s How to do Nothing, designing for slowness
Information Scaling
See: information scaling threshold
The wealth of information means a dearth of something else—a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients