Attention Economy
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
- shortening of attention spans? not sure if this is an actual thing
- ‘digital detox’ people not just as the products, but as 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