Attention economy
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Attention economics is an approach to the
Description
According to Matthew Crawford, "Attention is a resource—a person has only so much of it."[1] Thomas H. Davenport and John C. Beck[2] add to that definition:
Attention is focused mental engagement on a particular item of information. Items come into our awareness, we attend to a particular item, and then we decide whether to act.[3]
A strong trigger of this effect is that it limits the mental capability of humans and the receptiveness of information is also limited. Attention allows information to be filtered such that the most important information can be extracted from the environment while irrelevant details can be left out.
The economic value of time can be quantified and compared to monetary expenditures. Erik Brynjolfsson, Seon Tae Kim and Joo Hee Oh show that this makes it possible to formally analyze the attention economy and putting values on free goods.[6]
Theory
Research from a wide range of disciplines including psychology,[7] cognitive science,[8] neuroscience,[9] and economics,[10] suggest that humans have limited cognitive resources that can be used at any given time, when resources are allocated to one task, the resources available for other tasks will be limited. Given that attention is a cognitive process that involves the selective concentration of resources on a given item of information, to the exclusion of other perceivable information, attention can be considered in terms of limited processing resources.[11]
History
The concept of attention economics was first theorized by psychologist and economist Herbert A. Simon[12] when he wrote about the scarcity of attention in an information-rich world in 1971:
[I]n an information-rich world, 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. 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.[13]
He noted that many designers of information systems incorrectly represented their design problem as information scarcity rather than attention scarcity, and as a result, they built systems that excelled at providing more and more information to people, when what was really needed were systems that excelled at filtering out unimportant or irrelevant information.[14]
Simon's characterization of the problem of information overload as an economic one has become increasingly popular in analyzing information consumption since the mid-1990s, when writers such as Thomas H. Davenport and Michael Goldhaber[15] adopted terms like "attention economy" and "economics of attention".[16]
Some writers have speculated that "attention transactions" will replace financial transactions as the focus of our economic system.[17] Information systems researchers have also adopted the idea, and are beginning to investigate mechanism designs which build on the idea of creating property rights in attention (see Applications).
Intangibles
According to
- Immediacy - priority access, immediate delivery
- Personalization - tailored just for you
- Interpretation - support and guidance
- Authenticity - how can you be sure it is the real thing?
- Accessibility - wherever, whenever
- Embodiment - books, live music
- Patronage - "paying simply because it feels good"
- Findability - "When there are millions of books, millions of songs, millions of films, millions of applications, millions of everything requesting our attention—and most of it free—being found is valuable."
Social attention, collective attention
Attention economics is also relevant to the social sphere. Specifically, long-term attention can be considered according to the attention that people dedicate to managing their interactions with others. Dedicating too much attention to these interactions can lead to "social interaction overload",
Social attention can also be associated to collective attention, i.e. how "attention to novel items propagates and eventually fades among large populations".[21]
Applications
In advertising
"Attention economics" treats a potential consumer's attention as a resource.[22] Traditional media advertisers followed a model that suggested consumers went through a linear process they called AIDA (attention, interest, desire and action).[23] Attention is therefore a major and the first stage in the process of converting non-consumers. Since the cost to transmit advertising to consumers has become sufficiently low given that more ads can be transmitted to a consumer (e.g. via online advertising) than the consumer can process, the consumer's attention becomes the scarce resource to be allocated. As such, a superfluidity of information may hinder an individual's decision-making who keeps searching and comparing products as long as it promises to provide more than it is using up.[24]
Advertisers that produce attention-grabbing content that is presented to unconsenting consumers without compensation have been criticized for perpetrating attention theft.[25][26]
Controlling information pollution
One application treats various forms of information (e.g. spam, advertising) as a form of pollution or 'detrimental externality'.[27] In economics, an externality is a by-product of a production process that imposes burdens (or supplies benefits), to parties other than the intended consumer of a commodity.[28] For example; air and water pollution are ‘negative’ externalities that impose burdens on society and the environment.
A market-based approach to controlling externalities was outlined in Ronald Coase's The Problem of Social Cost (1960).[29] This evolved from an article on the Federal Communications Commission (1959),[30] in which Coase claimed that radio frequency interference is a negative externality that could be controlled by the creation of property rights.
Coase's approach to the management of externalities requires the careful specification of property rights and a set of rules for the initial allocation of the rights.[31] Once this has been achieved, a market mechanism can theoretically manage the externality problem.[32]
E-mail spam
Sending huge numbers of e-mail messages costs spammers very little, since the costs of e-mail messages are spread out over the internet service providers that distribute them (and the recipients who must spend attention dealing with them).[33] Thus, sending out as much spam as possible is a rational strategy: even if only 0.001% of recipients (1 in 100,000) is converted into a sale, a spam campaign can be profitable. Of course, it is very difficult to understand where all the revenue comes from since these businesses are run through proxy servers. However, if they were not profitable, it is reasonable to conclude that they would not be sending spam.[34] Spammers are demanding valuable attention from potential customers, but avoid paying a fair price for this attention due to the current architecture of e-mail systems.[35]
One way this might be mitigated is through the implementation of "
Closely related is the idea of selling "interrupt rights", or small fees for the right to demand one's attention.[37] The cost of these rights could vary according to the person who is interrupted: interrupt rights for the CEO of a Fortune 500 company would presumably be extraordinarily expensive, while those of a high school student might be lower. Costs could also vary for an individual depending on context, perhaps rising during the busy holiday season and falling during the dog days of summer. Those who are interrupted could decline to collect their fees from friends, family, and other welcome interrupters.[38]
Another idea in this vein is the creation of "attention bonds", small warranties that some information will not be a waste of the recipient's time, placed into escrow at the time of sending.[39] Like the granters of interrupt rights, receivers could cash in their bonds to signal to the sender that a given communication was a waste of their time or elect not to cash them in to signal that more communication would be welcome.[40]
Web spam
As search engines have become a primary means for finding and accessing information on the web, high rankings in the results for certain queries have become valuable commodities, due to the ability of search engines to focus searchers' attention.[41] Like other information systems, web search is vulnerable to pollution: "Because the Web environment contains profit seeking ventures, attention getting strategies evolve in response to search engine algorithms".[42]
Since most major search engines now rely on some form of
Another issue, similar to the issue discussed above of whether or not to consider political e-mail campaigns as spam, is what to do about politically motivated
Sales lead generation
The paid inclusion model, as well as more pervasive advertising networks like
See also
- Algorithmic attention rents
- Attention (disambiguation)
- Attention inequality
- Attention management
- Center for Humane Technology
- Clickbait
- Cognitive Surplus
- Competition (economics)
- Continuous partial attention
- Fearmongering
- Imagination age
- Information explosion
- Information society
- Mediatization
- Netocracy
- Piotr Woźniak
- Post-scarcity economy
- The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two (paper)
- Tim Ferriss, low information diet[49]
References
- ISBN 978-0374292980.
In the main currents of psychological research, attention is a resource—a person has only so much of it.
- ISBN 9781578518715. Retrieved 29 October 2020.
- ^ Davenport & Beck 2001, p. 20.
- PMID 23233157.
- S2CID 9388907. Retrieved 29 October 2020.
- ISSN 1047-7047.
- PMID 28038440.
- PMID 23428935.
- S2CID 14290580. Retrieved 30 October 2020.
- S2CID 15545774.
- S2CID 2575997.
- ^ Simon, Herbert A (1971). Designing Organizations for an Information-rich World. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. pp. 37–52. Archived from the original on 6 October 2020. Retrieved 28 October 2020.
- ^ Simon 1971, pp. 40–41.
- ^ Simon 1971.
- . Retrieved 29 October 2020.
- .
- ^ Goldhaber 1997, Franck 1999
- ^ Kelly, Kevin (February 5, 2008). "BETTER THAN FREE". The Edge.
- ^ Maier, Christian; Laumer, Sven; Weinert, Christoph (2013). "The Negative Side Of ICT-Enabled Communication: The Case Of Social Interaction Overload In Online Social Networks". ECIS 2013 Completed Research. 86: 1–10. Retrieved 30 October 2020.
- ISBN 9780415673167.
- PMID 17962416.
- ISBN 978-3-319-02993-1. Retrieved 1 June 2015.
- .
- ISBN 978-3-540-79883-5. Retrieved 1 June 2015.
- ^ Wu, Tim (April 14, 2017). "The Crisis of Attention Theft—Ads That Steal Your Time for Nothing in Return". Wired. Retrieved 9 August 2021.
- ^ McFedries, Paul (22 May 2014). "Stop, Attention Thief!". IEEE Spectrum. Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. Retrieved 9 August 2021.
- S2CID 30488295. Retrieved 1 November 2020.
- JSTOR 1236272.
- ISBN 978-0-230-52321-0. Retrieved 1 November 2020.
- S2CID 222324889. Retrieved 1 November 2020.
- JSTOR 2721541. Retrieved 1 November 2020.
- doi:10.1002/mde.1218. Retrieved 1 November 2020.
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- S2CID 1398765. Retrieved 1 November 2020.
- S2CID 23623868. Retrieved 1 November 2020.
- S2CID 195718575. Retrieved 1 November 2020.
- ^ Lueg, C. (2003). "Spam and anti-spam measures: A look at potential impacts". Proc. Informing Science and IT Education Conference: 24–27. Retrieved 1 November 2020.
- ^ Loder, T.; Van Alstyne, M.; Wash, R.; Benerorfe, M. (2004). "The spam and attention bond mechanism faq" (PDF). Technical Report, University of Michigan. Retrieved 1 November 2020.
- S2CID 154784397. Retrieved 1 November 2020.
- S2CID 53034987. Retrieved 1 November 2020.
- ^ Page, L.; Brin, S.; Motwani, R.; Winograd, T. "The PageRank citation ranking: Bringing order to the web 1999". Stanford InfoLab. Retrieved 1 November 2020.
- S2CID 6884167. Retrieved 1 November 2020.
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- ISBN 960-7475-25-9. Retrieved 1 November 2020.
- ^ Moss, Kenneth A.; Watson, Eric; Seidman, Eytan D. "Paid inclusion listing enhancement 2011" (PDF). U.S. Patent No. 7,953,631. Retrieved 1 November 2020.
- ^ Ferriss, Tim. "Low-Information Diet". The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss. Retrieved 5 August 2015.
Further reading
- Coase, R. H. (1959), "The Federal Communications Commission" (PDF), Journal of Law and Economics, 2 (1): 1–40, S2CID 222324889, archived from the original(PDF) on 2013-11-07
- Lanchester, John (August 2017), "You Are the Product", London Review of Books, 39 (16): 3–10
- Lanham, Richard (2006), The Economics of Attention: Style and Substance in the Age of Information
- Schmid, H. (2009), Economy of Fascination: Dubai and Las Vegas as Themed Urban Landscapes, Stuttgart, Berlin: E. Schweizerbart science publishers, ISBN 978-3-443-37014-5.
- Tran, J. L. (2016), "The Right to Attention", Indiana Law Journal, 91: 1023–62, SSRN 2600463
- Wu, Fang; Huberman, Bernardo (2007), "Novelty and collective attention", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 104 (17599): 17599–17601, PMID 17962416