What is the attention economy?

If natural resources run low and labor is incrementally automated a new model had to emerge were human attention is merely a resource for production. This is known as the attention economy, this newly found resource is finite, nonrenewable and worthy of competition.

The attention economy is more than just looking at advertisements like we do in TV or radio. No, it’s so much more than that, because this economic model is amplified and accelerated by the speed of fiber optic — the Internet — thanks to the communication potential brought over by virtual spaces and digital platforms.

To understand this new phenomenon, we must understand what’s so different about digital advertisement, what sort of information is needed for personalized ads and why do so many tech companies play the game of competing for attention in the first place?

The father of economics, Adam Smith himself, said that there are three main pillars of production: Land, labor and capital; in other words: The natural resources from which products come from, the human workers who make them and the money to incentivize and mobilize production. but this perspective came before digital.

Our economy today surfers from a lack of natural resources, job loss due to increasing automation and wealth inequality; We had to find a new “land” to exploit and extract resource from and we found it inside virtual spaces: The Internet — Where growth isn’t caped by lack of resources and projects can scale infinitely.

In the digital realm content is the new natural resource analogous to land, just like land — content is a resource to be exploited. Money remained as capital and users became main source of labor.

Most Internet users remain clueless about the labor they participate in, because in the attention economy to do work is a passive activity where entertainment is the main apparent output. Unlike traditional work, were production is active and conscious where the main output is a physical product of some kind.

The passive nature of this kind of labor is one of the reasons why the attention economy is so present on social media platforms. Users of social media sites naturally create and consume each other’s content in the form of socializing (land and labor) and they create value thanks to the incentive of social status (social capital). A social sphere already produces value by itself. The introduction of advertisements is a way to capitalize on the user’s social process.

Typical advertisements inside digital platforms are not your typical ads, they are highly tailored and narrowed down to the individual. This extreme level of precision characterized by personalized ads needs great amounts of data points on the users powered by increasing levels of surveillance — An eye on our behavior is necessary for targeted advertisement.

The race for attention gets amplified by the medium: The velocity of the Net and the nature of digital technologies dictate the methods used to win this competition. A traditional business model has no influence over the end user’s product diversity. Clothing stores have no say if you’re allowed to combine their products with the competition’s to make up your wardrobe.

Digital platforms are mutually exclusive: if you’re on YouTube right now you’re not on Netflix. Uber and Facebook are completely incompatible not by accident but because of the binary nature of software: You can only use one at a time, it’s either one or zero, on or off.

Because the end-user can only invest his or her attention in one platform at a time, designers have implemented “traps” for the users. The idea is that once you open the app you stay on the app for as long as possible. This is called frictionless design.

One of the consequences of frictionless deign is that it shapes the behavior of the users from an active behavior to a passive state of mind. For the production line to work at its best you must keep the machines oiled and frictionless.

Remember that labor in the attention economy depends on passive work rather than free an independent action, frictionless design makes sure of this by introducing features that favor consumption over creativity and creation.

For example: Facebook users like to format their posts as image macros or memes, so they used to leave Facebook to open Photoshop or other image editor to create memes and photo collages with text. This was terrible for Facebook, so they introduced a simple way to create pictures with text and a colored background. Now users don’t have to leave the app to have a spark of creativity due to the endless possibilities of a blank canvas on Photoshop. No! now they can just stay in the app, choose a background color and type some text and go back to scrolling.

All is permitted as long as you don’t leave the platform.

Features that keep users on site not only maximize the production of capital, they also force the competition to do the same — The competition races for the same eyeballs after all — failing to adapt to the attention economy means to lose out on your main source of income.

If Twitter sends you notifications to grab your attention, then Facebook is forced to do the same in the name of market competition.

The market has found a new home in virtual spaces and digital platforms. This led to the birth of the attention economy, were human attentions is a means to an end. This new model thinks of autonomy as an obstacle to be smoothed out of the equation with frictionless design. Just like a factory needs to optimize the production line for maximizing profits, online platforms have come to the point of snapping the users to the grid by swapping active and conscious action with passive consumption from the designs of their platforms.

The invisible hand has pushed most online businesses to the attention economy and their digital-ness nature reflects that unlike computers — that can run multiple processes and tasks at the same time — we can only do one task at a time: Pay attention.

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