The Attention Economy
“Over here! over here!” That is the essential cry of our time.
We live in a consumer society and if lock-down proved anything, it is that our economies don’t work when the cycle of consumption is disrupted. But before we buy, we need to give our attention, and the concerted efforts to secure it have stepped up exponentially in recent decades.
I remember a colleague from Media Studies explaining that the first lesson he gave students was that the shows they watched on television were not the real product; they, the audience, were. The money spent on programming was an investment in audience delivery. If you made a hit show, you could then charge companies high fees to run their ads alongside it. As companies and ad agencies knew, there were no guarantees. Even a prime-time or Super-Bowl ad was not certain to boost sales, but it could consolidate name recognition, and that made buying more likely.
A generation later, such broadcasting is starting to seem naive. In the new era of data mining, companies are learning to be much more precise about who their likely costumers are. That’s why we live in a world of “cookies” mapping our on-line journeys. The message inside the cookie is “If you looked for this, you may consider buying this.” There are algorithms that link your musical play-list to your clothing preferences and choice of car. It’s also why Google and others want you to switch your location finder “on.” For the offence of being born, you are urged to wear a tracking monitor. I remember my own slow-witted appreciation of this surveillance. I would look up a product and then suddenly see ads for exactly this item in my online version of newspapers.
Occasionally, this has a comic side. During lock-down, my wife was keen to find Sunday masses on line and some of her Venetian priests had set up live-streaming on Facebook. The only problem was that she refuses to be on Facebook. The solution was for me to find the pages from my own account. Within days, the ads in my news feed ceased to be for books and craft beer outlets and shifted to pilgrimages and religious artefacts; Mark Zuckerberg had concluded that I was born again.
Among economists of the rational choice school, it is widely recommended that you put a price tag on your time. We are all given a finite amount after all, and it cannot really be banked. If there are things that you enjoy doing, you may choose to place a high value on the time you give them. This may give you a rational case for deciding that you are not going to do “overtime” or take a job with a 90 minute commute. It may also induce you to consider the activities that are genuinely a “waste of your time.”
This is highly subjective but most people have things they do that are neither productive nor healthy. Many of the apps and games offered on your mobile phone may deliver them to you. They offer distraction and most human beings are addicted to it. But if you tabulate the time they take each day, you may not like the cost. And when you recognise that they are usually linked to advertising in various ways, you may decide that you want to keep some time and attention for yourself. It’s not just your data that you are giving, but life itself.
Of course, writing an on-line article about the contest for attention carries more than a little irony. Virtually all on-line content is inextricably part of the “attention economy,” and this article is one more distraction that has pulled you away from other things. Successful bloggers have pages that generate traffic and hence attract advertising revenue. All I can say is: thanks for your time!
