A wonderful longform article by the New York Times writer Charlie Warzel about the perils of the attention economy. The article itself is centered on his conversation with the writer Michael Goldhaber, who predicted this over thirty years ago, before even the infancy of the web.
The need to reclaim our attention is a topic dear to me, and naturally so was this article.
It’s hard to quote one or two essential sentences by Goldhaber, so I’ve had to go beyond in order to do him justice. I think it’s worth your attention to read on:
Understanding attention scarcity
He was obsessed at the time [in the 1980s] with what he felt was an information glut — that there was simply more access to news, opinion and forms of entertainment than one could handle. His epiphany was this: One of the most finite resources in the world is human attention.
This is a zero-sum proposition, he realized. When you pay attention to one thing, you ignore something else.
Understanding attention hijacking
“When you have attention, you have power, and some people will try and succeed in getting huge amounts of attention, and they would not use it in equal or positive ways.”
[In 1997] He outlined the demands of living in an attention economy, describing an ennui that didn’t yet exist but now feels familiar to anyone who makes a living online. “The Net also ups the ante, increasing the relentless pressure to get some fraction of this limited resource,” he wrote. “At the same time, it generates ever greater demands on each of us to pay what scarce attention we can to others.”
“Our abilities to pay attention are limited. Not so our abilities to receive it,” he wrote in the journal First Monday. “The value of true modesty or humility is hard to sustain in an attention economy.”
Politics and Attention
Most obviously, he saw Mr. Trump — and the tweets, rallies and cable news dominance that defined his presidency — as a near-perfect product of an attention economy, a truth that disturbed him greatly…
Living in a rural area, he suggested, means being farther from cultural centers and may result in feeling alienated by the attention that cities generate in the news and in pop culture. He said that almost by accident, Mr. Trump tapped into this frustration by at least pretending to pay attention to them.
he was deeply concerned about whether the attention economy and a healthy democracy can coexist. Nuanced policy discussions, he said, will almost certainly get simplified into “meaningless slogans” in order to travel farther online,
“We struggle to attune ourselves to groups of people who feel they’re not getting the attention they deserve, and we ought to get better at sensing that feeling earlier,” he said. “Because it’s a powerful, dangerous feeling.”