#123 A pause from poetry to talk about economy attention applied to all of us

Research from a wide range of disciplines suggests that humans have limited cognitive resources that can be used at any given time, when resources are allocated to one task the resources available to other tasks will be limited, neurologically speaking. Given that attention is a cognitive process that involves the selective concentration of resources on a particular item of information to the exclusion of other perceptible information, attention can be thought of in terms of a limited processing resource.

The notion of attention as a limited and increasingly desired resource is at the heart of what some authors have called the attention economy (Frank, 1998; Davenport and Beck, 1998). (…) there seems to be no doubt that what everyone wants most, and what is always felt to be in short supply, is attention.

This notion — and the related conceptualisations such as of ‘experience design’, the competition for ‘eyeballs’, ‘click-throughs’ and so on — animates contemporary digital media production, advertising and the online, multitasking, near-pervasive media milieu in which they develop. The attention economy rests on the idea that attention is a scarce resource to compete for, and competing harshly. In this digital economy, trade is increasingly built around information rather than physical…