From the Industrial Economy to the Attention Economy

“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.” Herbert Simon

Most of the social systems, business models and organisational structures we know today evolved under economic conditions of industrial capitalism.

The capitalist model is defined by money, jobs and capital and production. But with the automation, robotics and software we’re approaching a moment where production of material goods can happen without involvement of labor and at negligible cost. In addition, the politics of quantitative easing run by national central banks results in the massive amounts of capital available globally.

Progress in robotics, automation and artificial intelligence results in new information being created every day. This trend is only accelerating. More customised products with more custom designs advertised using more content marketing articles. We already have artificial intelligence solutions that are capable of writing articles in natural human language and we might expect that in the nearest future robot-written news articles will become normal.

Unfortunately, there is one limiting factor in this process. The limiting factor is human attention. The abundance of information results in scarcity of attention and the economic shift that we’re witnessing on the internet today can be explained as a shift from the ‘industrial/capital economy’ to the ‘attention economy’.

Modern day challenges of the internet economy such as the rise of adblocking, crisis of the ad-tech industry, uncertain future of ‘content monetisation’ models can be interpreted in the context of this shift.

Human attention, understood as an economic resource, has different properties from the previous scarcities of land and capital.

In terms of distribution, it’s equally distributed among the population - no matter if you’re a kid in Africa or Bill Gates you only have a finite amount of attention a day. In a way, attention resembles solar energy - it’s renewable, not available during the night (sleep) and cannot be accumulated - it has to be spent immediately as it’s produced.

Every human action is preceded by the act of paying attention as we can’t act on something we don’t see. Commercially valuable behaviours such as the acts of buying/selling require the act of attention before they happen.

Links: Albert Wenger http://continuations.com/post/131372549150/land-capital-attention-this-time-it-is-the-same

Michael Goldhaber http://firstmonday.org/article/view/519/440 http://www.well.com/user/mgoldh/MMIG.pdf