Wikipedia

Attention economy

(Redirected from Attention economics)

The attention economy refers to the incentives of, especially advertising-driven companies, to maximize the time and attention their users give to the product they are selling.[1][2]

Attention economics is an approach to the management of information that treats human attention as a scarce commodity and applies economic theory to solve various information management problems.

Description

edit

According to Matthew Crawford, "Attention is a resource—a person has only so much of it."[3] Thomas H. Davenport and John C. Beck[4] add to that definition:

Attention is focused mental engagement on a particular item of information. Items come into our awareness, we attend to a particular item, and then we decide whether to act.[5]

A strong trigger of this effect is that it limits the mental capability of humans and the receptiveness of information is also limited. Attention allows information to be filtered such that the most important information can be extracted from the environment while irrelevant details can be left out.[6]

Software applications either explicitly or implicitly take attention economy into consideration in their user interface design based on the realization that if it takes the user too long to locate something, they will find it through another application. This is done, for instance, by creating filters to make sure viewers are presented with information that is most relevant, of interest, and personalized based on past web search history.[7]

The economic value of time can be quantified and compared to monetary expenditures. Erik Brynjolfsson, Seon Tae Kim and Joo Hee Oh show that this makes it possible to formally analyze the attention economy and putting values on free goods.[8]

Theory

edit

Research from a wide range of disciplines including psychology,[9] cognitive science,[10] neuroscience,[11] and economics,[12] suggest that humans have limited cognitive resources that can be used at any given time, when resources are allocated to one task, the resources available for other tasks will be limited. Given that attention is a cognitive process that involves the selective concentration of resources on a given item of information, to the exclusion of other perceivable information, attention can be considered in terms of limited processing resources.[13]

History

edit

The concept of attention economics was first theorized by psychologist and economist Herbert A. Simon[14] when he wrote about the scarcity of attention in an information-rich world in 1971:

[I]n an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. 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.[15]

He noted that many designers of information systems incorrectly represented their design problem as information scarcity rather than attention scarcity, and as a result, they built systems that excelled at providing more and more information to people, when what was really needed were systems that excelled at filtering out unimportant or irrelevant information.[16]

Simon's characterization of the problem of information overload as an economic one has become increasingly popular in analyzing information consumption since the mid-1990s, when writers such as Thomas H. Davenport and Michael Goldhaber[17] adopted terms like "attention economy" and "economics of attention".[18]

Some writers have speculated that transactions based on attention will replace financial transactions as the focus of economic system. For example, Goldhaber wrote in 1997: "...transactions in which money is involved may be growing in total number, but the total number of global attention transactions is growing even faster."[19] For a 1999 essay, Georg Franck argued "income in attention ranks above financial success" for advertising-based media like magazines and television.[20] Information systems researchers have also adopted the idea, and are beginning to investigate mechanism designs which build on the idea of creating property rights in attention (see Applications).

Externalities

edit
See also: Social media addiction, Political polarization, and Problematic smartphone use

The 2010s saw a significant growth in the business model of the attention economy, with consequences for democracy.[1] The impact of Social media on democracy has drawn significant attention.

Notable works

edit

The Social Dilemma documentary on Netflix explores how algorithms from search engines to YouTube to social media have harmful side effects when maximizing engagement.[21][22] Jenny Odell has been a prominent critic of the attention economy and its impacts on health and wellbeing.[23]

Intangibles

edit

According to digital culture expert Kevin Kelly, by 2008, the modern attention economy is increasingly one where the consumer product costs virtually nothing to reproduce and the problem facing the supplier of the product lies in adding valuable intangibles that cannot be reproduced at any cost. He identifies these intangibles as:[24]

  1. Immediacy - priority access, immediate delivery
  2. Personalization - tailored just for you
  3. Interpretation - support and guidance
  4. Authenticity - how can you be sure it is the real thing?
  5. Accessibility - wherever, whenever
  6. Embodiment - books, live music
  7. Patronage - "paying simply because it feels good"
  8. Findability - "When there are millions of books, millions of songs, millions of films, millions of applications, millions of everything requesting our attention—and most of it free—being found is valuable."

Social attention, collective attention

edit

Attention economics is also relevant to the social sphere. Specifically, long-term attention can be considered according to the attention that people dedicate to managing their interactions with others. Dedicating too much attention to these interactions can lead to "social interaction overload",[25] i.e. when people are overwhelmed in managing their relationships with others, for instance in the context of social network services in which people are the subject of a high level of social solicitations. Digital media and the internet facilitate participation in this economy by creating new channels for distributing attention. Ordinary people are now empowered to reach a wide audience by publishing their own content and commenting on the content of others.[26]

Social attention can also be associated to collective attention, i.e. how "attention to novel items propagates and eventually fades among large populations".[27]

Applications

edit

In advertising

edit
Main article: Attention (advertising)
 
Sound trucks, like this one in Japan, involuntarily occupy the attention of those who hear them, an example of attention theft.

"Attention economics" treats a potential consumer's attention as a resource.[28] Traditional media advertisers followed a model that suggested consumers went through a linear process they called AIDA (attention, interest, desire and action).[29] Attention is therefore a major and the first stage in the process of converting non-consumers. Since the cost to transmit advertising to consumers has become sufficiently low given that more ads can be transmitted to a consumer (e.g. via online advertising) than the consumer can process, the consumer's attention becomes the scarce resource to be allocated. As such, a superfluidity of information may hinder an individual's decision-making who keeps searching and comparing products as long as it promises to provide more than it is using up.[30]

Advertisers that produce attention-grabbing content that is presented to unconsenting consumers without compensation have been criticized for perpetrating attention theft.[31][32]

Controlling information pollution

edit
Main article: Coase theorem

One application treats various forms of information (e.g. spam, advertising) as a form of pollution or 'detrimental externality'.[33] In economics, an externality is a by-product of a production process that imposes burdens (or supplies benefits), to parties other than the intended consumer of a commodity.[34] For example; air and water pollution are ‘negative’ externalities that impose burdens on society and the environment.

A market-based approach to controlling externalities was outlined in Ronald Coase's The Problem of Social Cost (1960).[35] This evolved from an article on the Federal Communications Commission (1959),[36] in which Coase claimed that radio frequency interference is a negative externality that could be controlled by the creation of property rights.

Coase's approach to the management of externalities requires the careful specification of property rights and a set of rules for the initial allocation of the rights.[37] Once this has been achieved, a market mechanism can theoretically manage the externality problem.[38]

E-mail spam

edit

Sending huge numbers of e-mail messages costs spammers very little, since the costs of e-mail messages are spread out over the internet service providers that distribute them (and the recipients who must spend attention dealing with them).[39] Thus, sending out as much spam as possible is a rational strategy: even if only 0.001% of recipients (1 in 100,000) is converted into a sale, a spam campaign can be profitable. Of course, it is very difficult to understand where all the revenue comes from since these businesses are run through proxy servers. However, if they were not profitable, it is reasonable to conclude that they would not be sending spam.[40] Spammers are demanding valuable attention from potential customers, but avoid paying a fair price for this attention due to the current architecture of e-mail systems.[41]

One way this might be mitigated is through the implementation of "Sender Bond" whereby senders are required to post a financial bond that is forfeited if enough recipients report an email as spam.[42]

Closely related is the idea of selling "interrupt rights", or small fees for the right to demand one's attention.[43] The cost of these rights could vary according to the person who is interrupted: interrupt rights for the CEO of a Fortune 500 company would presumably be extraordinarily expensive, while those of a high school student might be lower. Costs could also vary for an individual depending on context, perhaps rising during the busy holiday season and falling during the dog days of summer. Those who are interrupted could decline to collect their fees from friends, family, and other welcome interrupters.[44]

Another idea in this vein is the creation of "attention bonds", small warranties that some information will not be a waste of the recipient's time, placed into escrow at the time of sending.[45] Like the granters of interrupt rights, receivers could cash in their bonds to signal to the sender that a given communication was a waste of their time or elect not to cash them in to signal that more communication would be welcome.[46]

Web spam

edit

As search engines have become a primary means for finding and accessing information on the web, high rankings in the results for certain queries have become valuable commodities, due to the ability of search engines to focus searchers' attention.[47] Like other information systems, web search is vulnerable to pollution: "Because the Web environment contains profit seeking ventures, attention getting strategies evolve in response to search engine algorithms".[48]

Since most major search engines now rely on some form of PageRank (recursive counting of hyperlinks to a site) to determine search result rankings, a gray market in the creation and trading of hyperlinks has emerged.[49][50] Participants in this market engage in a variety of practices known as link spamming, link farming, and reciprocal linking.[51]

Another issue, similar to the issue discussed above of whether or not to consider political e-mail campaigns as spam, is what to do about politically motivated link campaigns or Google bombs.[52] Currently, the major search engines do not treat these as web spam, but this is a decision made unilaterally by private companies.

Sales lead generation

edit

The paid inclusion model, as well as more pervasive advertising networks like Yahoo! Publisher Network and Google's AdSense, work by treating consumer attention as the property of the search engine (in the case of paid inclusion) or the publisher (in the case of advertising networks).[53][54] This is somewhat different from the anti-spam uses of property rights in attention, which treat an individual's attention as his or her own property.

See also

edit


References

edit
  1. ^ a b Burkeman, Oliver (2019-11-22). "'The attention economy is in hyperdrive': how tech shaped the 2010s". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved 2024-07-15.
  2. ^ "The battle for consumers' attention". The Economist. February 9, 2017. ISSN 0013-0613. Retrieved 2024-07-15.
  3. ^ Crawford, Matthew B. (March 31, 2015). "Introduction, Attention as a Cultural Problem". The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction (hardcover) (1st ed.). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. p. 11. ISBN 978-0374292980. In the main currents of psychological research, attention is a resource—a person has only so much of it.
  4. ^ Davenport, Thomas; Beck, John (2001). The Attention Economy: Understanding the New Currency of Business. Cambridge: MA: Harvard Business School Press. ISBN 9781578518715. Retrieved 29 October 2020.
  5. ^ Davenport & Beck 2001, p. 20.
  6. ^ Kiyonaga, Anastasia; Egner, Tobias (12 December 2012). "Working memory as internal attention: Toward an integrative account of internal and external selection processes". Psychonomic Bulletin & Review. 20 (2): 228–242. doi:10.3758/s13423-012-0359-y. PMC 3594067. PMID 23233157.
  7. ^ Shekhar, Shashi; Agrawal, Rohit; Karm V., Arya (2010). "An Architectural Framework of a Crawler for Retrieving Highly Relevant Web Documents by Filtering Replicated Web Collections". 2010 International Conference on Advances in Computer Engineering. pp. 29–33. doi:10.1109/ACE.2010.64. ISBN 978-1-4244-7154-6. S2CID 9388907. Retrieved 29 October 2020.
  8. ^ Brynjolfsson, Erik; Kim, Seon Tae; Oh, Joo Hee (2023-08-31). "The Attention Economy: Measuring the Value of Free Goods on the Internet". Information Systems Research. 35 (3): 978–991. doi:10.1287/isre.2021.0153. ISSN 1047-7047.
  9. ^ Le, Thanh P; Najolia, Gina M; Minor, Kyle S; Cohen, Alex S (2016). "The effect of limited cognitive resources on communication disturbances in serious mental illness". Psychiatry Research. 248 (248): 98–104. doi:10.1016/j.psychres.2016.12.025. PMC 5378554. PMID 28038440.
  10. ^ Franconeri, Steven L; Alvarez, George A; Cavanagh, Patrick (2013). "Flexible cognitive resources: competitive content maps for attention and memory". Trends in Cognitive Sciences. 17 (3): 134–141. doi:10.1016/j.tics.2013.01.010. PMC 5047276. PMID 23428935.
  11. ^ Desimone, R; Duncan, J (1995). "Neural mechanisms of selective visual attention". Annual Review of Neuroscience. 18: 193–222. doi:10.1146/annurev.ne.18.030195.001205. PMID 7605061. S2CID 14290580. Retrieved 30 October 2020.
  12. ^ Christie, S; Schrater, Paul (2015). "Cognitive cost as dynamic allocation of energetic resources". Frontiers in Neuroscience. 9 (9): 289. doi:10.3389/fnins.2015.00289. PMC 4547044. PMID 26379482. S2CID 15545774.
  13. ^ Barrouillet, Pierre; Bernardin, Sophie; Portrat, Sophie; Vergauwe, Evie; Camos, Vale ́rie (2007). "Time and Cognitive Load in Working Memory". Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition. 33 (3): 570–585. doi:10.1037/0278-7393.33.3.570. PMID 17470006. S2CID 2575997.
  14. ^ Simon, Herbert A (1971). Designing Organizations for an Information-rich World. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. pp. 37–52. Archived from the original on 6 October 2020. Retrieved 28 October 2020.
  15. ^ Simon 1971, pp. 40–41.
  16. ^ Simon 1971.
  17. ^ Goldhaber, Michael H (1997). "The attention economy and the Net". First Monday. 2 (4). doi:10.5210/fm.v2i4.519. Archived from the original on 17 August 2000. Retrieved 5 July 2024.
  18. ^ van Krieken, Robert (2019). "Georg Franck's 'The Economy of Attention': Mental capitalism and the struggle for attention". Journal of Sociology. 55 (1): 3–7. doi:10.1177/1440783318812111.
  19. ^ Goldhaber, Michael H. (December 1997). "Attention Shoppers!". Wired. Vol. 5, no. 12. Archived from the original on 7 February 1998. Retrieved 5 July 2024.
  20. ^ Franck, Georg (2018). "The economy of attention". Journal of Sociology. 55 (1): 8–19. doi:10.1177/1440783318811778.
  21. ^ "Why The Social Dilemma is the most important documentary of our times". The Independent. 2020-09-18. Retrieved 2024-07-15.
  22. ^ "In social media's battle for our attention, real connection becomes the casualty". RAPPLER. 2020-11-10. Retrieved 2024-07-15.
  23. ^ Bromwich, Jonah Engel (2019-04-30). "A Manifesto for Opting Out of an Internet-Dominated World". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2024-07-15.
  24. ^ Kelly, Kevin (February 5, 2008). "BETTER THAN FREE". The Edge.
  25. ^ Maier, Christian; Laumer, Sven; Weinert, Christoph (2013). "The Negative Side Of ICT-Enabled Communication: The Case Of Social Interaction Overload In Online Social Networks". ECIS 2013 Completed Research. 86: 1–10. Retrieved 30 October 2020.
  26. ^ Jones, Rodney H.; Hafner, Christoph A. (2012). Understanding Digital Literacies. New York: Routledge. p. 90. ISBN 9780415673167.
  27. ^ Wu, Fang; Huberman, Bernardo (2007). "Novelty and collective attention". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. 104 (45): 17599–17601. arXiv:0704.1158. Bibcode:2007PNAS..10417599W. doi:10.1073/pnas.0704916104. PMC 2077036. PMID 17962416.
  28. ^ Pedrycz, Witold; Chen, Shyi-Ming, eds. (9 December 2013). Social Networks: A Framework of Computational Intelligence. Springer. p. 229. ISBN 978-3-319-02993-1. Retrieved 1 June 2015.
  29. ^ Ullal, Mithun; Hawaldar, Iqbal T (2018). "Influence of advertisement on customers based on AIDA model". Problems and Perspectives in Management. 16 (4): 285–298. doi:10.21511/ppm.16(4).2018.24.
  30. ^ Dolgin, Alexander (2008). The Economics of Symbolic Exchange. Springer. pp. 164–165. ISBN 978-3-540-79883-5. Retrieved 1 June 2015.
  31. ^ Wu, Tim (April 14, 2017). "The Crisis of Attention Theft—Ads That Steal Your Time for Nothing in Return". Wired. Retrieved 9 August 2021.
  32. ^ McFedries, Paul (22 May 2014). "Stop, Attention Thief!". IEEE Spectrum. Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. Retrieved 9 August 2021.
  33. ^ Chipman, John; Guoqiang, Tian (2012). "Detrimental Externalities, Pollution Rights, and the "Coase Theorem"". Economic Theory. 49 (2): 309–327. doi:10.1007/s00199-011-0602-1. JSTOR 41408714. S2CID 30488295. Retrieved 1 November 2020.
  34. ^ Castle, Emery N (1965). "The Market Mechanism, Externalities, and Land Economics". American Journal of Agricultural Economics. 47 (3): 542–556. doi:10.2307/1236272. JSTOR 1236272.
  35. ^ Coase, R.H (1960). "The Problem of Social Cost". Classic Papers in Natural Resource Economics (Gopalakrishnan C. (eds) Classic Papers in Natural Resource Economics ed.). London: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 87–137. doi:10.1057/9780230523210_6. ISBN 978-0-230-52321-0. Retrieved 1 November 2020.
  36. ^ Coase, R. H (1959). "The federal communications commission". The Journal of Law and Economics. 2: 1–40. doi:10.1086/466549. S2CID 222324889. Retrieved 1 November 2020.
  37. ^ Furubotn, E. G.; Pejovich, S (1972). "Property rights and economic theory: a survey of recent literature". Journal of Economic Literature. 10 (4): 1137–1162. JSTOR 2721541. Retrieved 1 November 2020.
  38. ^ Kim, J; Mahoney, J. T. (2005). "Property rights theory, transaction costs theory, and agency theory: an organizational economics approach to strategic management". Managerial and Decision Economics. 26 (4): 223–242. doi:10.1002/mde.1218. Retrieved 1 November 2020.
  39. ^ Park, S. Y.; Kim, J. T.; Kang, S. G. (2006). "Analysis of applicability of traditional spam regulations to VoIP spam". 2006 8th International Conference Advanced Communication Technology. Vol. 2. pp. 3 pp.-1217. doi:10.1109/ICACT.2006.206189. ISBN 89-5519-129-4. S2CID 19059033. Retrieved 1 November 2020.
  40. ^ Kanich, Chris; Kreibich, Christian; Levchenko, Kirill; Enright, Brandon; Voelker, Geoffrey M.; Paxson, Vern; Savage, Stefan (2008). "Spamalytics". Proceedings of the 15th ACM conference on Computer and communications security. Alexandria, Virginia, USA: ACM Press. pp. 3–14. doi:10.1145/1455770.1455774. ISBN 978-1-59593-810-7. S2CID 53111639.
  41. ^ Thomas, K.; Grier, C.; Ma, J.; Paxson, V.; Song, D. (2011). "Design and Evaluation of a Real-Time URL Spam Filtering Service". 2011 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy. pp. 447–462. doi:10.1109/SP.2011.25. ISBN 978-1-4577-0147-4. S2CID 1398765. Retrieved 1 November 2020.
  42. ^ Hoanca, B. (2006). "How good are our weapons in the spam wars?". IEEE Technology and Society Magazine. 25 (1): 22–30. doi:10.1109/MTAS.2006.1607720. S2CID 23623868. Retrieved 1 November 2020.
  43. ^ Fahlman, S. E. (2002). "Selling interrupt rights: A way to control unwanted e-mail and telephone calls". IBM Systems Journal. 41 (4): 759–766. doi:10.1147/sj.414.0759. S2CID 195718575. Retrieved 1 November 2020.
  44. ^ Lueg, C. (2003). "Spam and anti-spam measures: A look at potential impacts". Proc. Informing Science and IT Education Conference: 24–27. Retrieved 1 November 2020.
  45. ^ Loder, T.; Van Alstyne, M.; Wash, R.; Benerorfe, M. (2004). "The spam and attention bond mechanism faq" (PDF). Technical Report, University of Michigan. Retrieved 1 November 2020.
  46. ^ Loder, T.; Van Alstyne, M.; Wash, R. (2006). "An economic response to unsolicited communication". The BE Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy. 6 (1). doi:10.2202/1538-0637.1322. S2CID 154784397. Retrieved 1 November 2020.
  47. ^ Ge, S.; Dou, Z.; Jiang, Z.; Nie, J. Y.; Wen, J. R. (2018). "Personalizing Search Results Using Hierarchical RNN with Query-aware Attention". Proceedings of the 27th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management. Cikm '18. pp. 347–356. arXiv:1908.07600. doi:10.1145/3269206.3271728. ISBN 9781450360142. S2CID 53034987. Retrieved 1 November 2020.
  48. ^ Page, L.; Brin, S.; Motwani, R.; Winograd, T. "The PageRank citation ranking: Bringing order to the web 1999". Stanford InfoLab. Retrieved 1 November 2020.
  49. ^ Zook, M. A.; Graham, M. (2007). "Mapping DigiPlace: geocoded Internet data and the representation of place". Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design. 34 (3): 466–482. Bibcode:2007EnPlB..34..466Z. doi:10.1068/b3311. S2CID 6884167. Retrieved 1 November 2020.
  50. ^ Gonçalves, M. A.; Almeida, J. M.; dos Santos, L. G.; Laender, A. H.; Almeida, V. (2010). "On popularity in the blogosphere". IEEE Internet Computing. 14 (3): 42–49. doi:10.1109/MIC.2010.73. S2CID 11296597. Retrieved 1 November 2020.
  51. ^ Ghosh, S.; Viswanath, B.; Kooti, F.; Sharma, N.K.; Korlam, G.; Benevenuto, F.; Ganguly, N.; Gummadi, K. P. (2012). "Understanding and combating link farming in the twitter social network". Proceedings of the 21st international conference on World Wide Web. WWW '12. pp. 61–70. doi:10.1145/2187836.2187846. ISBN 9781450312295. S2CID 15556648. Retrieved 1 November 2020.
  52. ^ Hargittai, E. (2007). "The social, political, economic, and cultural dimensions of search engines: An introduction". Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. 12 (3): 769–777. doi:10.1111/j.1083-6101.2007.00349.x.
  53. ^ Weideman, Melius (2004). Ethical issues on content distribution to digital consumers via paid placement as opposed to website visibility in search engine results. Greece: University of the Aegean. ISBN 960-7475-25-9. Retrieved 1 November 2020.
  54. ^ Moss, Kenneth A.; Watson, Eric; Seidman, Eytan D. "Paid inclusion listing enhancement 2011" (PDF). U.S. Patent No. 7,953,631. Retrieved 1 November 2020.

Further reading

edit
edit
 
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Attention economy.
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Attention_economy&oldid=1249684426"