Note: we will run a series on attention economy because we think it’s a very important concept to understand for the average internet citizen. It also helps understanding why we design what we design

According to Wikipedia, attention economy, or attention economics, as it was first known, 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.”[1]

It can also be described as “a marketplace where consumers agree to receive services in exchange for their attention.” This includes personalized news (such as news feeds,) personalized search (such as Google,) and alerts and recommendations to buy (such as Amazon.)[2]

The basic concept is that an economy develops around a scarce resource. This resource may have been food, energy, or information in the past. Agriculture, industrial revolution, and telecommunications (mainly internet) displaced what was the key scarce resource. However, in current internet-saavy societies, information is no longer scarce: there is plenty of it. The problem is mostly which information is worth our time attention, or trust. The issue of what information to trust and how people judge how trustworthy each piece of information is online is a whole other interesting topic. In this report we will focus on the birth of the attention age or the attention economy, and how it affects the average person online.

There are two main uses of the term ’attention economy’. We will call them the strong hypothesis and the weak hypothesis. The strong hypothesis is that "attention transactions" will replace financial transactions as the focus of our economic system (Goldhaber 1997, Frank, 1999)[3][4]. The weak hypothesis is a lot less pretentious in its claims: managing attention is better than managing other resources such as time and effort. The book by Davenport and Beck (2001)[5] is a good example of the weak hypothesis. It is important to decide which of these two hypotheses you want to operate with, since the strategy you use will be completely different. In this post series on attention economy, we will use the strong hypothesis.

Whether you are an end user of the media, a content producer, a marketer or a business man, you need to start thinking about the value of your attention and that of the people you interact with (your peers, your prospects, and your clients).

Herbert Simon is often credited with being the first person to describe what attention economics is – that a wealth of information leads to a dearth of attention due to the fact that there is so much information out there and only so much attention that can be given to information, and the idea behind rationalizing how much attention any one information source receives.[6]

Golhaber (1997) seminal paper (on an online peer reviewed journal) is however the crucial turning point for this idea. This article presents the strong hypothesis and its consequences. In what follows we will try to introduce the idea of attention economy, mostly from Goldhaber’s point of view and how some popular pages implemented attention technology. Goldhaber has been preparing a book for the last 10 years, and he blogs prolifically.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_economy

[2] http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/attention_economy_primer.php

[3] http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue2_4/goldhaber/

[4] http://www.heise.de/tp/r4/artikel/5/5567/1.html

[5] Davenport, T.H., Beck, J. C. (2001) Attention Economy. Harvard Business School press, Boston, MA

[6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_economy#CITEREFSimon1971