The Service of Technology, Pt. Two

Joseph Syverson
4 min readAug 6, 2019

Wikipedia says, “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.

The origin of the idea has been traced to Herbert A Simon, who in 1971 described the the dynamics in familiar economic terms: “[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.”

Since the advent of the printing press in the Fifteenth Century, the amount of information available has increased at an accelerating rate. The Nineteenth Century brought three information-augmenting technologies into commercial use beginning with the radio, then the television, and finally the computer. All the while, the efficiency of these three and printing techniques improved to create more information than any individual or collective could possibly consume.

Knowledge of information’s abundance and the scarcity of attention is the impetus of many notable web applications, which otherwise would not have product to sell.

The popularization of the term “attention economy” has been attributed to Thomas H. Davenport and J. C. Beck. They defined attention as the “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.”

But, why is attention valuable to begin with? Anything without value is not given value by virtue of scarcity alone.

The attention acts a filter to apprehend and retain what is deemed the most important information of an otherwise unlimited set of undifferentiated facts. Based on our values, guided by pleasure, pain or some higher purpose, we tap our ability to pay attention when we’re learning, working and loving. Without this faculty, we would have no say as to what we remember and no consistent knowledge-base upon which to maintain our society, technology, or selves, let alone make new things. Attention is the very root of informed action and thus the first object of classical advertising. The acronym “AIDA” refers to a standard sequence of mental events that lead a person to act. In order to act, one must desire and in order to desire, one must express interest. There is no interest without attention. So any company seeking a buy-action ought to value attention quite highly.

We can trace the revenue of many “social media” companies to this commodity. One of Google’s former product strategists, James Williams, describes attention as the commodity that our technology now competes for. Physical devices and the applications loaded onto them serve as agents meant to harvest their user’s attention. Here’s how:

  • Tracking clicks, cookies and the associated data with them
  • Colorful, animated buttons and delightful pings
  • Likes and share buttons
  • Appealing to fear and rage
  • Click-bait headlines (“You Won’t Believe…”, “How to [do something for which there is no scientifically proven method of achieving]”, “… with This Simple Trick [… which there is probably no scientifically proven method of achieving]”)
  • Making off buttons and account cancellations inaccessible and on buttons a default (E G, autoplay, infinite scroll, email updates)

The benefit of using attention-harvesting methods is that they remove the labor of sorting through irrelevant information. They pay attention for us. The problem with these techniques is that they deprive the user of choice by limiting the scope of information the user has access to.

Assuming that humans are completely rational agents, as the economist Adam Smith did, we can suppose that filtering information for people instead of allowing them to choose will not inhibit their ability to distinguish between what was chosen for them and what’s actually right for them. So the ubiquitous features above could not possibly harm us. However, we wouldn’t need information filtered for us if we could, in any case, make the right decision about which information we wanted access to. Tech companies large and small nevertheless pursue an agenda that controls the flow of data.

In a talk entitled, “Are Digital Technologies Making Politics Impossible?”, James Williams explains why: businesses employ technology to direct our attention to their goals, which usually are quite different than our own. He uses spending time with family or learning to play an instrument as wholesome goals we might call our own. Maximizing the amount of clicks, scrolls, or time someone spends on a tech company’s app are not. However, these are the goals of the perhaps misnamed “social media” company, which does not actually sell social media, but our attention and related data.

Rather than some large-scale conspiracy, these strategies hide in plane view. The C E O of Netfix, Reed Hastings had this to say about the strategy: “At Netflix, we are competing for our customers’ time, so our competitors include Snapchat, Youtube, sleep, etc.” Although the comment may have been said in jest, it is not actually a joke. The more time we spend achieving the goals of technology, the less time we spend achieving our own. Williams insists that’s not what technology is for, though — it’s for helping us achieve our goals, not theirs.

Williams’s analysis of technology agrees with John Roberts’s (see Part One of this series), but as a statement of value only. Yes, technology should help us to achieve our goals, or to use Robert’s terminology, grant us more “choices”. But as a statement of fact, there is a wider gap. Regardless of technology’s supposed purpose, the opposite is actually occurring. The case instead demonstrates Heidegger’ diagnosis (see Part One), at least in the instance of information technology and the attention economy.

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