The Attention Economy — Currency of Our Time
A critical overview of the mechanisms shaping the Internet
Introduction
In an information-rich world, the abundance of information leads to the shortage of another resource: scarcity becomes what information consumes. What information consumes is obvious enough: it’s the attention of its recipients. Hence, an abundance of information creates a scarcity of attention, and the need to distribute that attention efficiently among the superabundance of information sources that can consume it.
This is how Simon Herbert, economist, and artificial intelligence researcher, anticipated in 1971 what is now known as the Attention Economy [1].
The Internet of the 21st century is characterized by social networks, video, and audio streaming platforms, and online games that operate on this economic model. It’s important to remember, however, that the GAFAMs that dominate the attention economy haven’t always operated this way. There was a time when Google refused to allow advertising on its search engine and Facebook forbade tracking of its users!
How did the Internet switch to this new model? What does it imply for society as a whole?
Personal data as sources of value
In concrete terms, the GAFAM model consists of considering the collection of users’ online activity as a resource, enabling the optimization of the advertising that will be presented to them.
The question of attention is at both ends of the chain.
- Keeping users on the platforms and capturing their attention.
- Ultimately serve them advertising content specially adapted for them and presented as more effective than traditional content.
This model is more than viable: 80% of Google’s revenues come from advertising, and it’s almost 99% for Facebook [2] (2018).
The choice of this business model, although initially designed to keep the user on the platform, has become entrenched in the dynamics of internet development, and we can see its harmful consequences today: polarization of opinions, user surveillance, loss of attention and concentration, and addiction to notifications and phones.
If, at the outset, the personal data collected was used solely to personalize advertisements, it has gradually evolved for another purpose: to personalize the platform in question.
The first to understand this has not been forgotten — far from it!
Among the sites using the attention economy as the basis of their model since the early 2000s are Google and Facebook.
- In 2004, Larry Page gave a conference to promote AdSense, Google’s new system designed to “make our ads useful, not just annoying”.
- Sean Parker, Facebook’s president in 2004, later said in an interview that the site had been designed around the question of “how to consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible” [3].
A shot of dopamine
But Facebook wasn’t just a forerunner in this respect. They also helped to democratize what today causes a loss of concentration and, for some, even an addiction. In the same interview with Sean Parker, he explains that in order to consume as much of the user’s time as possible, they need to be injected with “a little shot of dopamine from time to time”, through a notification.
These words are backed up by psychological research. Multiple studies show that receiving a notification has the same impact as a drug — that feeling of social validation which then pushes you to produce more content in order to repeat the experience [3]. It goes even further than that — the expectation of reward when you post something leads to a lack of inhibition, which translates into difficulty in not acting on impulse and constitutes the central deficit in attention disorders.
Sean Parker explains this with a smile on his face, proud of what he has created, which he describes as “the kind of thing a hacker like me could invent because we exploit a vulnerability in human psychology”. And while you might think he couldn’t be more Machiavellian, he still manages to surprise us by adding “We, the creators, the inventors, that’s Mark (Zuckerberg) and I, we consciously understood that, and we did it anyway”.
Words of repentance
However, not all the genius creators who have shaped the way a significant part of today’s society works were ill-intentioned.
The creator of Facebook’s “Like” button, Justin Rosenstein, explains in the Netflix-produced documentary “The Social Dilemma”:
“When we created the “Like” button, our motivation was: can we spread positivity and love in the world? The idea that has emerged today that teenagers would become depressed when they don’t get enough likes, or that this would lead to political polarization, was nowhere on our radar.” [4]
Although this sounds like something Zuckerberg might say when he is heard by the US Congress, Justin now lives away from social networks and keeps his internet use to a strict minimum. He is also involved in a number of projects designed to educate users about the dangers of social networking and the internet, as are several of his former colleagues who have also changed their tune following the evolution of their creation.
Should we listen to the repentant? When you see that these former employees of these major groups are now playing a different role, on the side of the users, you might well wonder whether we’re giving a voice to the right people. After all, people like Tristan Harris, former design ethicist at Google, write articles for major newspapers, travel all over the world to give TED talks and seminars, and thousands of people turn out to hear their homilies.
Journalists have dubbed this type of character the Prodigal Tech Bro.
This character systematically undergoes a kind of religious awakening. He suddenly sees his former employer as toxic and reinvents himself as an expert at taming tech giants. A redemption that doesn’t convince Maria Farrell, a journalist The Conversationalist from which I quoted the previous description and the following. The prodigal Tech Bro had lost his way but has now found it again. He is warmly welcomed at the center of our discussions. The real problem here is that many exhausted activists who haven’t taken any money from Google or Facebook don’t have even a quarter of the attention, status, and authority that these prodigals consider their birthright [5].
But, in their place, wouldn’t we do the same thing? Why would anyone do the right thing from the start “when he can take the money, have a good time, and then, when the wind changes, convert his status and relative wealth into special pleading and a whole new career?” [5]
Tristan Harris launched an association in early 2018, the “Center for Humane Technology” with other ex-workers from the Google and Facebook empires. Their aim is to raise awareness among technology professionals, as well as ordinary citizens, of the influence new technologies have on their lives, attention, and privacy. The association also aims to weigh in against GAFAM, notably on the political stage by lobbying the US Senate. The greatest concern of these professionals seems to be for future generations, their children who will be potential victims of these abuses. They denounce, for example, the dangerous exposure of children on Youtube Kids [6], and the development of an addiction to likes, notifications, and so on.
Act in your own way
If you want to do something about it yourself, you can use an adblocker to avoid monetizing your attention on the content you don’t support.
If you want to see the scale of things, you can also install the Ghostery extension on your browsers to display the number of tools used by a site to harvest data about you [7]. Finally, as you should already be doing, remember to turn off as many notifications as possible when you need to concentrate on a task.
But make no mistake! These solutions should be seen for what they are. They don’t change the architecture of the attention economy, and that’s where the limits of these individual solutions lie. Moreover, the problem with them is that we’re playing a bit of a cat-and-mouse game. Advertising and platforms are adapting to attract our attention, and we’re likely to see more and more ads integrated into content.
Is the solution a matter of individual ethics or digital hygiene? Or is the attention economy a matter of collective political choice? I’ll let you think about it on your own!
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References
[1] H. A. Simon, “Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World,” in Martin Greenberger, Computers, Communication, and the Public Interest, Johns Hopkins Press, 1971, pp. 40–41.
[2] Stupid Economics, “L’économie de l‘attention : le commencement”, Youtube, 20 juin 2018 (https://youtu.be/rMV1WaWGb3I?t=402)
[3] Interview of Sean Parker “Facebook is ripping apart society”, Youtube, (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J54k7WrbfMg)
[4] Netflix’s documentary “The Social Dillema” https://www.thesocialdilemma.com/
[5] Maria Farell, “The prodigal TechBro”, The Conversationalist, 2020, https://conversationalist.org/2020/03/05/the-prodigal-techbro/
[6] Ramos Tommy, Lebrun Mathilde, Schwaiger Sarah, “L’enfer du Youtube pour enfants”, ACID, 2, 2021.
[7] Camille Gruhier, “Données personnelles — Prise en main d’un anti-traceur pour naviguer sans être pisté”, https://www.quechoisir.org/conseils-donnees-personnelles-prise-en-main-d-un-anti-traceur-pour-naviguer-sans-etre-piste-n6909/
