Week 7: Attention Economy

<aside> 💡 Since advertising is the backbone of the attention economy, it’s important to note that the early history of advertising has its roots in late nineteenth-century capitalism as noted in Chapter 2 of The Attention Merchants. “For patent medicine, this translated into too great a fraud, too much profit, too much damage to public health.” Many technological innovations and advertising evolutions have happened alongside each other since then that have brought us to the attention economy we know today but the same capitalist incentives are still baked in.

Subprime Attention Crisis “investigates the fascinating connections between the finance industry and the evolution of the modern programmatic advertising ecosystem.” Not only are corporations selling and buying our attention, but it has turned consumers into content creators or what I’d like to call attention laborers. While reading Chapter 24, “ The Importance of Being Microfamous”, from The Attention Merchants, I couldn’t help but think about the current protests in Iran - I’m sure a far cry from the influencer image that the chapter was referencing. I recently came across an activist’s post about a massacre at Sharif University with a plea to keep sharing the post so it could gather more attention. If the attention economy sees us as content laborers, are some more privileged than others?

Tufekci’s “It's the (Democracy-Poisoning) Golden Age of Free Speech” summarizes the complicated use of social media and the Internet. While the attention economy disproportionately favors messages of “authoritarianism, propaganda, misinformation, and polarization,” in the past, marginalized voices had a hard time reaching a mass audience at all.” Just like patent medicine, the economy has “translated into too great a fraud, too much profit, too much damage to public health” (The Attention Merchants).

If history truly repeats itself, then it’s time that government intervenes. Understandably, what makes the attention economy difficult to comprehend is the fact that it’s a complicated invisible system that evolves more quickly than government can put forth regulations. There needs to be more proactive and productive discussions between technology and data ethics experts and elected officials.

Then again, this is a very American problem. Looking forward to the other units covering other countries and how they confront technology ethical issues.

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