THE ECONOMY OF ATTENTION

[bitheerani319]

We may think that the economy is based on matter and energy as it has been named since the industrial revolution, as if the interpretation of the nature of this industrial society was based on the means of production. But since the 20th century, the great economists were already pointing out how the whole society was based not on capital, natural resources, or work, but on knowledge. If there is knowledge, the other factors of production can be obtained; knowledge becomes useful in order to obtain economic results.

The economy had to adapt to the fact that the most precious dominican republic phone number list in the world was something immaterial, so the customs, rules, and skills to be able to capture, preserve, discover, and exploit information are now the most important things, as Walter Wriston, the former president of Citybank, said. The problem with the information resource is that instead of being scarce, it is excessively abundant, which results in a shortage of what consumes it, that is, attention . Human attention is what gives meaning to information, what converts “data” into “information.” But given the abundance and accessibility of information, a conceptual shift is taking place that now considers that information is that subject that competes for human attention. Of course, it is not really a subject that consumes because it lacks consciousness.

Attention economy
However, thanks to this shift, the concept of attention economy is born, where attention is a good, which, through the quantification and efficient management of exposure to advertising content, generates economic resources, through marketing to third parties. In other words, attention is the new currency, which, in any case, once it has been created, the message manifests itself in an independent way and that is why we consider information as a subject that competes for access to human attention.

We can illustrate this more easily by asking ourselves: How much time do we spend on digital platforms or social networks? When you wake up or are working and a notification sounds on your cell phone, how long do you stay hooked? People's attention is framed within the limited daily time of 24 hours a day, plus the capacity that each person has to stay focused on what is being consumed. And since we have more free time than people in the last century, we go through the syndrome of immediacy, that is, we want the information to be fast and precise so that it does not take us a long time to understand it, which makes it increasingly difficult to keep the attention of users on something, consequently, for the economy it becomes a search through Big Data to know how to retain and get people's attention to last much longer. The longer the attention span, the more likely we are to buy or consume the product that is being offered to us. Attention equals winning.

The digital world, and especially social media, understood all of the above very well. To this end, they turned these platforms into another habit, so many of them have “autoplay” options in which you can immediately watch a video or a chapter of a series as soon as the one you were watching ends, or the “scroll” in which it continues loading or you slide to continue viewing content or photos endlessly. But behind all of this there are psychological studies that address the main ingredient of this attention economy, which is nothing more than the chemical produced by our brain called dopamine, which gives us the feeling of pleasure or happiness. This means that these platforms work the same as drugs, since little by little we look for more content that makes us feel those sensations. So most everyday things, like eating or working, are done at the same time as looking at the cell phone screen.

These social networks use the financing model that is currently in fashion, which is advertising financing, which was already done in traditional media such as radio or television, but which is now also based on selling information to companies to transform it into guaranteed consumer content. In short, since we do not pay anything to consume these social networks or platforms, we are the product that the economy consumes.