Frequent claims that “free services” provided by internet
and technology companies are an unalloyed benefit for consumers often ignore a
fundamental truth:
“Facebook promotes
video, plays publisher-generated content up or down in relation to
user-generated content, and tinkers continually with the algorithm that
determines what appears on its News Feed; it does this not out of any inherent
high- or low-mindedness, but in an effort to harvest an ever greater quantity
of our time. If the written word happens to fall out of favor, or if journalism
becomes economically unworkable as a consequence, these results, so far as
Facebook is concerned, are unintentional. They’re merely collateral damage from
the relentless expansion of the most powerful attention-capture machine ever
built.
The economist
Herbert A. Simon first developed the concept of an attention economy in a 1971
essay. Taking note of the new phenomenon of “information overload,” Simon
pointed out something that now seems obvious—that “a wealth of information
creates a poverty of attention.” In recent years, thinking about attention as a
scarce resource has come into vogue as a way to appraise the human and
psychological impact of digital and social media.”