The Inner Workings of Attention Economy
The Role of Smartphones in Attention Economy
Advertising is one of the most prominent direct methods still employed that strives to capture our attention. An advert is similar to the shout of a vendor at an open market, where it isn’t just the medium of a billboard or video that is used, but the voice. So in a world where many can publish adverts, corporations can either pay more to gain areas with more public reach and higher attention priority, or they may resort to using other forms of media and locations that can reach potential consumers.
Resorting to advertising in other locations however may not always be deemed acceptable by most, and would be classified as a form of information pollution. This happens with email spam, where the platform is targeted and used as a potential advertising area as opposed to one of personal communication. The cost of advertising through email is effectively negligible due to being able to send as many emails as one desires, but the cost is paid on the end of the receiver which pays with their attention. This makes it a profitable system due to its lossless nature, where it takes no cost to send spam, and even a minute percentage of successful emails will result in a profit. However, email filters may intercept such spam, and quickly dissolve any possible reputation to be earned by the receiver.
Similar to email spam is Web spam, since search engines are also part of a business structure that leads to financial gain, some may attempt to gain the most attention. This could be achieved through misuse of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) techniques, where the rank of a website is artificially increased through the addition of hyperlinks (Ghosh et al., 2012). This might be perceived as information pollution due to the false traffic that does not represent the actual ranking standpoint of a website.
A digital culture expert Kevin Kelly (2008), describes the internet as a repository of copies of information, that once they enter the system they will never leave. The digital economy is described as working on this flow of copies, that are free unlike reproduced copies in the tangible world. He goes on to argue that when free copies are abundant, what can’t be copied for free results in becoming rare. Furthermore, something such as trust or a relationship is something that cannot be reproduced, and is an intangible entity that increases in value in our system full of copies.
Kelly also notes a number of these intangible generatives that cannot be reproduced at any price, such as; immediacy, personalisation, interpretation, authenticity, accessibility, embodiment, patronage, and findability. He calls them generatives as they require to be nurtured and grown, ultimately requiring time and are not possible to copy, hence giving them a unique nature.
In all of this, there are various tools that aid in attention economy. The smartphone today is still going strong as a personal item that many find comfortable using, and often unable to live without. Thus it is an item that gains our attention, and any content providers that have capitalised on that attention with our subscriptions and customisations, have a priority queue when providing new content. This linking action that occurs when smartphones are quickly replaced by new ones, creates a perfect system for corporations to harness attention for prolonged amounts of time.
References:
Ghosh, S., Viswanath, B., Kooti, F., Sharma, N.K., Korlam, G., Benevenuto, F., Ganguly, N., & Gummadi, K. P. (2012). “Understanding and combating link farming in the twitter social network”. Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on World Wide Web, 61–70. https://doi.org/10.1145/2187836.2187846
Kelly, K. (2008). Better than free. Edge. https://www.edge.org/conversation/better-than-free
This blog is a project for Study Unit DGA3008, University of Malta.
