Welcome to Attention Economy!

Magic behind PAYING attention

PAUSE for a Second.

Pay Attention!- is one of the word combinations that we use very often in our daily lives, however not many people think about the actual meaning: Here the word attention is considered as a source of payment.

Daily, anywhere we go, we are bombarded with tremendous amounts of information and paying attention to every single detail is challenging. We get distracted by devices, news and various media channels in order to acquire desired or undesired information. Have you ever thought about why tiny bubbles are rippling on a screen after you send a text? or why does Youtube autoplay the next video with a countdown?

We are now living in a new era called the Attention Economy!

What is an Attention Economy?

The term Attention Economy was first presented by psychologist and economist Herber A. Simon. As economy is the allocation of scarce resources, he stated that in the age of information, the scarce resource is the attention and we need to allocate that attention efficiently overabundance of information resources.

Modern technologies have fastened information transmission and there is a surplus of it already and even more and more information is flowing and being created. Companies are targeting our attention to make money and increase their profits.

How much can you handle?

The statistics show the information created every minute of the day.

Due to abundance of information, this scarcity of attention is becoming a new challenge for today’s businesses because they are no longer competing only with their peers but fighting with everyone else for getting user attention.

Why are we so addicted to it?

No one ever plans that they will spend 5 hours on social media daily, but they end up doing it as we grab our phones unconsciously a lot of times a day.

Why do we check our phones?

In psychological terms, seeing notifications brings rewarding stimuli. Studies show that likes, retweets, sounds and shares cause the same kind of brain reaction as they would get with the drugs. By using social media, people have the same kind of addiction and the level of dopamine rises, which brings instant happiness to people.

Every like button, the hearts, the retweets, the perfect notification sounds, the endless news feeds and the auto-play features all serve as an endless flow of rewarding stimuli with one goal in mind, to get you hooked and keep coming back for more.

Paying with Money vs Paying with Attention

We do not often realize the value of our attention unless we spend 4 hours on social media and are left out with the feeling of unsatisfaction with ourselves.

Carl Richards, once offered an interesting idea that every time we decide to check social media, ask ourselves if I had to pay 20$ to do this would I still do it?

We consider certain things to be free, however things require our attention and it is kind of payment, exchanging opportunity vs other opportunity.