The Value of Your Attention

A long time ago, before the printing press, the only ways people could exchange ideas were through spoken word and painstakingly transcribed books. The printing press allowed people’s ideas to flow much more freely. Except that people’s ideas only flowed as long as they had access to a printing press and money to pay for its use. Later on, radio and TV entered the scene. They created an entirely new way to transmit ideas, news, and entertainment. You know, if you owned a broadcast station, had a license to transmit on a particular frequency, and employed enough people to run the station.

Finally, the Internet came onto the scene, and it demonstrated the potential for something different. Unlike print, radio, and TV, the Internet is much less centralized. Older means of transmitting ideas were “broadcasts”: controlled by the few and sent to the many. The Internet leveled the playing field significantly. On the Internet, anyone can broadcast their own ideas through Tweets, Facebook, blogs, etc. Any journalism site can publish articles, not just the ones with the resources to broadcast their ideas.

And you know what? It kinda stinks. Don’t get me wrong, the old way wasn’t ideal, but the new way stinks in its own way. If information were like water, then we went from drinking from a water fountain of questionable quality, to attempting to get a drink out of a fire hose going full blast.

And it’s not just the quantity of information that is different. It’s also the distribution. Decentralization is great for empowering anyone to write their thoughts. But people can’t find every decentralized source of information; they want a few central sources of information they can easily peruse. So we came up with ways to gather up “the best of the web.” Social networks and content aggregators sprung up to fill this void. Some depend on people submitting and voting on content. Others depend on sharing content through the social network.

No matter how these sites work, pretty much all of them share the same problem: they can be pretty easily manipulated. It could be the money of advertisers, or the opinions of your friends. It might be clickbait titles, or the demographics of a site’s users. It may be swarms of computers voting on articles and being controlled by a single person. No matter what, these sources of information are being manipulated by all sorts of people. They’re battling over a single resource: your attention.

People want your attention because it’s money. Attention wins elections and builds fortune. Attention wins clicks. Clicks get ad revenue. Advertisements bring increased sales. I want your attention because, well, I have opinions. I enjoy writing my thoughts, I enjoy people reading them, and I especially enjoy when interesting conversation results from it. But the bottom line is, everybody wants your attention.

If I still have your attention right now, I hope you realize how valuable it really is. It’s time out of your day, and revenue to all sorts of people. Every message that comes to you over the Internet has some amount of subtext and some amount of motive behind it. So I hope that you spend your attention as if it were money: very carefully.

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