Economics is the study of how scarce resources are allocated; whether that is housing, food, or money. However, in an era of endless amounts of information at the hands of our fingertips, what is the scarcity? Unlike the first three examples that can be empirically quantified and measured, our intangible yet extremely valuable attention is the limiting factor: we are in the age of the attention economy.
The American Psychological Association defines attention as “a state in which cognitive resources are focused on certain aspects of the environment rather than on others.” Attention comes in many forms: love, recognition, obedience, and help. Although theoretically unquantifiable, many derive attention’s value from how much time we focus on a particular thing. We face attention’s scarcity every day; while “paying attention” to one thing we ignore others. Similar to money, we exchange attention; you are reading this article right now and probably ignoring the other work you have to do (sorry for bringing that up).
The term “attention economy” was coined by psychologist, economist, and Nobel Laureate Herbert A. Simon, who posited that attention was the “bottleneck of human thought”
— source econreview.studentorg.berkeley.edu | Mar 31, 2020