What Is Attention Economy and How to Avoid It

The driving force of the industrial age was oil, but the driving force of the digital age is now something far more valuable: your attention.

Companies around the world are trying to capture and monetise your attention. This is quite different from the services offered on websites like fortunica casino: there’s an economy built on your attention, and you are both the source of revenue and the consumer of this system.

So, what exactly is the attention economy, and how does it work? More importantly, how can you protect yourself from it? Here, we’ll try to answer all these questions.

What Is the Attention Economy?

The attention economy, in its simplest form, is built on capturing and holding users’ attention and consists of products and services offered for this purpose. It targets users’ cognitive resources: their time and attention. It’s quite successful in this regard, as our daily lives are almost entirely built on this economy.

The smartphone in your pocket causes your life to revolve around social media, push notifications, on-demand content, ads, and videos. All of these serve the purpose of capturing and monetising your attention.

Why Attention Became So Valuable?

You might be wondering why human attention is so important and worth building an economy around. There are actually several reasons for this.

Human attention isn’t infinite; it has limits. And like anything finite, it’s valuable: there aren’t many things you can focus your attention on in a 24-hour day, and stealing even a minute of that time can be incredibly valuable.
There are advertising platforms built on human attention. On platforms like Facebook, Google, and TikTok, ad revenue is based on viewing time. Every video you focus your attention on generates more money for these platforms.
How you focus your attention is also important: everything you tap, scroll, click, watch, and comment on is used to create a behavioral profile. These profiles are sold to advertising companies for quite big amounts and used in algorithms that will choose the next thing to capture your attention.

So, even if you’re getting a product or service for free, you’re actually paying a price: your time. And your time is much more valuable than you think.

Tactics Companies Use to Drill for Attention

Tactics used to steal your time can be incredibly subtle: you often don’t even realise you’re the target of one. Common examples include:

Endless scrolling and auto-play: On platforms like TikTok, new content automatically loads as you scroll. You move from one clip to the next almost instantly, and you’ll quickly find something that piques your interest. This is a tactic used to eliminate natural stopping cues and increase your viewing time.
Personalised feeds and algorithms: As mentioned above, your behavioral profile is used by algorithms to determine what to recommend next. You’ll most often see this practice on video content platforms like YouTube, but other platforms like X do the same: they encourage you to spend more time viewing engaging content.
Notification engineering: Your smartphone’s push notifications also utilise these algorithms. Your installed apps know when to display a notification because they track your active hours. Notification content is also a product of engineering, as it’s always engaging or built on fear of missing out (FOMO).
Gamification: You often don’t realise this technique is being used, but your brain does. Things like achievements, virtual badges, points, and progress bars trigger dopamine (the happiness hormone) in your brain, just like games do. After a while, you’ll want to return to that product or service without even realising it.

These techniques, and the attention economy they build upon, can be detrimental to your mental health, fostering biased ideas by creating echo chambers and reducing your productivity by constantly stealing your time. So, is there anything you can do about it?

Reclaiming Your Attention

The truth is, it’s impossible to completely escape the attention economy, as modern life is largely based on it. However, you can minimise its impact on you. To that end, we recommend the following:

Mindful technology use: Establish tech-free periods in your daily life and avoid technological devices &disable all push notifications during these periods.
Digital well-being tools: Use this economy to your advantage: use apps that track your screen time and set limits.
Intentional content diet: Stop feeding the algorithm. Instead of following content that creates anxiety, fear, or excitement, focus on high-quality, long-form content.

Once again, you can’t completely eliminate the effects of the attention economy: everything you do on your PC, laptop, or smartphone will continue to feed it.

Furthermore, it’s now very difficult for modern people to go about their daily lives without these devices. But even with these simple tips, you can reduce its impact on you.