“Attention is a resource—a person has only so much of it.” -Matthew Crawford
Squirrel
As the car moves down the road, you see the sign for a new restaurant you’ve been wanting to try. Out comes the phone to text your friend about going to dinner tonight. As you unlock your phone your eyes subconsciously scan the notification bar. You have a new email. Instinctively, your thumb rolls down your notification bar and clicks on the email notification. It’s an email from a website you recently visited and entered your email address into. As you scroll down your eye catches a link to an amazon product that sounds interesting. Your thumb naturally touches the link, bringing you to a product page on Amazon. It’s a Prime item and has 4.7 stars and 389 reviews.
Two days later as you walk up to your front door, you nearly trip over an unexpected Amazon box. What possibly could this be? Out comes that random $30 product.
Why? What happened between setting up dinner with your friend and purchasing an unneeded product?
Attention hijacking.
Through the Ages
Modern America was built on the industrial age, where industry was dominated by efficiently producing materials and manufacturing products. Henry Ford became famous for producing the “everyman car” as well as inventing the assembly line. Business magnates such as John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie built the oil and steel industries that exist today.
Then, as computers became relevant, we transitioned into the information age. With the domination of companies such as Apple, Microsoft, Google, Facebook and Amazon, information became valuable. He who holds the most information wins.
But we are approaching a new age. One that goes beyond the information. The Attention Age is approaching.
Knowledge is Power
While we are still in the information age, many economists believe the end is near. Just as industry is still relevant in the information age, information will be relevant as we transition to the Attention Age. But why is the information age coming to a close?
As Wired.com put it, “All this talk of “big data” feels like an attempt to strain a few more drops of juice out of an already-squeezed orange.” A colossal amount of data has been collected, and there is plenty more to come. But we have reached a critical mass, a point where the return on information gathering is not greater than the effort spent. This drives a shift, just as industry reached a critical mass where it had become so efficient, that the only thing to make it more efficient was to shift.
Attention Commodity
What is the attention age? Companies like Facebook and Google make copious amounts of money through their ability to manipulate information to grab attention. This happens in the form of pointed advertisements. A company pays Facebook to present relevant ads to users. Facebook uses information it has about its users, their preferences and behavior, and presents ads to the users most likely to be interested in that particular ad.
The information age is all about gathering, storing and using information. The attention age is about capturing focus.
What happened when you pulled out the phone to text a friend? Your attention was grabbed by the notification bar.
Your intent was to send a text. Your attention was hijacked.
The point of the email was to sell you something. They used the information they had gathered on you (your email address that you voluntarily gave). It had an “attention grabber” headline, which is why you opened it. The entire email was designed to get you to click on any one of the many affiliate links. It worked.
Amazon employees spend thousands of hours testing what product page formats and information displays prompt visitors to buy with the highest frequency. Amazon succeeded in keeping your attention long enough for you to click “Order”.
But How?
What are the implications of the approaching Attention Age?
Throughout the information age, security of personal data has become a major issue. Who “owns” personal information? Is it the person, or the company who has gathered and stored it?
The information age began as computers presented the ability to rapidly acquire, store and deploy information. Personal data security became a concern only after tech mongols already “owned” the data.
We now know how important it is to be careful about where we put our personal information.
Likewise with the Attention Age, we won’t realize or respect the value of our attention until it has been nearly all compromised. This is already happening. With the advent of cell phones, it is now simple to become engrossed in the Instagram feed while waiting in line at the grocery store.
Tech companies and social media platforms make their money by capturing and keeping our attention. YouTube analyzes statistics on the average watch time of each video. They actively develop ways to increase average watchtime. The videos that reach the home page are the ones with the longest average watch time. It is in their best interest to keep you watching for as long as possible. When is the last time you went on an unintentional YouTube watching rabbit trail? It happens to me all the time with SNL skits. 45 minutes later you come to and realize you just spent the last hour on YouTube when you meant to be working out.
Think Differently
Developing the ability to control your attention in a world with increasingly invasive distractions is critical. Leaders, you must take back your time. Is your job to attend meetings all day at the whim of everyone else, or is it to be visionaries of your organization? Own your time. Spend it where it has the highest return.
References
- https://www.wired.com/insights/2014/06/beyond-information-age/
- https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/you-think-were-still-age-information-again-mike-doria/
- Crawford, Matthew B. (March 31, 2015). “Introduction, Attention as a Cultural Problem”. The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction (hardcover) (1st ed.). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. p. 11. ISBN 978-0374292980. “In the main currents of psychological research, attention is a resource—a person has only so much of it.”
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_Age
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_economy
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imagination_age
- https://humanetech.com/
- https://jamesclear.com/
