What is the first thing you do when you wake up? Do you look at the mobile? This appliance is capturing your attention early in the day. And now think: why do you stop at one news and not another? Why do you share content from one contact and not from another on your social networks?
Access to information increaseswe suffer from ‘infoxication’ and, given this, companies -and more and more individuals- focus on the generation, management and distribution of content on the Internet considering the attention as a rare commodity, and trying to monetize it. That’s what we call attention economy.
This term, included in the book by Thomas H. Davenport and JC Beck’The Attention Economy’was picked up by Michael Goldhaber, who alluded to the care transactions as financial substitutes. The attention economy Thus, it refers to the limited capacity of people to capture information, which is why it is necessary to carry a filter to receive and process it. Our attention, therefore, is not infinite. We have more and more access to more information, and yet our capacity of attention does not increase.
“Have you ever counted the number of times you look at your phone? Or how can you miss part of a conversation in a bar by responding to a WhatsApp? This has to do with how the screens of our smartphones can get to capture our attention above what is happening to us in real life, ”he explains to BYZness Clara Ávila, director of marketing at Godaddy and professor at MSMK.
Because we spend 74 hours a week connected to the Internet, according to data from the ‘Digital Consumer Survey’ from Nielsen. Hence, companies are waging a battle to get the curiosity of boaters. In the age of scrollsof the brief contents, of the headlines and of reading between the lines, attention has become a very precious commodity due to the scarcity.
And it is no longer that we surf the Internet, it is that social networks also have us ‘hooked’. So much so that 85% of Internet users between 16 and 65 years old use social networks in Spain, that is, more than 25.5 million people, according to the IAB ‘Annual Study of Social Networks 2019’.
ATTENTION ECONOMY: IS THERE A DIGITAL CARE CRISIS?
In the words of Rosalía Lloret, general director of eldiario.es and professor at The Valley, “there is a avalanche of information with millions of possible sources that group together those that existed before, such as the media, for example, and those of today: new media from all countries, companies, individuals who report, institutions… Now what is scarce is not the information, but the attention”.
“It can’t be that what’s on your terminal seems more interesting to you than what’s going on around you. We should not hesitate whether to attend to what a person tells you or consult the messages we have received. And yet we do it.” we live a digital care crisis. A situation that, according to the opinion of Clara Ávila, “will explode” at some point.
As this expert argues, “small screens have sometimes made us lose focus on reality. Enclose ourselves in a microworld and lose contact with the outside.” Something that doesn’t have to be bad, like when you go to the movies, she exemplifies her. “The problem is when we lose focus at any moment with a simple notification,” she adds.
Therefore, on the opposite side, on the content generatorsare not only the media, but also our contacts and other companies (many of them technological), obsessed with the so-called engagement or public loyalty. Likes, comments, content sharing, survey responses… “These interactions contribute once again to focus our attention. Like a kind of dopamine of interaction”, indicates Ávila.
This great exposure to information has its positive side, says Lloret, because “they offer us what we want at all times” and the effort to find what we need decreases. But at the same time it also has its negative side: phenomena such as the echo chamber or the bubble filter arise, “because they only give us what we want to see or what is in tune with our opinions and tastes,” argues this professor at The Valley, which makes us lose other content and other ideas.
Along with this, Rosalía Lloret refers to a very common practice, and very little edifying: the clickbait (or cyberbait), which uses headlines in order to get us to click at any price and attract our attention.
Faced with this situation, companies struggle to offer relevant and valuable information in order to have satisfied consumers who pay attention to their content. The attention economy emerge. The more traffic, the more visits, the more impressions, and the more revenue (and maybe, if you’re lucky, more conversions to customers).