Processing Time: Digital Media and the Insistence of the Information Economy

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Too much information, or not enough time? Is that really our problem or just the way it’s been designed? Turns out that our disordered state of attention is not just a digital distraction.

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Writer and theoretical physicist Michael Goldhaber (dubbed the Casandra of the internet age by the New York Beacon) argued in the late nineties that a new “attention economy” was emerging alongside the traditional economy of goods and services.

“Ours is not truly an information economy,” Goldhaber claimed in his article “Attention Shoppers!” for Wired. “Economics,” he went on to explain, is the study of how a society uses its scarce resources.

By definition, economics is the study of how a society uses its scarce resources. And information is not scarce — especially on the ‘net, where it is not only abundant, but overflowing.

“We are drowning in information, yet constantly increasing our generation of it,” Goldhaber assessed. “So a key question arises: Is there something else that flows through cyberspace, something that is scarce and desirable? There is. No one would put anything on the Internet without the hope of obtaining some. It’s called attention. And the economy of attention — not information — is the natural economy of cyberspace.”

Go back a decade further and there arose the phenomena of attention deficit disorder (ADD) diagnoses, which were sometimes linked in the discourse to electronic media, specifically television, as opposed to digital media.

As far back as 1969, Herbert Simon, apparently regarded as “the father of the attention economy,” observed that “the wealth of information means a dearth of something else — a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes.

“And what information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients.’”

Cultural theorist Yves Citton, in his 2016 book The Ecology of Attention dated the phrase “attention economy” even earlier and links it explicitly to the need of Capital to discipline labor and control consumers.

These roots of attention discourse are also highlighted in Jonathan Crary’s Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (1999). As Crary documented, much of the early research on attention in the nineteenth century was initially “bound up in the need for information on attention in the context of rationalizing production.”

Michael Sacasas brings all these sources together in his latest blog post at The Convivial Society.

While he does not go along with suggestions that all ADD or ADHD diagnoses are the direct fault of an overload of information forced on the vulnerable, he does contend that, “We inhabit a techno-social environment manufactured to fracture our attention.”

He proceeds to suggest that this analysis should at least encourage us to ask new questions about our own struggles with attention and distraction. If there is a “problem with attention,” what are its sources? he wants us to ask.

“Do I conceptualize the problem of attention as a failure of the individual, or as a failure of the techno-social environment? Who or what demands my attention and to what end? Do my efforts to discipline my attention simply serve the interests of the system that has generated the problem in the first place?”

And what would this gain?

“We will not by our individual actions undo a techno-social order that is inhospitable to human beings…” Sacascas says, “but we can become more alert to how we might have internalized the demands of our milieu.”