Attention - A Double Edged Sword of Glory and Tragedy

Attention marketing is a term that was coined by Steve Jelley, and based on a business model concocted with the advent of social media. This idea is popularised most prominently by marketing legend Seth Godin in his book Purple Cow, and is known as a concept that directly contrasts interruptive models of traditional pop-up marketing and advertising (commercials and surprise banners).

Attention is in fact an inevitable trait of free market economies. We contend for things like views and footfall in a healthy capitalist climate, and this helps to propagate the organic flow of information and freedoms in choice for the things that we want, often in the form of products and services. Why then, is the idea of harvesting attention occasionally vilified?

Prolific thinkers like Noam Chomsky (admittedly quite anti-capitalist in his opinions) tend to argue against the idea of captured attention from a standpoint of sheer scale, enabled by corporate mechanisms. From this perspective, attention seeking is not the intrinsic issue itself, but the mechanised and automated weaponisation of attention seeking seen in modern times.

Philosopher Byung Chul Han points to the individualism that's encouraged by capitalist structures, which incentivises us to self-actualise through methods like the acquisition of wealth and the attention of others. We all do this to some extent, mostly aware of the games we play. On that note, René Girard's ideas on Mimetic Theory states that as humans, we often mimic each other's preferences and desires, leading to conflict and competition in the face of primal validation.

On that same spectrum but to a more practical degree, we see authors like psychologist Johnathan Haidt and computer scientist Cal Newport who delve into the long-term effects of attention-oriented algorithms on the brain and on productivity levels. This leads to phenomena such as 'audience capture', when influencers are inadvertently controlled by their own audience to an extreme extent.

There's a clear rift in today's discourse on such a topic as attention. Seen as an inevitable force for potential good by some, a necessary 'evil' by others, and a complete abomination of human nature by a few.

There's no clear resolve, only more questions and potential solutions offered to mitigate risks involved with the quest for attention, as we gain some semblance of clarity in every instance of hindsight.