Birth of the attention economy

With the spectacular circus that passes for the US Presidential election firmly behind us, we now have our own homegrown spectacle known as the federal election to endure. As we are forced to swim through the flotsam and jetsam of the major parties’ political election campaigns, it is hardly surprising that ‘keeping an eye on the ball’ is becoming a very difficult act as the twists and turns in international politics are as hard as they are fast. One could be easily excused for feeling bewildered in the media frenzy that rapidly switches truth for fantasy on a daily basis. It seems that the ground beneath us is constantly moving, giving rise to a feeling of growing instability. This may be due to the contemporary world where experts are easily dismissed, emotions are allowed to override evidence and facts are arbitrarily moulded to align with the dominant narrative.

Buried deep underneath the cacophony of headlines that floods the daily newsfeed was the birth of the ‘attention economy.’ Unannounced, the attention economy began by turning our ability to focus into the latest form of currency. The future is here and profits are being generated by regularly hijacking your attention.

Human attention is a form of (a) energy that requires (b) time, both of which are finite resources that large IT companies are desperately seeking to capture. Given that there are twelve months in a year, seven days in a week and twenty-four hours in a day, IT corporations know that each person’s attention comes in limited quantities and their ability to engage our focus and capture it for long periods of time depends on the appeal of their platforms and content. Whether we look at a device, a digital advertisement or flick through the pages of the print media, the alluring presentation of each image and headline will determine the duration for which our gaze is captured constituting precious information and profit for large IT corporations. Hence, it is crucial for large IT corporations to catch our attention using whatever means they have, and then keep it for as long as possible.

Through overt and covert means, large IT corporations have been amassing huge amounts of data on every one of us for at least two decades. Dubbed ‘surveillance capitalism’ large tech companies have been gathering the most intimate information about our shopping habits through to our unique keystrokes. Given the global nature of data collection, the power of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been employed to process colossal amounts of data and convert it into valuable information. This has given large IT companies a new product to trade on the open market. It has also gifted large IT companies with an unprecedented insight into how society works which translates into huge power and influence. This raises a vital question about the use and abuse of data by Big Tech, and whether this constitutes one of the greatest perils that the public faces?

With the emergence of surveillance capitalism and the power of AI, it is by no accident that the attention economy has come to be. The quest to solve the problem of the oversupply of data has been found along with capitalism’s search to find a new market. We are living in an age where the new frontier for market exploitation has landed on the human mind. 

Through the commodification of human attention, large IT corporations have been developing sophisticated tools and techniques to attract and capture the public’s attention. This is evidenced by the countless options we face that demand our attention on a daily basis. TV serials, podcasts, social media trends, radio programs, influencers, newspaper articles, celebrity news and a plethora of addictive digital platforms all vie for our attention. Aided by Big Tech’s use of algorithms, it is easy for people to be distracted by the endless stream of addictive content, infotainment, the buzzing phone and the lure of having information at our fingertips. Such distractions are no accident; they have been designed to keep the public engaged for as long as possible and take full advantage of our brain’s craving for stimulation.

Big Tech’s strategy to capture our attention has a double-barrelled approach. Firstly, it serves the purpose of generating colossal profits by capturing our attention on the various platforms that inundate our homes, offices and streetscapes. Secondly, the wide network of media outlets helps to instil an alternative reality into the public’s consciousness that is based on a carefully curated narrative. This latter aspect has created a fundamental shift in how the public experiences reality which in turn has significant ramifications on how we perceive power, our identity and our role as individuals in society.

The digital revolution aided by large IT corporations has fundamentally changed the way we experience ‘reality’. What we see, do and experience is largely mediated by images beamed out of our screens and to a lesser extend what we see in print. We now create content by capturing what we experience as images on our mobile phones and then dutifully send them off to friends and family to experience as an image. The digital revolution has replaced face to face meetings with on-line meetings. In effect, our social relations are mediated through images which moulds the way we interact with others and how we understand the world. The implication is that Big Tech and the media moguls who own the means of communication play a significant role in managing the world we experience by shaping the dominant narrative through what we see on our screens. 

It is by no coincidence that the powerful and wealthy one percent eagerly seek to centralise the means of communication, thereby making it easier to control and manipulate the public’s understanding of reality. Pronouncements that Big Tech and media oligarchs want to safeguard freedom of speech and democracy is pure fiction. When have oligarchs sought to protect democracy? Where the manufactured narrative is challenged, other means are employed to stifle alternative voices. Across the so-called ‘free’ and ‘democratic’ societies, there has been an ominous clampdown on freedom of expression. Protests have been supressed, namely protests expressing opposition to the Israeli genocide taking place in Gaza. Whistleblowers highlighting institutional corruption and war crimes have been gagged and imprisoned. Independent journalists highlighting news and opinion contrary to the dominant narrative have been shut down through media bans imposed by mainstream media platforms. Under the guise of laws on hate speech, freedom of expression has been curtailed by governments when certain views do not align with the ‘nation’s values.’ Our largest universities, once sites of progress and healthy discourse have been turned into academic gulags where students and staff protesting against the slaughter of thousands of civilians in Gaza are being repressed. In effect, alternative views and independent voices are being silenced. The truth and complexity that current issues carry have been manipulated and repackaged into simple to understand doses of propaganda curated for public consumption. The society of spectacle is supplanting material reality in an effort to distract citizens from vital issues that directly impact the majority. Issues of social and political impact are being replaced with a manufactured reality aimed at justifying the continuance of the status quo.

 

Each beat of the attention economy’s heart is powered by ‘clicks’ and ‘shares.’ The more we ‘click’ the faster our attention is transformed into currency surreptitiously stolen by Big Tech. It is only in recent years that the insidious nature of the attention economy is being revealed through research and the irrefutable evidence that is on display within our communities. The detrimental impact of social media, platforms that inundate people with highly addictive and incendiary content are all designed to extract maximum attention that is treated as a commodity to be exploited by large IT corporations. Big Tech have learned that high quality journalism and breakthroughs in human endeavours do not necessarily engage the levels of attention they seek. Unfortunately, fear, hate and outrage are proving to be the more popular ingredients used to capture our attention. PR companies and spin doctors have also cottoned on to what constitutes a good ‘attention grabber.’ Positive news stories and facts are being replaced by reports laced with fear, hate and violence which appeals to the public’s emotions and captures their attention. The mainstream media has refined its daily dose of fear, hate and sensationalisation, all aimed at sedating the public with the spectacle that passes for reality. Social media has created echo chambers that reinforce single issues and myopic views of the world. Influencers and podcasters do not promote healthy debate or dialogue. Their so-called online ‘communities’ simply deliver one-way communications to an isolated listener with a pair of headphones plugged into a device. Large IT corporations have been perfecting algorithms for over a decade, which are employed to matchmake people with content. This is an effective tactic to create a comfortable echo chamber where views and ideas are not challenged but reinforced. Digital platforms offer limited means by which views and opinions are exchanged leaving corporate interests ample room to curate content, promote the dominate narrative and sustain the status quo.

The past 12 months has clearly exposed the methods used by the one percent who own the means of communications to enforce the dominant narrative that reconfigures reality. The genocide in Gaza is a particular case in point. For over two and a half years a genocide in Gaza has been livestreamed onto our screens. The fact that the state of Israel has brought about the indiscriminate killing of tens of thousands of innocent men, women and children has caused little consternation amongst western nations who view Isreal as a close ally. Western nati ons continue to supply munitions, intelligence, financial and logistical support to the Israeli Defence Force (IDF). Western democracies persist to have normal diplomatic and trade relations with Israel whilst the IDF targets hospitals, medical staff, aid workers and journalists in Gaza. To alter the public’s sense of reality, the Australian mainstream media has been working overtime to distract the public’s attention from the prolonged human catastrophe in Gaza. Instead of reporting the death and destruction meted out by the IDF against the Palestinian population in Gaza and in the West Bank, the mainstream media has been omitting or downplaying the depravity of Israel’s actions against civilians. National outrage at Israel’s active genocide on university campuses and in the streets of our capital cities have been subdued by private security firms and law enforcement authorities backed by the state and federal government clampdown. The corporate owned and government-controlled media unashamedly backed the merchants of death at last year’s arms bazaar held amid the active genocide in Gaza. The government-controlled and billionaire owned media portrayed protesters outside the arms convention as radical troublemakers turning the streets of Melbourne into a war zone causing inconvenience to commuters and those business people attending the arms show. Since then, the mainstream media has sought to distract the publics’ attention from the active genocide by inundating the Australian public with headlines proclaiming a ‘rise in anti-Semitism”. This new spectacle has been manufactured to capture the public’s attention and create a narrative of hate and intolerance designed to overshadow the destruction and depravity being inflicted on Palestinians in Gaza. It has also served to gloss over the spineless stance taken by the federal ALP and federal LNP opposition in relation to the genocide. The gravity of the human disaster facing Palestinians has largely been omitted from the mainstream media. Major issues such as violence against women and the struggle of our nation’s indigenous people have all been lost on the corporate owned media and the government-controlled media’s amplification of anti-Semitism. The alternative reality designed to distract the public’s attention from the reality on the ground provides a further justification for Australia’s weak-kneed approach to issues demanding an ethical and moral stance by the political and corporate elite. 

The one percent of society who own the means of production, distribution, communication and exchange understand that managing the public’s perception of reality is no longer sustainable via a handful of influential TV stations, radio stations and newspapers. Put simply, those days are long gone. The mode of collective control employed by the rich and powerful one percent of society has become much more sophisticated and deeply entrenched across and array of institutions and media outlets. The art of distraction and attention theft have been found to be highly effective tactics that are sustained through sensationalisation and creating a spectacle of certain events and issues. This approach helps to hijack the public’s attention, and support the new attention economy that generates profits by capturing the public’s gaze and mediating reality through a world based on images. The re-presentation of images and content by Big Tech and the mainstream media is the means by which the views and wishes of the one percent are presented to the public as reality. This new development has based its foundations on theuse and abuse of the public’s personal data by large IT corporations which opens great perils for societies across the globe. The unethical use of highly addictive content, IT platforms that promote hate and outrage to generate ‘clicks’ to prolong and capture the public’s attention for the purpose of monetizing our attention has been afforded insufficient concern given the detrimental impact it has on society’s wellbeing and social cohesion. As large IT corporations and mainstream media platforms vie for our attention, little oversight is being dedicated to the quality of the content provided, nor are ethical standards being set and maintained. Given such an environment, it is vital that the public does not lose sight of those issues that are important to fostering a vibrant and progressive society. Maintaining an acute awareness of those spectacles that generate more ‘clicks’ through fear, hate and outrage is essential to keeping an objective view on reality.

Critical thinking is the antidote to groupthink and operating on ‘auto-pilot.’ It is about actively analysing and criticising the daily newsfeed curated by the mainstream media. Independent thinking is vital to analysing and conceptualising information from a broad range of angles so you may see the world from a broad standpoint instead of the prescriptive perspective of the mainstream news owned by the rich and powerful one percent. Researching your own news and seeking alternative views that break away from the intravenous news tube curated by Big Tech’s algorithms is critical to understanding reality on the ground.

Today is an opportunity to look beyond the images on your screen that beams out the dominant narrative curated by oligarchs and the political elite who feed the public a moving spectacle laden with fear, hate, division and scarcity requiring your attention and your full compliance. Reality exists in our homes, on our streets and in our communities. By exercising critical thinking on a daily basis will you be able to see through the spectacle and recognise what is possible and inspire others to question the status quo and take the next step and demand change for a better society. 

March 2025