Last night around 10pm, I booked a flight to Mexico for Mrs. Wallet and me. As I write this just after noon1 , we are sitting on the plane, about to take off. While I’ve been struck before by the oddity the airport has become, it seems to have reached new heights.
The internet and other technologies have brought fundamental changes to the nature of work and the economy. This new economy has been given many names: the information, knowledge, gig/shared, or passion economy…
But what struck me today is the concept of the attention economy. More than anything else, companies are vying for our attention and finding novel ways to monetize it.
“You have to be where people’s attention is.”
~ @garyvee
Losing Focus
One oft-cited statistic is that the average human attention span has declined over the last several years to around 8 seconds – supposedly less than the goldfish2, which purportedly has an attention span of about 9 seconds. While this seems like hyperbole to me, taking a trip today makes it difficult not to see why we’d be heading in that direction.
While airlines and airports have never been ones to forego an opportunity to upsell you while you’re in transit, they’ve found even more opportunities to offer you something extra. Simply printing our boarding passes involved no less than four opportunities to buy something – priority boarding, seat upgrades, extra points, checked bags… Not to mention the process of actually buying tickets!
At the beginning of your flight, in addition to the normal welcome and safety rundown, a flight attendant now reads you a host of advertisements about in-flight amenities, credit card applications, etc. Throughout the flight, other attendants continue to stop by to provide additional opportunities to make a purchase. However, these abundant opportunities to upgrade your experience aren’t the most unnerving part of the arrangement.
It’s almost impossible to escape the screens! Of course, there are the usual screens throughout the airport with advertisements and flight information. Each seat at a bar, restaurant, or even simple rest or waiting area has its own personal screen constantly trying to catch your attention, entertain, and sell you something.
In some cases, you can’t even turn these tablets off. In the past, I’ve turned them around or set them on their face just to avoid having a screen shooting bright, constantly changing light into my cranium. I feel sorry for parents trying to keep their kids away from screens, much less themselves!
Once you get on the flight, things don’t get any better. Every seat has its own screen, at least on most flights these days. Without turning my head, I can see 19 screens provided by the aircraft and one more thanks to my neighbor, who’s watching his own movie on an iPad. Twenty screens, all vying to capture my attention with bright cascades of image and motion. Even for someone who trains their attention regularly, this is a bit of a stretch, and it took my brain a few minutes to adjust and realize it didn’t need to figure out what all the commotion (in terms of light and movement) was about every time twenty screens started flickering in unison.
Luckily, you can at least turn off your own screen, unless the welcome sequence of information and advertisements is running, or your screen is broken and won’t turn off like Mrs. Wallet’s.
With such a preponderance of rich stimuli constantly vying for our attention at any moment, it’s no wonder people’s ability to sustain focus and attention is beginning to wane. For our children, this will be the new normal.
Striking a Balance
It’s only extremely recently in the history of human evolution that we’ve been presented with an environment that strives to keep us constantly entertained the way the modern world does. Even you likely remember a time when screens, phones, and Instagram weren’t ubiquitous. And yet, our kids (and many of us) are constantly glued to these devices any time there’s a spare moment; often even when there isn’t.
Previous generations didn’t have an option. If there wasn’t much going on, you were simply stuck with your thoughts or environment. Boredom was a normal part of everyday life. Some may argue they still experience boredom regularly when they run out of new posts on Facebook, people have stopped liking their most recent post, or they’ve watched everything on Netflix, Prime Video, and Hulu. But this type of “boredom” is fundamentally different from that experienced by previous generations in a less technologically immersive environment.
The constant stimulation of modern society involves a completely different neurological and physical state than that offered by the boredom of yesteryear. When we’re bored and waiting for that next hit of dopamine a “like” or new post offers, our sympathetic nervous system is very much engaged, pumping out stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline to prime our system. While there’s nothing wrong with either of these neurotransmitters and the sympathetic nervous system is absolutely essential to getting things done, it becomes a problem when it’s always turned on.
Nature is all about balance, and our body is no exception. We need to regularly and reliably get into a relaxed state with our parasympathetic nervous system in order to stay healthy and happy. When there isn’t the constant stimulus of a phone, screen, or something to do, our body/mind switches over into a completely different state. We find novel ways to interpret and interact with our internal and external environment. Our body begins producing a different array of neurotransmitters and internal processes as our mind wanders. This is absolutely essential to the health of our body and mind.
The Attention Economy
We’ve gotten pretty far away from the concept of the attention economy!
Perhaps we lost focus.
The truth is, the current state of technology isn’t all bad; the massive, lightning-fast changes we’ve seen race through our society have brought with them many benefits. Pretty recently, we used to operate from more of a knowledge economy – we had plenty of labor and other resources, so the bottleneck was knowledge. In such an economy, people who knew a lot would prosper, as they were in high demand.
The internet, in particular, has pushed us out of the knowledge economy – information is cheap and readily available. You can look up pretty much anything you could imagine on Wikipedia, YouTube, and Google. If you’re a programmer, many of your problems have an answer on Stack Overflow, and you can learn to become a proficient programmer online, for free – a skill which can quickly net you six figures.
With so much information constantly at our fingertips and indeed being shoved in our faces every moment of the day in the form of advertisements, social media, etc, you can’t just drink from the firehose. What’s become paramount is the ability to focus individually or capture human attention.
Individually, we’re constantly being bombarded by stimuli, and we have a practically infinite amount of information available to us at all times. The bottleneck is no longer information; it’s the ability to focus and avoid being drawn in by the ceaseless distractions vying for our attention. People with the ability to pick the right information from this endless stream and apply it appropriately are going to thrive. In fact, what you focus on is so important, that some even argue that it literally defines who and what you are:
“Who you are, what you think, feel, and do, what you love—is the sum of what you focus on.”
~ Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World
If you’re an organization, people’s attention is your bread and butter. Just look at the amount of clickbait going around or the size and worth of any of the major social media platforms. In the attention economy, social networks are the primary location to capture people’s attention. It’s more important to get more clicks, more eyeballs on your post or product than it is for your product or information to be perfect or true. For example, you will make more money from a sensational headline than from being perfectly truthful or factual or actually discussing the more important topic in most cases, which may be mundane in comparison.
Unfortunately, the way social networks work (as an extension of the way our brains work) is to highlight the most extreme information. This is why you see increasing political polarization and people like Donald Trump or Kim Kardashian flourishing.
Thriving in the Attention Economy
The world we live in today offers new challenges for our generation and those of the future. While having limitless access to information provides limitless opportunity, it also brings with it new challenges. The issues of polarization, endless upsell opportunities, airline screens, clickbait, and cat videos aren’t solely a product of the internet, social networks, and the information-rich world we live in today. They’re a byproduct of our human behavior, and we are the only ones who can change that.
With the rise of the attention economy, it has become more important than ever to develop our self-awareness and manage our attention. It’s possible that more than the amount of money, land, or respect we can accumulate, the most important resource we can leverage is much closer to home: our own focus and attention.
Much Love,
(Your) Wallet
Footnotes:
1. I started writing this post some time ago when we were on our way to Mexico but didn’t finalize and publish it for some time afterward.
2. McSpadden, Kevin. (2015). You Now Have a Shorter Attention Span Than a Goldfish. time.com.
