Needing to Be Noticed: Understanding the Market in an Attention Economy

nd a w lsh scool of foeign sevice gegetow n unersity For this paper, I have decided to step through the proscenium and appeal directly across the “fourth wall” to whatever readers this piece may attract, in the hopes that someone among you will be able to help me figure out the answers to a set of questions with which I have been wrestling for several years. For fun, let’s call this paper an exercise in crowd-sourcing. The context is this: Information used to be scarce and human attention comparatively abundant. Now that ratio has flipped over—information is available in mind-boggling abundance, and human attention is so scarce that it must be competed for. Hence the notion of an attention economy—anyone who is trying to get the public to notice and heed a message (which can be anyone from a soap salesman to the U.S. secretary of State) is now in the position of, in effect, offering “wares” for which the target audience will “pay attention” (or perhaps will “buy our argument”). As the discussion below will show, attention has many—but not all—of the characteristics of money, which makes the notion of an “attention economy” a potentially useful tool both for those who must communicate messages, like people in public diplomacy, strategic communications, and psychological operations, and those who try to intercept and understand the messages being sent by those whom we consider our rivals and opponents. That much makes sense to me. What I cannot figure out, however, are things like the following: