NotitiesReality Lost
Vincent F. Hendricks and Mads Vestergaard
In de informatiemaatschappij is de overvloed aan informatie een uitdaging, waardoor aandacht een kostbare hulpbron is. Marketing en communicatie zijn nauw verbonden met het oogsten van aandacht, wat leidt tot een industrie die bekendstaat als 'attention merchants', waarbij gebruikers als producten worden verkocht aan adverteerders. Predatory advertising richt zich op kwetsbare personen en benut hun persoonlijke informatie.
The hallmark of the information age is not that we are all in continuous pursuit of precious information hard to access, but the other way around: The information age offers so much information that drowning in it, or chocking on it, is the risk. The vast offer of freely available information online has made the value of information drop steeply. (Location 333)
The easy access to overwhelming amounts of information, and the fact that often you don’t have to pay money for it, doesn’t mean that information comes for free; to receive information, we pay attention. (Location 338)
The challenge today is not to find something to read or information to pay attention to; it is to find the time to read or look at the material at your disposal. With information in abundance comes an attention deficit. As early as 1971, Nobel Prize Laureate in economics Herbert Simon prophetically said about the information age to come: …in an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. (Location 342)
The fact that information consumes attention makes attention a valuable resource. (Location 348)
Philosopher and psychologist William James (1842–1910) has described attention in a famous quote from 1890: [Attention] …is the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought …. It implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others. (Location 354)
When attention is viewed as a scarce resource, it creates the basis for studying the information age as an attention economy. (Location 373)
When attention is consumed by information, information is the source of knowledge, and attention is a scarce resource, it is important to spend attention with care. (Location 387)
If you have people’s attention, you can channel it to another person or product and monetize it. (Location 405)
Marketing is intrinsically linked to attention harvesting. (Location 407)
Note: Gouden quote
1.6 Attention Merchants The intimate connection between attention, communication, and marketing forms the basis of an industry that Columbia Law School Professor Tim Wu has labelled attention merchants (Wu 2016). The basic business model is quite simple: harvest attention and resell it for marketing and advertising purposes. (Location 424)
In the attention merchant business model, however, the readers are actually the product sold to the real customers: the advertisers. (Location 442)
The idea behind predatory advertising is: … to localize the most vulnerable persons and use their private information against them. This involves figuring out where they hurt the most, their so-called pain point.10 (Location 507)