Dear friends, you are receiving this newsletter because you have at some point generously given me your time and encouragement and have listened to my idea about an attention economy on the internet. I have had this idea in my head for a few years now and am happy to finally send it out into the world (or rather, the internet) to see what kind of attention it can gather.
I will be sending out this newsletter every week or two with a new essay developing the idea, and the essays will appear on my Substack page. If you have any thoughts, comments, or criticism, it will be much appreciated. Feel free to either leave a public comment on one of the essays or to write me directly by responding to this email. I will be very grateful for your attention!
And of course if you know anyone who may be interested in the topic, I encourage you to forward this newsletter to them.
Without further ado, the first essay:
Each time we pay attention to information online, that information is called from a storage location, such as a server, and transmitted through the network for delivery to a connected device, such as our phone. When this happens, records of the event are created at multiple points in the network, from the server to the phone.
These records contain a variety of data about when, where, how, to what and by whom the attention was paid. They are varied in form, name, and content according to the needs of the entities that record them, and they are stored as digital information themselves. They go by a variety of names, their names often describing the attention event they record. A developer might call them logs, sessions, calls, queries, or clicks. Platforms may display them to viewers as visits, views, likes, follows, listens, upvotes, or responses. They are often aggregated and called stats, metrics, analytics, or ratings.
For example: a web host will create a record of a ‘view’ of a webpage containing data such as the browser and location of the viewer; a social media platform might make a record of a ‘like’ of a photograph with reference to the user ID of the user who ‘liked’, the file name of the photograph, and a timestamp of when it happened; a streaming service will create ratings for a tv show that include aggregated data about viewers’ locations, devices, and viewing times.
Because they do not have standardized forms or names, and because they are used in such a variety of contexts, we tend to think of these records as disparate types of data that do not share a general classification. But in fact they share a common function: they are all indicators of attention paid to information, and as such they play a powerful role in the internet: they determine the value of that information.
As we can see by the examples above, these records exist as, and consist of, digital information, but the information they consist of is not what grants them their powerful role. The data these records contain is useful and has its own value—we are all aware of how it can be bought and sold by advertisers and media platforms—but this data is not what makes us excited when we see that our photograph has been liked or that our webpage has been viewed.
Just as the value of a penny is not derived from the market value of the copper it contains, the value of a record of an attention event does not derive from the use value of the data it contains. Its value is derived from the value inherent in what it represents: an act of human attention.
When we see that someone has viewed our webpage or liked our photograph, we are excited because a person gave their attention to the information we created. Their attention is valuable to us. It represents some amount of their time that was spent on our information, as opposed to all of the other information that they could have been paying attention to at that moment. And so the more views our webpage gets, the more likes our photograph receives, the more valuable we consider our digital creations to be. We deem a webpage with thousands of views to be more valuable than one with forty, and a photo with hundreds of likes as more valuable than one with only a few.
Because they represent human attention paid to information, records of attention events are not simply collections of useful data—they are determinants of value in a space where traditional determinants of value cannot exist.
Nothing but digitized information can be transmitted and stored in the networked space of the internet, and digitized information on the internet cannot be valued as we value objects in the physical world. As we have learned over and again in the internet era, digitized information in the network slips around the rules of property ownership and transfer that bind objects in the physical world and allow for valuations based on market transactions.
If we want to value information on the internet, we cannot look to a market price. We value it based on who has seen it, who has shared it, and how widely disseminated it is. We implicitly value digital information based on the attention it has received, but we have yet to come up with a framework for understanding this value.
The value we create on the internet is derived from human attention paid to information. This value is extremely important to us, and its pursuit is profoundly reshaping our world. It is affecting our behaviors, our interactions, and our institutions in significant and unpredictable ways. In order to understand it, we need a new framework and a consistent vocabulary in which to describe how it is created, how it grows, and the ways in which it can be transformed into physical value and physical power.
In this series of essays, I will outline a theory of value on the internet, which I describe as a networked attention economy. I will argue that value is created in the attention economy when attention is paid to digital information, but that this value exists only in the digital, networked space of the internet and does not behave as value in the physical world. I will show that it can be, and regularly is, transformed into physical value, but only with the help of powerful entities - the internet platforms. I will argue that the pursuit of this value is profoundly affecting human behavior and motivations, with the effect of weakening existing physical institutions and political structures. I will describe how the growth in this value is the driving force behind the most talked-about innovations of our time - AI (in the form of large language models) and blockchain technologies (such as cryptocurrency). Most importantly, I will show how our perception of this value has altered our idea of what it means to effect change in the physical world, with potentially devastating consequences for global systems and institutions.
In the next essay I will introduce some history and context for the idea of an attention economy, and I will argue for its application to our interactions with the internet. In subsequent essays I will build and develop a theory of the internet as a networked attention economy, first by introducing some concepts and new vocabulary that will allow us to discuss attention and value on the internet, then by exploring its implications: for our behavior, for our relations with one another, and for the physical world.
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