Attention capture is essential to every competitive process including elections
Evidence
Information cannot be acted upon without attention and thus attention capture and information are essential to a functioning market economy, or indeed any competitive process, like an election (unknown candidates do not win). So as a technology for gaining access to the human mind, advertising can therefore serve a vital function, making markets, elections, and everything that depends on informed choice operate better, by telling us what we need to know about our choices, ideally in an objective fashion. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 270
Categorization
- XREF: Links directly to Wu’s own platform/attention framework and to Herbert Simon’s scarcity-of-attention idea that later chapters build on. — connects to: Politics itself is being reshaped by attentional extraction industries; Attentional exploitation can be transformed into a basis for collective political identity