Attention frackers capitalized on pre-existing civic decline rather than creating it

Evidence

Putnam’s essay appeared as a book in 2000. Even then, it would be two more years before Google supercharged its AdWords program with predictive data scraped from user search behavior, a moment that marked (for many) the birth of the contemporary digital attention economy. So civic communities were already experiencing a destabilization when the attention frackers came onto the scene. They capitalized on what they found. Since it is a dark fact that the basic good of these gatherings—the opportunity to attend to friends, and be attended to, and to share a world with them—is exactly the crude material that the attention frackers learned to quantify, capture, extract, and cash out. — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!, 296

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth chasing: is the claim that AdWords in 2002 ‘marked the birth’ of the attention economy credible, or does it predate to earlier ad tech?
• XREF: connects to: The civic decline’s roots predate sixties upheavals and divorce revolution — Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone The Collapse and Revival…, 919