Attention is a scarce resource drained by information overload

Evidence

Although paying attention appropriately has always been important, the need to manage attention has become more critical with recent geometric increases in the distractions in our lives and the amount of information available to us. The supply of attention is limited within an individual and within an organization. Yet the number of messages we receive and their invasiveness has increased significantly in the past few years. Most people recognize this reality through exposure to the rapidly increasing number of Web sites, books, magazines, and television channels available, and through the proliferation of devices like pagers, cellular phones, faxes, and e-mails that can invade our attention. This information overload has led to organizational attention-deficit disorder—the inability of individuals and organizations to focus attention on the key elements of success. — Thomas Davenport & John Beck, The Attention Economy, 17

Categorization

• XREF: This is the classic framing Herbert Simon articulated (a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention) that later feeds the whole ‘attention economy’ literature from Davenport, Wu, and the digital-age writers like Tim Wu and James Williams. — connects to: Attention scarcity can be turned into an asset through redistributed attention — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 337; Attentional tasks fail when capacity cannot meet their demands; Herbert Simon defined attention as the scarce resource that information consumes. — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 35 (+13 more)
• ADDENDUM: Directly relevant to the ‘Grafting & Growth’ infrastructure piece in a conceptual inversion sense: information as an endlessly proliferating growth that exhausts the scarce shared resource of focus.
• DEEPTHINKING: The ‘organizational attention-deficit disorder’ framing is a genuinely fertile management concept — treating attention as a bounded organizational resource with its own pathologies, predating later digital-age usage of ADD as metaphor.

Related

• Information abundance creates a scarcity of attention (similarity 0.90)
• Attention is the scarce resource that powers the information economy. (similarity 0.88)
• Abundant information makes human attention a scarce economic resource. (similarity 0.88)
• Attention scarcity can be turned into an asset through redistributed attention (similarity 0.86)
• Human serial attention limits make attention the scarce resource (similarity 0.86)
• Attention is becoming the hegemonic resource restructuring material production (similarity 0.86)
• Attention is a finite resource whose unequal distribution produces symbolic misery (similarity 0.84)
• Herbert Simon defined attention as the scarce resource that information consumes. (similarity 0.82)
• Paying attention differs from spending time or being aware. (similarity 0.82)
• Attention is socially and materially mediated, not just a scarce mental resource (similarity 0.81)
• Attention has long been treated as valuable and manipulable, not only digitally. (similarity 0.81)
• Attention is a socially produced and politically governed resource, not merely a scarce one. (similarity 0.80)
• Attention scarcity is a capitalist construction, not a universal given (similarity 0.80)
• Attention ecology is a surprisingly underinvestigated field needing new vocabulary (similarity 0.80)
• Poor attention management causes managers to miss key competitive and environmental changes (similarity 0.80)

Broader Connections

• Constant information overload structurally undermines the capacity for independent thought #expands (0.95) — George Michelsen Foy, Zero Decibels, 453
• Abundant information makes human attention a scarce economic resource. #expands (0.80) — Annual Review of Anthropology contributors (⚠ verify author line), The Political Economy of Attention, 18
• Attention-maximizing technologies can reduce rather than increase user control over attention #expands (0.75) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 635
• Measuring attention as data enables treating it as a monetizable resource #expands (0.72)