Attention merchants now shape the course of human lives and futures

Evidence

At bottom, whether we acknowledge it or not, the attention merchants have come to play an important part in setting the course of our lives and consequently the future of the human race, insofar as that future will be nothing more than the running total of our individual mental states. Does that sound like exaggeration? It was William James, the fount of American Pragmatism, who, having lived and died before the flowering of the attention industry, held that our life experience would ultimately amount to whatever we had paid attention to. At stake, then, is something akin to how one’s life is lived. That, if nothing else, ought to compel a greater scrutiny of the countless bargains to which we routinely submit, and, even more important, lead us to consider the necessity, at times, of not dealing at all. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 1143

Categorization

• XREF: Ties to the reader’s body of work on silencing/noise and attention as a resource in the soundscape project. — connects to: Scarcity has shifted from production of goods to consumption of attention. — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 41; Attention merchants profit by colonizing previously uncommercialized spaces of awareness. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 17; Interpersonal relationships were the final unconquered frontier for attention merchants — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 724 (+9 more)
• DEEPTHINKING: Juxtaposes James’s pragmatist account of attention with the industry that monetizes it, a dense multi-layered point about what a life literally is.

Broader Connections

• The attention economy functions as an industrial farm of vegetative users #exemplifies (0.85) — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!, 83
• Measuring attention as data enables treating it as a monetizable resource #expands (0.85)
• Attention functions as convertible capital that individuals and institutions can bank and trade #expands (0.80) — Michael H. Goldhaber, The Attention Economy and the Net, 14
• Attention works as a needle weaving global links at the price of inequality #expands (0.80) — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 560
• Industrialized attention extraction despoils the shared human spirit as pollution despoils water. #exemplifies (0.80) — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!, 479
• Attention now functions like money as a common metric for cultural value. #expands (0.78) — Annual Review of Anthropology contributors (⚠ verify author line), The Political Economy of Attention, 18
• Attention is becoming the hegemonic resource restructuring material production #corroborates (0.78) — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 47
• Attention has emerged as a site of political, economic, and moral struggle #complicates (0.75) — Annual Review of Anthropology contributors (⚠ verify author line), The Political Economy of Attention, 10
• Future literature mobilizes people toward predetermined ends #complicates (0.75) — James W. Carey, Communication as Culture- Essays on…, 747