Discourse on the attention economy took off sharply around 1996
Evidence
The statistical data gathered on Google Books Ngram Viewer – the attention measuring software that counts up the occurrences of words and expressions in texts digitalized by Google Books17 – confirm this initial impression (Figures 2 and 3). In both the Anglophone and the Francophone corpus they show a spectacular take-off in 1996, the moment that Michael Goldhaber set off a polemic by announcing the radical novelty of the attention economy, which was immediately denounced as vague and illusory in a series of critiques. — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 49
Categorization
Category: Factual Claims
Related
- The attention economy predates digital technology by 150 years (similarity 0.83)
- Georg Franck built the best attention-economy framework yet remains unknown outside Germany. (similarity 0.82)
- The attention economy rests on a hidden false premise about attention. (similarity 0.82)
- By the mid-2010s attention was openly proclaimed the universal currency across industries (similarity 0.81)
- Early attention economy thinkers prioritized experiential quality over productive quantification (similarity 0.81)
- Measuring attention as data enables treating it as a monetizable resource (similarity 0.81)
- Attention has long been treated as valuable and manipulable, not only digitally. (similarity 0.81)
- Attention ecology is a surprisingly underinvestigated field needing new vocabulary (similarity 0.81)
- Digital technologies replace human attentional energy with electrical energy. (similarity 0.80)
- Attention has emerged as a site of political, economic, and moral struggle (similarity 0.80)
- Attention-economy analysis must be reframed within a broader attention ecosophy (similarity 0.80)
- The economic paradigm distorts our understanding of how attention actually functions (similarity 0.80)
- Attention now functions like money as a common metric for cultural value. (similarity 0.79)
- Attention frackers capitalized on pre-existing civic decline rather than creating it (similarity 0.79)
- Attention cannot function as currency without homogenizing measurement (similarity 0.79)