Early media proprietors self-aggrandized grandly while chasing reader attention

Evidence

Claude C. Hopkins was perhaps an unlikely figure to revolutionize the business of harvesting and using human attention, but that is what he did in the early twentieth century, when he became one of advertising’s greatest innovators. Still in its infancy, this new form of communication was, as we have said, the means by which attention could be converted into cash, for Hopkins was a particular master of the art of using attention to create demand for new products. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 76 (#expands, via linked claim)

One of the earliest attempts to analyze attention in economic terms was the work of the French sociologist, Gabriel Tarde (1843-1904), who highlighted in his “economic psychology” the centrality of advertising in the mass media as a means of capturing and holding attention. He noted that newspapers were “a kind of great, continuous and general advertisement” (1902: 133). Tarde saw the capacity to focus public attention as a primary source of value, convertible to economic value, and manifested as celebrity or fame. This capacity was in turn self-reproducing, in the sense that the fact that a person is already the focus of attention in the public sphere takes on an objective reality, which in turn prompts others to direct their attention towards them as well. To a large extent our perception of a public figure is determined not through careful consideration of their virtues and vices, but by the cues we get from the social world around us. Tarde saw the capacity to attract attention as amenable to quantification, suggesting the invention of a “gloriometer” that would measure (a) how many people had heard of a public figure, (b) how many positively admired that person, and (c) the social “weight” of their admirers, by which he meant how well-known they themselves were (1902: 56). — Michael H. Goldhaber, The Attention Economy and the Net, 6 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Early media executives led leisure-heavy lives unlike modern workaholic CEOs.; Early advertising converted human attention into cash by creating demand — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 76; Public attention is a self-reproducing form of value convertible into fame — Michael H. Goldhaber, The Attention Economy and the Net, 6

Broader Connections

• Early advertising converted human attention into cash by creating demand #expands (0.78) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 76
• Public attention is a self-reproducing form of value convertible into fame #expands (0.75) — Michael H. Goldhaber, The Attention Economy and the Net, 6