The commercial attention economy feeds on pre-existing civic community decline

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

• DEFINE: Precises the causal claim of the whole manifesto: real communal attention is the raw material that attention fracking extracts.