The smartphone harvested previously uncollected attention like fracking recovers oil.
Evidence
Now a new device appeared capable of harvesting the attention that had been, as it were, left on the table, rather in the way fracking would later recover great reserves of oil once considered wholly inaccessible. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 1038
Categorization
- SEED: The fracking metaphor for attention harvesting is a strong image worth an essay on how each new screen ‘recovers’ attention reserves deemed inaccessible.
- SHARE: Wu’s fracking metaphor for smartphone attention capture is a vivid line a colleague working on attention economics would enjoy.
- XREF: connects to: An industry has channeled and commodified human attention like fracking extracts natural resources.; Human fracking extracts attentional capacities as industry once extracted physical ones. — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!: A Manifesto of the…, 458