Attention
Attention is the allocation of limited cognitive resources. There are always tons of things happening around us and we cannot possibly focus on every single detail. When we give attention we choose, consciously or subconsciously, what to focus on and what to ignore.
Attention Economy
“Pay attention”
This phrase is often used, yet its significance is almost always overlooked. Paying attention means that we are giving finite cognitive resources to something or someone. It is interesting to note the word pay. This suggests that attention Is a currency.
Monetary currency is traded for the currency of attention every second. All around us people are paying to get our attention. This is because there are two ways companies make money. They either sell a tangible or intangible product to a consumer or they sell your attention. The former is the way that money has been made since the dawn of time, the latter way of making money has developed in our modern age.
The Internet is an attention economy. Consumers always pay, even while using sites or apps that are free. Consumers either pay with money to use a service or they pay with their attention. Companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and more are “free” to use. However, These companies make a lot of money. They make money by selling your attention. They make money through advertising. That’s why Facebook employs engineers, And pays them well, to make their platform as addicting as possible. The more time they can get you to spend on their platform the more of your attention they can sell to advertisers.
The Internet is not the only attention economy your local news station, for example, sells your attention to advertisers as well. They want you to spend as much time as possible watching their channel. This is why there are so many negative, fearful stories. Negativity and fear grab her attention like a few things.
Any time spent consuming media, especially free media, his time spent selling your attention.
Power of Attention
We give things power when we give them our attention. When we spend an hour scrolling through Instagram, we give it power over our thoughts and feelings. Likewise, when we spend an hour reading uplifting or thought-provoking content, we too give those things power over us. We let the things we give attention to influence us, for good or for bad.
Our attention is not just something that we can hold on to and not “spend”. We can’t save our attention for later. We have to pay attention to something, every minute of the day. However, if we don’t consciously choose what to pay attention to, the choice will be made for us.
Decide
Inevitably throughout the day we will find ourselves mindlessly paying attention to things that are around us. We can, in those moments, pause to make the decision to either keep giving our attention to that thing or to give our attention to something else. We can consciously and mindfully decide what to pay attention to. We can spend our attention wisely.