The Attention Economy

Think you’re the master of your own destiny when it comes to your activities online? Think again. An entire industry exists purely to capture and hold your attention, writes Alex Meehan

In the 1970s, the US economist and Nobel prize winner Herbert Simon observed that “when information becomes abundant, attention becomes a scarce resource”. At the time, with the internet more than two decades away, he was speaking in general terms.

Today, however, the average person has access to more information on their smartphone than they could consume in several lifetimes. And this makes all of us pawns in what has become known as ...