The Future of the Attention Economy

All the things we create as a society are becoming cheaper to produce, and some have dubbed this the age of abundance. But there is one remaining, fixed scarcity: our attention. Though we might attempt to multi-task, the number of things we can give our full attention to is limited by the clock. Our individual attention pays for and runs major parts of the economy. In this short talk, I consider the future of competition for this precious commodity, and the new curation tools that help us decide where to spend it. Advertising agencies have mediated the competition for our attention for a long time, but we can expect to see their models shifting significantly, in some cases decentralizing, and in others being completely bypassed. Currently, algorithms also play a role in the competition by surfacing things we are interested in. They will continue to be important, but they will soon do a better job of drawing upon our social graphs while leading us to serendipitous discoveries. These algorithms will also become more informed by what we do rather than what we consume. These changes will move the attention economy in a direction that is more sustainable as it increases opportunities for us to share and curate the things we find interesting and valuable, compensate us for doing so, and keep discovering things that are relevant but unexpected. This video on “The Future of the Attention Economy” was commissioned by China Mobile as part of an online course. It is one of 36 lecture videos. A version with Chinese subtitles is available at Citic Migu: http://citic.cmread.com/zxHtml/listen... A transcript of the lecture in English is available here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1R0bs...