The Attention Economy is Breaking Democracy

What is the Attention Economy?

The attention economy is understood as the monetisation of human attention, treating human focus as a valuable, scarce commodity. It often materialises through social media platforms, where companies collect and analyse users’ data to curate highly personalised content for their feeds. This data is then sold to third parties, such as advertisers, who use it to market products tailored to users’ interests.

Undoubtedly, the attention economy is a highly valuable industry. Economist David S. Evans estimated the value created by the attention economy at approximately US$7.1 trillion in the United States alone in 2016. Similarly, Erik Brynjolfsson and JooHee Oh estimated that the consumer surplus generated by television amounted to 10.2% of GDP.

It is widely understood that the attention economy has heavily impacted how our society and economy function. However, its political consequences are often only partially grasped. Much of the discussion focuses on polarisation, often overlooking a far greater problem: a society whose attention has become commodified.

How the Attention Economy Affects Political Salience

Political content online is often made up of polarising beliefs that lack nuance. This is largely because algorithms reward content that evokes extreme emotion, particularly that which is contingent on anger and vehement opposition. This can be attributed to the fact that such posts are more attention-grabbing and hard to ignore, and thus likely to get more shares, angry comments, and be stitched or responded to by people with opposing beliefs.

This content is frequently built on false or misleading claims presented as fact. Political debates are often stripped of their original context, and statistics are exaggerated or selectively presented to support a particular narrative. Consequently, inaccurate and amplified content frequently overrides truthful and objective information online. According to a 2018 investigation by Soroush Vosoughi, Deb Roy, and Sinan Aral at MIT, which analysed roughly 126,000 verified true and false news stories shared on Twitter, false information spread more rapidly, broadly, and deeply than accurate news. As mentioned above, it can be assumed that posts consisting of misinformation often spread faster or remain uncorrected because of the outrage and resulting engagement they receive. 

Many of these posts manifest in short-form content, which encourages rapid consumption rather than sustained attention and reflection. As a result, it erodes people’s ability and willingness to reflect on the validity and rationality of the content they consume.

One of the major consequences of this phenomenon is its influence on the political ideologies of those who consume such content. Politically uninformed or less media-literate social media users, who are incapable of identifying fallacies and misinformation, are more likely to be influenced by radical political content. As a result, ideological polarisation becomes a growing concern, and the space for a middle ground continues to shrink. 

A supporting study (Craft, Ashley & Maksl, 2017) showed that higher levels of news literacy correlated with lower endorsement of conspiracy theories. Ultimately, the rise of social media has forced politics to be repackaged as something more palatable to users’ shortening attention spans, but at the cost of accuracy, nuance, and political tolerance. This raises an important question: what truly threatens democracy — polarisation itself, or the consequences of constant distraction?

The Attention Economy’s Impact on Democratic Deliberation

Democratic deliberation and cognitive autonomy are key factors in upholding a democratic system. These specifically demand the ability to engage with multiple and even competing ideas simultaneously, and to coordinate discussions over shared facts and commonly accepted information, which is sometimes known as the epistemic common ground. The issue arises when individuals are not able to agree on a set of factual information, making further discussions fruitless due to differences in accepted “realities”. Undoubtedly, this is the result of social media consumption where algorithms personalise feeds according to a user’s interests and existing political beliefs in order to maximise engagement, preventing users from being conversant with realities that differ from their own.

Researchers at the Illinois Institute of Technology gathered and curated a collection of more than 900,000 news articles and opinion essays from 41 sources, annotated by topic and partisan lean. A simulation investigated how different algorithmic strategies affect filter bubble formation. Their research found that algorithmic personalisation creates “filter bubbles” which continuously expose users to ideas that conform to their pre-existing perceptions and beliefs. Therefore, when people are not in agreement over the same set of policies, verified facts, and understanding of social issues, political discussion makes little to no progress, and individuals are unable to revise their beliefs when confronted with new and credible information.

It is also true that users are unable to articulate political information that they are already adept at due to the erosion of their executive attention. Executive attention refers to an individual’s capacity to choose what they pay attention to and what they ignore. When “attention merchants” — a term coined by Tim Wu — compete relentlessly for human attention by flooding users’ feeds with highly stimulating content that provides instant gratification, the trade-off becomes clear. Although citizens may still be voting, they do so without thorough reflection or judgement, and in some cases, may even be oblivious to the policies and party they support.

As a result, increasing partisanship, coupled with declining democratic participation, weakens democracy itself. Citizens become less informed about the policies and political agendas they support, while the space for civil political discussion gradually diminishes.

Whether democratic institutions can continue to thrive in social media spaces ultimately depends on the regulation of these platforms and whether human attention is something that continues to be monetised. If attention itself becomes the world’s most valuable commodity, then protecting democracy may increasingly require protecting the public’s capacity to think before they react.

References

Shaw, A. (2023). Social media, extremism, and radicalization. Science Advances, 9(35), eadk2031. https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.adk2031

The Attention Economy and the Collapse of Cognitive Autonomy” Georgetown Law

Allcott, Braghieri, Eichmeyer & Gentzkow (2020), “The Welfare Effects of Social Media” (American Economic Review)

United Nations Economist Network: NEW ECONOMICS FOR SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT: ATTENTION ECONOMY 

Wu, Tim (14 April 2017). “The Crisis of Attention Theft—Ads That Steal Your Time for Nothing in Return”. 

Ping Liu, Karthik Shivaram, Aron Culotta, Matthew A. Shapiro, and Mustafa Bilgic. 2021. The Interaction between Political Typology and Filter Bubbles in News Recommendation Algorithms. In Proceedings of the Web Conference 2021 (WWW ’21). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 3791–3801. https://doi.org/10.1145/3442381.3450113

The Attention Economy is Eating Democracy – James Maconochie