Attention Economy

(Sorry for the long wind-up, it was mostly for my sake, not yours. Skip to paragraph 3 if you wish to cut to the chase.)

People may not be willing to spend their money online or on mobile devices. But they may be willing to spend their time. My question is where that time is coming from.  In economic terms, attention is a scarce resource that consumers decide how to distribute based on their desires to maximize utility. To focus on a narrow application of this idea, a person might decide to dedicate a certain portion of their attention to news consumption. This news consumption might be entirely from a morning newspaper, or split between the Internet and local TV news, or any other combination.  If a person wanted to use a new medium for news, say because they received an Amazon Kindle for Christmas, they would have to cut back on other media use because their attention is a scarce resource.

But I argue that attention is not as fixed a resource as some might suspect. First, increasing media use may take attention from other areas of life (a person may go out less, for example).  Of course, there are still only 24 hours in a day, so at some point there are no other parts of the pie to steal from. But secondly, what if new technologies introduce efficiencies into the attention system such that person has more expendable attention? Instead of simply waiting in line – what used to be attention essentially wasted – people frequently consume media on portable electronic devices. Not that this wasn’t possible (people have always brought books to waiting rooms) but it now requires no advance thought because a cell phone is, for most people, a constant companion (unlike a book, for most people).

It may be that, in a world of increasing choice, people are more able to exercise their preferences (as Prior says), and hence simply swap one medium or news source for another that better suits their preferences. But it could also be that access to the Internet anywhere has fundamentally changed how and when we choose to consume media, pushing media consumption into heretofore media-less areas of our lives. I find some evidence of this in my study of how journalists use smartphones and tablets, which enable them to work at times and in places where it was previously impossible or prohibitively inconvenient. This new convenience of Internet access may be wiggling its way into the nooks and crannies of our lives, leading to a surge in busy-ness.

Proposition: Mobile Internet technologies are not “or” media, but “and” media. (The language of substitute and complementary would seem to apply, but I think that would imply some sort of relationship between the media. My sense is that they are NOT related, that mobile internet consumption fits into a new gap that it created for itself.)

Data required: Media usage across several years, but preferably at least the last five years. Hours working. Leisure time and recreation data. Some measure of busy-ness, maybe stress or anxiety could be a proxy here. The idea is to get a sense of how much attention people have to spend, and then decide whether that has changed with the adoption of mobile Internet devices.