Attention Industry and the Future of Internet

Based on Tim Wu’s interview to The Guardian.

“In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.” [1]

This quote is transcription from Nobel prize-winning economist Herbert Simon’s speech. This brief explanation about the consequences of an information-rich society seems to properly describe our current context with the internet. However, this speech was made in 1971, when newspaper, radio and TV were the dominant mass media means of communication.

And it`s with the analysis of the means of communication development that professor Tim Wu, the man who created the term “net neutrality” [2], recreates “attention industry” history in his new book The Attention Merchants.

To Wu, the attention industry’s main goal is to capture human attention like a commodity and then sell it to advertisers. Despite the differences among the specific sectors of the attention industry, like radio, TV and so on, Wu has identified some patterns that today can be seen in all of them and in some of today’s internet services.

A brief history

One of the first examples of the attention industry emerged in 1833, with the newspaper New York Sun. Its business model aimed to produce rapid circulation of newspapers based on reduced costs and fake news.To Wu, this newspaper established the main pattern of the attention industry: offer “free” services or products in order to attract people’s attention and then resell it.

This model developed in US radio with the soap operas and quiz programs from the 1950’s. Today, free services offered by companies like Facebook, Google, BuzzFeed and others use a similar logic in order to capture users’ attention to gather their personal data, and then use it to target marketing. Today’s marketing has developed more sophisticated ways to target consumers, looking for individuals or specific groups different from the the advertisement made for the masses in the past.

Kill your television!

Wu notes that over time there were also forms of resistance to the industry’s attempts to capture people’s attention. For example, in the 1960s, there were counterculture movements that tried to diminish mass TV influence, or like the movement Kill Your Television [3]. Nowadays, similar resistance can be seen when people uses programs like Ad Block, when they look for freedom-respecting software that does not capture personal data for advertising purposes. Or even when they use Netflix with its immersive experience without advertisement.

Another interesting historical similarity pointed out by Wu is that communication technologies from the 20th and 21st centuries usually begin their development in a more open, creative, and chaotic way, which has permitted a great deal of innovation. This scenario seems to describe today’s Internet conception for most of its users. Although Wu has also perceived that along the way, communication technologies end up been dominated by big economic interests. He had hoped that the internet could break this cycle, keeping its competitive space nature, but now he is skeptical about that.

Nowadays, however, big internet companies are dominating the market for some of the online services, where small and medium companies have little or no space to act. Wu believes that our current scenario was caused in part because there was a naivety about how the internet works, mainly in the 1990s and the 2000s. Netizens believed that cyberculture was different and, to some extent, morally superior, when compared to the offline world. They wrongly expected openness, innovation, freedom of expression and communication would be sustainable by themselves. Nonetheless, underestimated problems like trolling, data hacking, invasive advertisement, etc.

Brave new Internet?

To Wu, if society believes that certain aspects of the Internet must have a public characteristic so as to maintain these aspects, people must build solid institutions to preserve them. They can’t believe anymore that these essential characteristics will be sustained by themselves. They can’t expect anymore that people will act morally different just because they are on cyberspace. And it can’t be expected that these public qualities of the internet can maintain themselves just by means of adopting not-for-profit business models.

Tim Wu`s work is a fundamental alert to those worried about having an internet open and diverse. Mainly because it seems that people still have a naive idea about the internet, associating today’s cyberspace with unlimited freedom and equality. So that public aspects of internet be preserved on the cyberspace, granting sustainable economic development and respect to human rights, we, as a global society, must strengthen open dialogue spaces and multi-stakeholder processes. Therefore, we can avoid an Internet monopolized by just one sector.

Spaces like the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) have a fundamental importance, because they allow debates open to all interested parties on internet issues. But we must always pay attention to the differences of power among the players and try to diminish these differences in order to ensure,  as much as possible, a democratic space.

[1] SIMON, Hebert A. Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich Wolrd. 1971. p.41. Available on: <https://goo.gl/SFGoso>. Accessed on: 25/01/2017.

[2]  WU, Tim. Network Neutrality, Broadband Discrimination. Journal of Telecommunications and High Technology Law. Vol. 2.  2003.  Available on: <https://goo.gl/j1VKwM>.Accessed on: 25/01/2017.

[3] ASSANGE, Julian; APPELBAUM, Jacob; MULLER-MAGHUN, Andy;  ZIMMERMANN, Jérémie. Cypherpunks – Liberdade e o Futuro da Internet. São Paulo: Publisher Boitempo. 2013. p.71.