From the Bookseller:
What happens when we run out of time?
This might sound like a philosophical question, but with the explosion in content and entertainment offerings such as social media and freemium games, we are rapidly approaching a state of peak attention. I define peak attention as the moment where the competition for our attention reaches a saturated point – when there is no more time to spare and something else must miss out.
As the old saying goes; time is the ultimate finite resource. Increasingly, ours is being spent online.
Herbert Simon first coined the term ‘attention economy’ way back in 1971. His simple conclusion was that an explosion of information must lead to a scarcity of what it consumes, our attention. From his office, it’s like he foresaw the entire rise of social media with its endless content feeds. We now collectively spend more than 10bn hours a week on the main social platforms, and it is rising fast. The total attention equation is different still. Between online and offline media platforms, the average American spends one more hour per day than they did just two years ago – almost 11 hours a day in total.
Simultaneously, from 2005 to 2015, the average amount of time Americans spent reading for personal interest on weekend days and holidays fell by six minutes to 21 minutes per day and 17 minutes on normal work days – a 22% decrease in a decade.
. . . .
I believe the advent of the data feedback loop from users, now a reality with all digital media, will prove the game changer. Software can now learn on its own, powered by unprecedented computational power and vast data sets of real human behaviour. Imagine a book that gets better and better suited to its audience every time it is read, gradually personalising to fit each person’s preferred narrative direction.
These new self-learning systems will inevitably get very good at hooking us in – and keeping us there.
. . . .
Rather than simply living side by side in harmony, there is a compounding effect on the competition for attention across all the media we consume. Every new entertainment offering and attention-consuming activity essentially raises the bar for all the incumbent things people used to spend time on. We have entered a state of hyper-competition. If everyone increasingly fights for the same attention pool, something must inevitably lose out. And that’s going to be books, if Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Netflix keep winning.
The true structural issue here is that all services and products compete for the same 24 hours.
Link to the rest at the Bookseller
I have too much other stuff I’d rather read/watch than this article. What is it about?
There’s a real threat here for mediocre time-waster books, because it will never be easier to read a novel than to scroll through social feeds. Techno-personalization of stories probably won’t change that.
But for amazing stories that you suck you in and keep you reading until 5am? People will always seek those out, will forget about their social feeds entirely until they’ve put the book down– and then they’ll get on Facebook to rave about the story they just read.
Well said!
I define peak attention as the moment where the competition for our attention reaches a saturated point – when there is no more time to spare and something else must miss out.
That happened long ago. At any given moment, we can focus on one thing. Everything else misses out.
Over a time span, we can count the things we have focused on. Everything else missed out.
tl;dr
😆