attention economics

This is a theory of economics that regards attention as a commodity that is in scant supply. Human beings have a limited supply of attention that they can give to any piece of information, and therefore a world that makes information increasingly abundant is actually outstripping the capacity of human beings to deal with it. A wealth of information creates poverty of attention. Attention economics applies economic theory to this problem as a way of devising strategies to manage the supply of information, so that instead of building systems that provide more and more information, we build systems that weed out anything that is unimportant or irrelevant and increase the quality of the attention transactions. A better attention economy is the goal of the future.