Attention economics is fascinating
I don’t know, something about this whole information overload, advertising, ever growing human population and endless amount of voices to be heard and solutions to be offered, there’s something about it.
We live in times where speed of information flow is atleast 5x as compared to 90’s. This results in feedback loops, bandwagon effects, these phenomena of “winner takes it all”, where for instance one reddit post gains traffic, there’s an inclination of upvotes snowballing on this post. Meanwhile there’s tons of potentially more interesting and valuable posts being buried and gaining no attention.
It’s such an interesting thing as the valuations get distorted by so much, laws of supply and demand get damaged. We don’t have real tools to be able to screen the best ‘apples’ there are, so we need to resort to catchy headlines, pattern recognition, intuition… “fast and frugal heuristics”. Endless sea where it seems that the loudest and brightest forces will win.
It’s funny, reminds me of this south park clip
Stan: Dad, come on. We all get your point, but don’t you think you’re overdoing it?
Randy: You have to overdo it in today’s society, Stan. You can’t be nuanced and subtle anymore or else critics go, “Wow, what was the point of that?”
There’s just something about it, it’s like a game of forces that whoever transmits the loudest signal that yells “Listen to me! There’s a reward here to be reaped!” will win. And when this loud signal gets traffic, now the people around it act as a signaling force themselves further reinforcing the cluster and invoking the herding behavior. It is so fascinating!
06.02.2021