The Irony Of The Attention Economy

Why the compelling need to attract monetizable eyeballs has led to a world of attention-deficit humans

If you were able to travel back in time a mere century, you’d encounter a world in which people read for pleasure. Reading was not regarded as onerous but rather as a means of achieving intellectual and emotional satisfaction. This attitude had emerged more than three centuries earlier, as the printing press finally enabled a flood of secular literature to be purchased at a modest cost. In much of northern Europe, even manual laborers learned to read. When the US Civil War ended, hundreds of thousands of former slaves embraced the opportunity to become literate; lending libraries sprang up everywhere and books of all kinds were assiduously devoured.

The works of Erasmus may have enjoyed extremely modest distribution in the early sixteenth century but by the eighteenth century Jane Austen’s novels reached an audience thousands of times larger. Back then the world moved at a slower pace and few felt their cognitive faculties were taxed unduly by long sophisticated paragraphs.

Even as the moving pictures and the radio of the early twentieth century began to offer alternative ways to be entertained, reading remained paramount. The USA, to be sure, pushed hard to…