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Attention Economy
An annotated collection of 2 papers & essays on attention economy, spanning 1971 to 1997. Featuring works by Herbert A. Simon, Michael H. Goldhaber — each with editorial commentary oriented to digital product practice.
Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World
Herbert A. Simon, 1971 · In M. Greenberger (ed.), Computers, Communications, and the Public Interest, Johns Hopkins Press
The essay that quietly invented the attention economy. Simon's argument compresses into one sentence: "a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention." Written in 1971, read it now in the middle of an LLM-enabled…
The Attention Economy and the Net
Michael H. Goldhaber, 1997 · First Monday, Vol. 2, No. 4
Goldhaber's 1997 essay coined "the attention economy" as a framework for understanding the internet — the argument that in a world of information abundance, the scarce resource is not information but human attention, and…