The Attention Economy and the Net

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 that the internet is primarily an economy organised around capturing, holding and exchanging attention. Written before Google, before social media, before the smartphone, the essay reads as prophecy. For product direction it is the foundational text for every product that competes for attention: feeds, notifications, recommendations, engagement metrics — all of them are interventions in Goldhaber's economy. Read alongside Simon's Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World (which anticipated the idea in 1971) and Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death for the cultural critique. First Monday is open access; the essay is free.