Rethinking the cognitive foundations of the attention economy

The attention economy is the economic system in which human attention is the scarce resource. This literature takes a particular passage in Herbert Simon’s seminal Chapter Designing Organization for an Information-rich World as its point of departure: information abundance implies attention scarcity. My aim in this paper is firstly to provide an exposition of the assumptions that underlie Simon’s statement and the context in which he makes these remarks. I will then critically assess whether Simon’s assumptions hold in the face of contemporary work in the science and philosophy of attention. I will focus on two interrelated assumptions: the assumption that the distribution of attention is done by an allocator rather than distributed competition, and the assumption that attention is a unified an invariant resource that is required for any cognitive task involving the central-processing unit. Both of these assumptions are heavily criticized in the contemporary literature on attention. Without these assumptions in play Simon’s analysis does not come off the ground. It is not even clear that the term attention has a stable referent. In the last section, I discuss a number of options remaining for theorists of the attention economy.