For decades, we’ve all been paying attention to the attention economy.
That economic concept and business model sees online content as an unlimited resource. Its consumption is limited only by people’s mental capacity, implying a global contest for the finite and valuable resource of human attention.
The attention economy idea explains why companies like Meta sees itself not only competing with other social sites like TikTok, X or YouTube, but also with books, plays and nature walks — anything that grabs people’s attention.
Because attention is limited, the only way to grow is to be better at attracting attention. And that simple model is the reason why social networks are filled with rage bait, AI slop, memes, pornography and hate speech. The social media business isn’t incentivized to prioritize “good” content, only attention-grabbing content.
In the attention economy paradigm, human attention is a currency with monetary value that people “spend.” The more a company like Meta can get people to “spend” their attention on Instagram or Facebook, the more successful that company will be. So the algorithms are deliberately designed (and constantly redesigned) to maximize how much time people pay attention to social networks. New features are specifically designed to increase the time users spend on Meta services instead of other things. For example, the average time spent on Instagram grew by 24% after Reels launched, making it a huge success for the company.
