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>Now you can force your idiotic, or great ideas onto the screens of millions of people you'll never meet. No you can’t. Attention is scarce. That’s why it’s ca

>Now you can force your idiotic, or great ideas onto the screens of millions of people you'll never meet. No you can’t. Attention is scarce. That’s why it’s called “attention economy”. In fact, it was far easier to force idiotic ideas onto the screens of millions of people before the internet came along. That’s what TV commercials were.

NL807 4y ago
I think you're thinking about corporate/org-scale attention seeking. Putting things into historical context, getting attention today is certainly easier for a random individual. In fact anyone could directly compete with large organisations and even surpass them in some cases. You can set up a youtube account then do episodic dumb shit, and i can guarantee you'll get thousands of not millions of views eventually. You simply couldn't do that 30 years ago.
- AlbertCory 4y ago
  Exactly. And it is, indeed, still hard to become famous, but not as hard as 30 years ago.
autoexec 4y ago
> That’s why it’s called “attention economy”. Those are your words. How many people do you think have already read them? How many more do you think will have read them after 10, 20, or 50 years? If you'd said the same thing before we were using computers to communicate with each other, who would you have said it to? How many people would have heard it? How long would those words have been discoverable? What chance you would you have had to have your words reach millions of people? Forget about you, what chance would I and everyone else have? Speaking as someone who wasn't born after the internet it's much easier now than it was when I was a child for my words to reach a massive number of people, and every child alive today has a better chance than I did at their age. Attention is scarce, when you've got near instant communication over a global network of billions of people you only need a tiny fraction of them to be looking your way and you've got your ideas onto the screens of millions of people

NL807 4y ago

I think you're thinking about corporate/org-scale attention seeking. Putting things into historical context, getting attention today is certainly easier for a random individual. In fact anyone could directly compete with large organisations and even surpass them in some cases. You can set up a youtube account then do episodic dumb shit, and i can guarantee you'll get thousands of not millions of views eventually. You simply couldn't do that 30 years ago.

AlbertCory 4y ago
Exactly. And it is, indeed, still hard to become famous, but not as hard as 30 years ago.

autoexec 4y ago

> That’s why it’s called “attention economy”. Those are your words. How many people do you think have already read them? How many more do you think will have read them after 10, 20, or 50 years? If you'd said the same thing before we were using computers to communicate with each other, who would you have said it to? How many people would have heard it? How long would those words have been discoverable? What chance you would you have had to have your words reach millions of people? Forget about you, what chance would I and everyone else have? Speaking as someone who wasn't born after the internet it's much easier now than it was when I was a child for my words to reach a massive number of people, and every child alive today has a better chance than I did at their age. Attention is scarce, when you've got near instant communication over a global network of billions of people you only need a tiny fraction of them to be looking your way and you've got your ideas onto the screens of millions of people