Attention economy
Etymology
The core insight is older than the phrase: economist Herbert Simon observed in 1971 that a wealth of information creates "a poverty of attention." The term "attention economy" itself was popularized in the late 1990s and early 2000s, notably by Michael Goldhaber and by the 2001 book of that name by Thomas Davenport and John Beck. It joins "attention," from the Latin attendere (to stretch toward), with the language of scarcity and markets.
noun phrase · /uh-TEN-shun ih-KON-uh-mee/
A market in which human attention is the scarce resource that companies compete to capture and sell.
What it names
It explains why so many free products are engineered to hook you: the real transaction is your time and focus, not the app.
Example
Every notification, autoplay, and infinite scroll is a rational move in the attention economy, where the platform only earns when you stay.
Related idea
The attention economy names the whole market for focus; surveillance capitalism names a specific business model within it, where the data harvested from that attention is refined into predictions and sold.