From an Attention Economy to an Intention Economy

• In Event: Attention! - III: Pauses and Punctuations of Experience

Abstract

In Silicon Valley, the world’s most famous site of technological innovation, technologists are rejecting their inventions and disconnecting from the internet. According to reports, the technologists are not rejecting the internet per se, but the “attention economy”: the socio-economic system that commoditises user attention and incentivises technologists to create habitual technological experiences that glue users to their screens.
In this paper, I analyse a loosely-affiliated group of software developers, behavioural scientists, and entrepreneurs who are resisting the attention economy by creating technology-based ways that reclaim attention. These technologies include internet jammers, productivity apps, and a digital offline magazine. Drawing upon interviews and the walkthrough method (Light et al., 2016) I posit that these technologies reveal new assemblages of psychological design that aim to break tech habits and/or respect the intentions of the user (“intentional design”).
I argue that technologies within the attention economy use psychological design to encourage automatic, mindless, or unconscious user behaviour. In contrast, technologies using intentional design promote effortful, mindful or intentional ways of thinking. I offer two critiques of intentional design: that neither technologists (or users themselves) can conceive of what the intentions of users are, and more surreptitiously, that intentional user behaviour is often conflated with aspirational norms of productivity or health.
With both Google’s Digital Wellbeing and Apple’s Screen Time entering the attention reconfiguration market, I speculate about a future shift in the Silicon Valley from an attention economy to an “intention economy”: an emergent socio-economic system which commoditises aspirational user behaviour.

Author

• Alex Beattie, Victoria University Wellington