The (shaky?) cognitive foundations of the attention economy

Herbert Simon’s slogan that a “wealth of information creates a poverty of attention” is taken as a central point of departure in the literature on the attention economy. In a world chockful with information, human attention is a scarce commodity that needs to be allocated with care.

In my talk, I will examine the assumptions that underpin Simon’s operationalization of attention and information and question these assumptions in light of ongoing debates in cognitive science and philosophy of mind about the workings and nature of attention. In particular, the question is whether attention is something that can be allocated to facilitate information-processing, or is the outcome of information processing. I will conclude that Simon’s conception of attention is both unhelpfully abstract and based on questionable assumptions.

In closing, I will sketch several ways in which I think the philosophy and cognitive science of the attention economy can move forward.

Bio

Jelle Bruineberg is currently a Macquarie Research Fellow at the Department of Philosophy of Macquarie University in Sydney. He works on attention, the philosophy of affordances, and technological mediation.