Media & Communication — The Attention Economy
The Roman Circus Never Really Closed
The algorithm didn't invent the competition for your attention — it just industrialised something the ancient world already understood with terrifying clarity.
The Idea
The phrase 'attention economy' was coined by psychologist and Nobel laureate Herbert Simon in 1971, but the underlying logic is far older: in a world of abundant information, the scarce resource is not content but the human capacity to consume it. Every media system in history has had to solve this problem — how do you hold someone's focus long enough to deliver a message, sell a product, or consolidate power? What's new about the digital version isn't the competition for attention, but the precision of the tools. Platforms now run continuous, real-time experiments on hundreds of millions of users simultaneously, optimising every variable — scroll speed, notification timing, thumbnail colour — to extend engagement by fractions of a second per session. Those fractions compound into hours. The average person checks their phone over a hundred times a day, not because they are weak-willed, but because the system is explicitly designed to make checking feel like a small, low-stakes reward. The deeper point is that this isn't a bug or an accident of the internet age. It is the logical endpoint of a commercial model in which the product being sold to advertisers is not your click — it is your attention, your mood, and increasingly your predictable future behaviour. Understanding this reframes the experience of using these platforms: you are not the customer. You are the inventory.
In the World
In the late Roman Republic, politicians discovered that sponsoring public games — chariot races, gladiatorial contests, theatrical spectacles — was among the most effective ways to win popular favour. Julius Caesar spent so lavishly on games during his early career that he reportedly went into enormous debt to fund them, gambling that the goodwill purchased would translate into political capital. It did. The Latin phrase 'panem et circenses' — bread and circuses — emerged as shorthand for this logic: keep the population fed and entertained, and they would remain pliable. The parallel to contemporary media isn't merely rhetorical. In 2017, leaked internal documents from Facebook revealed that researchers had identified the emotional states most likely to sustain engagement: anxiety, outrage, and longing. The platform was not simply reflecting human psychology; it was actively cultivating specific emotional conditions because those conditions kept users scrolling. An anxious user checks back. An outraged user shares. A user feeling longing clicks through. Neither Caesar's games nor Facebook's feed were designed primarily to harm. Both were designed to capture attention for the benefit of whoever was running the system. The Romans at least knew they were at the circus. We tend to think we are simply catching up on the news.
Why It Matters
Recognising that your attention is a resource — finite, exhaustible, and commercially valuable to others — changes how you relate to every screen in your life. It does not require you to delete anything or adopt a monastic media diet. But it does invite a small but significant shift in posture: from passive consumer to someone who decides, at least occasionally, where their focus actually goes. The people who designed the systems you use most are not neutral architects. They are, by professional necessity, optimising for time-on-platform. That optimisation has real costs — not just in hours spent, but in the texture of how you feel afterward, what you remember, and what you never quite got around to thinking about because something more immediately stimulating was always one tap away. The question the attention economy never wants you to ask is a very old one: what is this time actually for? History suggests that societies which handed their attention entirely to whoever staged the most compelling spectacle tended to become easier to govern and harder to change. That pattern has not become less relevant with the invention of the smartphone.
A Question to Ponder
If your attention is genuinely finite and genuinely valuable, what received it today that you would not have chosen to give it to, if you had paused for a moment first?
Get a new one of these every morning.
Start learning with Thinkable