The Attention Merchants
—The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads (1) By Tim Wu
Since the rise of capitalism, it has been known that capturing someone’s attention could cause him to part with some money. From the 1890s through the 1920s, there arose the first means for harvesting attention on a mass scale and directing it for commercial effect, thanks to what is now familiar to us in many forms under the name of advertising. At its inception it was as transformative as the cotton gin. For advertising was the conversion engine that, with astonishing efficiency, turned the cash crop of attention into an industrial commodity. As such, attention could be not only used but resold.
We’ve already seen the attention merchant’s basic modus operandi: draw attention with apparently free stuff and then resell it. But a consequence of that model is a total dependence on gaining and holding attention. This means that under competition, the race will naturally run to the bottom; attention will almost invariably gravitate to the more garish, lurid, outrageous alternative, whatever stimulus may more likely engage what cognitive scientists call our “automatic” attention as opposed to our “controlled” attention, the kind we direct with intent. The race to a bottomless bottom, appealing to what one might call the audience’s baser instincts, poses a fundamental, continual dilemma for the attention merchant—just how far will he go to get his harvest? If the history of attention capture teaches us anything, it is that the limits are often theoretical, and when real, rarely self-imposed.
《注意力经济·如何把大众的注意力变成生意》（一）
作者：吴修铭【美】
从资本主义崛起之初至今，众所周知的是，只要抓住了某人的注意力就能让他付出一些金钱。19世纪90年代到20世纪20年代之间，首次涌现出了大规模获取注意力并将其转而用于商业效应的手段，这要感谢我们如今已经熟知的形形色色的广告。在其出现之初，广告的变革性不亚于轧棉机的出现。原因在于，广告就像转换引擎一样，以令人难以置信的效率将注意力这种“经济作物”变成了工业商品。为此，人们不仅能利用注意力，而且还能转售注意力。
我们已经见识过了注意力商人最为基本的手法：通过显而易见的免费事物来吸引注意力，然后加以转售。但是这种模式的后果之一就是要完全依赖注意力的获取和保持。这意味着在竞争之下，双方的较量自然而然会成为向下竞争，不断突破底线。几乎毫无例外的是，越是夸大其词、耸人听闻、肆无忌惮的另类内容，越是可以吸引注意力，因为这种刺激因素更有可能吸引认知科学家所说的“自动”注意力，与之相对的是我们可以有意支配的“受控”注意力。这种没有底线的向下竞争，为了吸引所谓“读者更为原始的本能”，将注意力商人置于至关重要、持续不断的困境之中——究竟不择手段到什么程度才能实现获取注意力的目的？如果争夺注意力的历史给我们带来了任何启示，那么就是局限性往往是理论上的，在现实当中，人们很少能做到有所节制。
