The attention economy

True, there’s no guarantee he’s getting what he paid for, but it does beg the question: is attention, or focus, a commodity? Certainly it’s an essential factor in productivity, and getting scarcer and scarcer. (See a recent New York Magazine cover story; Gallagher’s latest, “Rapt”; and Wurman’s “Information Anxiety” who called the attention overload almost twenty years ago.) And is lack of focus a red cape for marketers? I’ve seen reported of spambots that search for facebook/blog entries that contain the phrase “I’m bored”… oops.