Why Information Abundance Creates Attention Poverty
Open with Simon's core idea: more content raises the cost of being noticed while human attention stays fixed.
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Janine is a Political Economy Research Fellow at Pulp, studying how attention, media, and digital platforms shape political behavior. Her research examines the economic logic behind information and influence.
Open with Simon's core idea: more content raises the cost of being noticed while human attention stays fixed.
Introduce the "perceptual gate" threshold and show how rising information volume raises the minimum signal strength required to be consciously noticed.
Explain how attention scarcity pushes people toward fast heuristic processing and why effective signals are built to ride that route.
Explain how platforms quantify, segment, and package attention into tradable products, creating uneven value per hour across formats and audiences.
Extend the framework into political campaigning: early-cycle persuasion, visibility decay on feeds, and moral-emotional language that accelerates sharing.
Attention in the digital public sphere becomes a concentrated, tradable currency controlled by firms and political actors through algorithmic amplification and audience segmentation.