[stefanpl]

"One view of the status quo is that media companies are aggregating human attention and selling it at a discount–far below minimum wage–to advertisers in a massive arbitrage on human capital."

Interesting idea. I've never thought of attention in this manner before.

[colechristensen]

This is a strange sentiment because what is happening with the type of person is moving further from having attention sold to advertisers.

I am not unique and advertisers have a really hard time getting any of my attention. I have ad blockers installed, I don't have an antenna for broadcast television or a cable subscription, I watch television through netflix or purchased seasons/episodes/movies either digital or physical, I play video games, and I buy books at bookstores or on an ereader. The most advertisement I experience is for more media on the same medium. Astroturfing reddit and email are the closest I get to consuming ads.

This isn't unique or special and it's certainly growing. I find being forced to watch advertisements intolerable having been away from it for so long and it's easy to keep away.

[att-throw]

What do you mean by "what is happening"? I definitely agree that there's a type of person or group of people further from having attention sold to advertisers, but I don't know what they would be like.

I had a similar thought listening to the radio yesterday: there are some lyrics and themes on public airwaves (like lauding adultery, cooking crack cocaine, etc.) that would have at least generated a little outrage even 15 years ago. But my guess is that many of the people who normally would have gotten on Parents Television Council and written angry letters to the FTC have now just stopped consuming mainstream media broadcasting altogether.

Anything with a non-transparent recommender system (including most digital stores) is still vulnerable to tracking, attention harvesting and paid placements, even if you aren't seeing straight up soap ads. For example, how do you know that the TV producer isn't paying Vudu or whoever to put shows on your front page because you watched show X?

[colechristensen]

"One view of the status quo is that media companies are aggregating human attention and selling it at a discount–far below minimum wage–to advertisers in a massive arbitrage on human capital."

When I say "what is happening" I am referring to the status quo stated here.

The view stated is that media companies are "buying" human attention with cheap entertainment and selling it to advertisers (the portion not taken up by the content).

The contradiction I am putting forward is that the people seemingly most susceptible to withdrawing some of their time from the workforce to pursue leisure and media are also consuming far fewer advertisement-hours in an absolute sense and as a proportion of time of multimedia consumed.

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As for the lack of outrage, that's a cultural shift not a media access shift (primarily at least). It's true that 15 years ago people were generally consuming a much more homogeneous set of media, but the driving factor of outrage is every age group was born 15 years later. Things aren't so shocking when you grew up with them. Fifteen years ago it was also a lot more outrageous to be gay; the extremely diminished outrage reaction to that isn't just because people are consuming different media.

[lotsofpulp]

Product placement will get so valuable that media creators won’t be able to ignore. I already find it tedious to hear product placement in songs and all the stupid camera shots of a vehicle’s logo in tv shows.