Misinformation poses a smaller threat to democracy than you might think
conspicuouscognition.com
conspicuouscognition.com
Herbert Simon in 1971 - In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the Attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of Attention and a need to allocate that Attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.
The current global attention allocation system is biased towards the biggest attentions craving characters on the planet And those who can buy the most ads.
Would it not be more accurate to say it's misallocation of attention, rather than a scarcity? That is, even if we had more attention to give, we should avoid dedicating as much as we do to those who can buy the most ads
A small, fairly pedantic difference, I suppose.
The UN report on the Attention Economy quotes a study that says 0.5% of content generated is consumed by people. And that number was from 2015 and keeps falling.
As networks grow, more connections happen, and as tools of content generation/distribution/broadcast gets cheaper or free, Info keeps exploding. But Attention available does not grow.
So this creates a problem for 2 groups - those who want the Attention of others (eg corporations/politicians/influencors etc) and those who are having a hard time working out what info to pay attention too.
The global attention allocation system is designed for the first cause they are willing to pay to capture finite available global attention.
The second group is mostly left to fend for themselves against extremely sophisticated systems designed to capture, buy and sell their attention or sometimes even steal it.