Is ‘Peak Attention’ Behind Us?

As individuals are learning to cope with ‘Information Overload’, it will be increasingly hard to grab their attention

It is unclear where the phrase ‘Peak Attention’ originally came from. What is certain is that it is particularly eloquent and relevant. The phrase was modelled after ‘Peak Oil’, which refers to the time of maximum global oil production, the time after which new oil reserves become harder to find, are smaller, and more expensive to drill into. Peak Oil is when every extra gallon of oil becomes slightly more expensive to produce than the previous one. Oil fuelled the growth of the Fordist economy. The fact that its peak may now be past us is laden with meaning.

Throughout the second half of the 20th century, as the information age transformed the Fordist economy, consumers’ time and attention became the number one resource to create value. Long before the internet, the golden age of advertising, radio and television taught us about the value of one second’s worth of consumer attention. With the rise of the Internet, every economic agent learned to fight to win a bit of that attention.

For two decades Internet users have been exposed to a steadily increasing amount of information: more media, more apps, more ads, more messages. What used to be top-down mass information turned into bottom-up targeted information. And customized information grabs our attention even more. The data produced by users is used to better target them, so they can produce more data, and so on and so forth.

Up until recently, there was still room for further increase — after all not every second of consumers’ time had yet been colonized: Google started developing self-driving cars to free some more minutes of its users attention and colonize more of their time. But for some time we may have reached the peak. Every extra second of attention becomes more costly to grab and is gained at the expense of some competitor, by robbing Peter to pay Paul. Is the peak really behind us?

On the ascending slope towards Peak Attention is ‘Information Overload’

Information overload, also called ‘infoxication’, refers to a person’s difficulty to understand an issue and make decisions due to their exposition to too much information. There is an overload when the input to the system (the human brain) exceeds its processing capacity. The incapacity to make a decision can occur when there is too much choice, for example. The exceedingly large number of toothpaste brands in a supermarket will make a new consumer dizzy and incapable of making a decision, while a more experienced consumer will have learned to escape the choice by buying the same brand over and over again.

On the ascending slope towards Peak Attention, every economic actor’s aim was to expose consumers to more information. The number of media, brands, means of communication, and messages increased steadily for half a century at least. The early age of the Internet, when there was not much information available online, any website’s main value was to expose users to as much information as possible. That is the reason for the success of the internet portals in the 1990s. They were meant to be a user’s entry point to everything online. Good design meant providing access to as much as possible so consumers would have a wider choice of options to choose from.

However, as the amount of information increased, the portals and all the other information-concentrating tools soon found their limits. Decision makers have fairly limited cognitive processing capacities. When information overload occurs, a reduction in decision quality is sure to happen. Fewer consumers will be able to process all the information available to them before making their choices. They will rely on a variety of strategies to overcome the difficulty.

That is the subject of a book by Daniel Levitin, a McGill University psychology professor, titled “The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload”.

Funneling our way out of information overload

Increasingly fast and sophisticated information technologies have increased our focus on information overload. We produce more information more quickly and disseminate this information to a wider audience than ever before. But we are also increasingly aware of our inability to handle the “data smog”. So new services, products and designs are now almost exclusively about limiting the amount of available choices rather than maximizing it. A lot of new trends suggest we could already be well past Peak Attention. Here are a few:

• Modern digital design is about simplicity. Less is more. It is about making it easy even for a child’s brain to process the information of the web page. The Yahoo portal’s design is a thing of the past. Google’s page looks radically different. (Read our WillBe Group article about the importance of design, in French, here). Being of value means eliminating the overload.