Newspaper directness – The daily blog of behavioral and cognitive economics

The Birth of the Attention Economy

Early in the Civil War, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. announced in The Atlantic that the necessities of life had been reduced to two things: bread and the newspaper. Trying to keep up with what Holmes called the “excitements of the time,” civilians lived their days newspaper to newspaper, hanging on the latest reports. Reading anything else felt beside the point. The newspaper was an inescapable force, Holmes wrote; it ruled by “divine right of its telegraphic dispatches.” Holmes didn’t think he was describing some permanent modern condition—information dependency as a way of life. The newspaper’s reign would end with the war, he thought. ….[READ]