Thinking Clearly

The term “attention economy” has become a buzzword in our current zeitgeist. But 30 to 40 years ago Michael Goldhaber, who has a PhD in physics coupled with a passionate 1960’s brewed concern about social and political justice, began thinking and writing  about human attention as a scarce resource and made predictions about how the newly emerging internet would interact with our attention and eventually transition us to an attention economy. His early predictions were then rediscovered and described in a New York Times article published in Feb., 2021. Topics discussed in this episode include: the attention economy, how it contributes to misinformation and what we can all do can do to reduce the pollution in our information environments.