The Man Who Foresaw the Disinformation Superhighway--Another NYT Article

New York Times reporter Charlie Warzel recently interviewed Michael Goldhaber, who saw 40 years ago the downside of the inner webs. A snippet from his piece:

Quote:

These days, the term (the "attention economy") is a catch-all for the internet and the broader landscape of information and entertainment. Advertising is part of the attention economy. So are journalism and politics and the streaming business and all the social media platforms. But for Mr. Goldhaber, the term was a bit less theoretical: Every single action we take - calling our grandparents, cleaning up the kitchen or, today, scrolling through our phones - is a transaction. We are taking what precious little attention we have and diverting it toward something. This is a zero-sum proposition, he realized. When you pay attention to one thing, you ignore something else. The idea changed the way he saw the entire world, and it unsettled him deeply. I kept thinking that attention is highly desirable and that those who want it tend to want as much as they can possibly get," Mr. Goldhaber, 78, told me over a Zoom call last month after I tracked him down in Berkeley, Calif. He couldn't shake the idea that this would cause a deepening inequality. When you have attention, you have power, and some people will try and succeed in getting huge amounts of attention, and they would not use it in equal or positive ways."