Sport needs attention to survive, but can it survive the attention economy?
This article explores how the 'attention economy' is impacting the world of sports, arguing that the constant need for engagement is distracting from the games themselves. It references historical theories on attention scarcity to explain why modern sports are increasingly focused on spectacle over substance.
Why it matters
It addresses the cultural shift in sports consumption and the potential degradation of athletic integrity due to social media and influencer culture.
Hello and welcome to another edition of Offside.Recently it has been suggested – by the powers that be – that Offside should deal with things beyond the Beautiful Game. So, this week we are going to ponder something that has become such an integral part of sport and appears intent on ruining it: the attention economy.There is some debate about who came up with the term first, a Newton-Leibniz moment for the social sciences, if you will.Herbert Simon, the Nobel Prize-winning American economist and cognitive scientist, laid the intellectual groundwork in 1971 when he argued that an abundance of information inevitably creates a scarcity of attention. Michael Goldhaber, an American physicist and early theorist of internet culture, later popularised the idea of an “attention economy” in the 1990s, arguing that in a world overflowing with information, the truly scarce commodity was other people’s attention.
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