Re:The Right to Attention in an Age of Distraction
by skybrian on Friday May 26, 2017 @06:07PM
(#14427549)
Maybe, but if anything, smaller companies tend to be more attention-seeking, since they don't have anything to fall back on.
Subscriptions don't do it either, by themselves. Many companies will try to get more revenue out of your existing customers.
And even charities are attention-seeking (if you get on their mailing list).
Furthermore, it's hard to say what kinds of attention-seeking are actually wrong. On the one hand there's spam, and on the other it gets very blurry.
Right now, our focus/attention is at the mercy of only a few big companies. Because of the silos/"network effect", we can't switch to other providers, and there is basically no competition, and no way out for consumers.
If there was choice, we could switch to service providers that are more decent regarding our attention.
Another angle on the problem could be ads. If we would not allow ads, but just paid a fixed amount of money for a service, then the whole attention-grabbing problem would not exist.