The business of answering that question attracts hundreds of billions of dollars every year. As long as there have been things to buy, there's been a market for human attention.
Long ago, capitalizing on human attention consisted of little more than the call of a street vendor over the din of a crowded village market.
Much later, the first one cent copies of The Sun hit the streets of New York, inspired by the realization of its editor that it was much more valuable to sell each reader's attention to advertisers than to make money off newspaper sales directly.
Today, that concept has been taken to an extreme. Thousands of algorithms on millions of servers auction off your every click and tap, anticipating which emails you'll open, which search results you'll read, even how your eye might dart around the page.
Google and Facebook rely almost exclusively on directly reselling human attention. Machines are starting to help optimize email subject lines and article titles based on what might catch your eye. The playbook is simple: attract human attention with cheap or free stuff -- cheap newspapers, Google search, interesting reading material -- and optionally resell that attention to the highest bidder.
Where are we headed? In the face of this transformation, what can we expect? Answering these questions is hard. To go any further, it's important to understand how attention works.
Your attention is like a spotlight cast on a stage. You're the spotlight operator. You can point the spotlight at specific things on stage, but you can't control what actually appears on the stage.
The stage is your awareness, and it contains the sum total of information accessible to your mind at this moment. That includes the words on your screen, the sensation of pressure from your chair, and background noises in your environment, as well as the never-ending stream of random thoughts that pop up in your head.
As you read this, you are volitionally casting your spotlight on the words you're reading. You'll keep this up for a little while, but inevitably, the spotlight will move without your permission, attracted by an unexpected noise behind you, or someone walking into your field of view, or a stray thought about what you want for lunch.
This is the nature of attention. It darts around, scanning continuously for what's interesting. This was an invaluable benefit in our ancestral environment. It was rare we might need to focus on one thing for more than a few moments at a time, but essential not to miss that snarling predator lurking in the bush.
As a result, if you try really hard to pay attention to only one thing, you'll quickly find your attention elsewhere. In fact, usually, your brain decides to change the subject of your attention without your conscious input, much less your permission. You might have already drifted off into a different thought a few times as you read this. Your brain expects a little hit of feel-good neurotransmitter every time your attention jumps to something interesting. Novelty feels good.
This is precisely what makes it hard to reliably capture people's attention. Generally, people themselves don't understand what catches their attention or why. Most shifts in attention are unconscious, so it's impossible for people to articulate why their attention does what it does. They only notice what it does after it has happened. Certain colors of call-to-action buttons work better on a landing page than others not due to any conscious decision by anyone, but due to the unconscious preferences of billions of brains.
Certainly, there are some things that work very well on all of us: bright colors, flashing objects, and attractive scantily clad people are all widely used to great effect. For a new parent, there's nothing better than an iPad to quell a tantrum from a cranky toddler, and that's because looking at colorful moving images feels good.
