Walked past a guy on the street today filming himself. Phone out, talking to the lens, full performance. He was in a suit, outside a Greggs, doing some kind of bit. And nobody was looking. Not one person turned their head. That's the thing about attention now. Everyone is chasing it but nobody is giving it.
Same thing happened at Clickbust today. We had a room of people who make their living from getting people to look. And the whole conversation kept circling back to the same problem. Attention is cheap but engagement is expensive. You can get a million views on a video of a cat falling off a shelf. But ask those same people to read a 500 word essay on why the thing matters and they are gone.
The guy on the street was performing for an audience that didn't exist. He was playing to the camera because the camera is the only thing that pays attention back. But the camera is not a person. It does not care. It just records.
I think that is the split that matters now. The difference between attention that is given and attention that is captured. Captured attention is a transaction. You give me a dopamine hit, I give you a second of my life. But given attention is rare. It is when someone actually stops and thinks about what you said. And that is almost never what the algorithms reward.
The guy in the suit was trying to capture something he could trade. But what he actually needed was for one person to stop and think. And nobody did.
Paul