Attention economy is a pretty important concept in today’s socioeconomic systems. Here an article by Nielsen Norman Group explaining it a bit in the context of digital products.

Digital products are competing for users’ limited attention. The modern economy increasingly revolves around the human attention span and how products capture that attention.

Attention is one of the most valuable resources of the digital age. For most of human history, access to information was limited. Centuries ago many people could not read and education was a luxury. Today we have access to information on a massive scale. Facts, literature, and art are available (often for free) to anyone with an internet connection.

We are presented with a wealth of information, but we have the same amount of mental processing power as we have always had. The number of minutes has also stayed exactly the same in every day. Today attention, not information, is the limiting factor.

There are many scientific works on the topic; here some queries in computer science / software engineering databases:

• IEEE Xplore
• ACM DL
• arXiv

Another related article by NN/g: The Vortex: Why Users Feel Trapped in Their Devices