paying attention to the attention economy text by JOHN JEFFERSON SELVE french cultural critic john jefferson selve is the founder of the journal possession immediate and a regular contributor to purple We’re all aware that what we used to call “mind” and now call “attention” is in serious trouble these days. To analyze the phenomenon, let’s take a brief look back through time. The corporate desire to capture minds dates back to the early 1920s. For example, the books of Edward Bernays, nephew to Freud and inventor of marketing, who took old Europe’s techniques of propaganda and persuasion and applied them to American commerce. What was then called “manufactured consent” set the standard for America’s large industrial brands. Marketing developed on this basis — by leaps and bounds, in tandem with technological advances in media. With information technology already outpacing the mind, the concept of “information anxiety” was formulated in…