June 1, 1971

Thirty-five years before the launch of Twitter, American political scientist, economist, sociologist, and psychologist Herbert Simon coins the term "Attention economy" in the essay "Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World" published in Computers, Communication, and the Public Interest by The Johns Hopkins Press on this day on June 1, 1971.

"In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it." (pp 40 - 41)

In his paper, Simon recognizes that many designers of information systems incorrectly represented their design problem as information scarcity rather than attention scarcity, and as a result they built systems that excell at providing more and more information to people, when what was really needed were systems that excelled at filtering out unimportant or irrelevant information.