About Attentionocracy

Attentionocracy measures the economy of public attention—a system of influence in which those who attract the most visibility hold the greatest cultural power.

In today's digital landscape, attention has emerged as a primary form of currency and power. As the economist and Nobel laureate Herbert Simon noted: "What information consumes is the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention."

Our project quantifies this otherwise invisible economy by tracking how public attention is distributed among political figures. We believe that transparency in attention metrics can contribute to a more informed public discourse about who receives our collective focus and why.

"In an age of information abundance, attention becomes the scarce resource."

We use Wikipedia pageview data as our primary metric for several key reasons:

• 1Objectivity: Wikipedia pageviews offer a neutral measurement that is not influenced by algorithmic biases that exist on social media platforms.
• 2Intentionality: Page visits represent deliberate information-seeking behavior rather than passive content consumption.
• 3Global Reach: Wikipedia's multilingual nature allows us to capture attention patterns across diverse audiences worldwide.
• 4Transparency: All data is publicly accessible, making our methodology open to verification and scrutiny.

Our data processing pipeline collects daily pageview statistics through the Wikimedia REST API. We normalize this data to account for overall traffic fluctuations and categorize political figures by relevant attributes such as party affiliation, office, and geographical region.