Source: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/0...

The free economy is, in fact, an economy of the bartered self. But attention can never be limitless. Kaliouby put me in touch with Thales Teixeira, the business professor who collaborated with her, and we met at the Harvard Club in New York. “There are three major fungible resources that we as individuals have,” he said. “The first is money, the second is time, and the third is attention. Attention is the least explored.” Teixeira had recently tried to calculate the value of attention, and found that, like the dollar, its price fluctuated. Using Super Bowl ads as a rough indicator of the high end of the market, he determined that in 2010 the price of an American’s attention was six cents per minute. By 2014, the rate had increased by twenty per cent—more than double inflation. The jump had obvious implications: attention—at least, the kind worth selling—is becoming increasingly scarce, as people spend their free time distracted by a growing array of devices. And, just as the increasing scarcity of oil has led to more exotic methods of recovery, the scarcity of attention, combined with a growing economy built around its exchange, has prompted R. & D. in the mining of consumer cognition. “What people in the industry are saying is ‘I need to get people’s attention in a shorter period of time,’ so they are trying to focus on capturing the intensity of it,” Teixeira explained. “People who are emotional are much more engaged. And because emotions are ‘memory markers’ they remember more. So the idea now is shifting to: how do we get people who are feeling these emotions?”

Many companies are moving to take advantage of this shift. “We put together a patent application for a system that could dynamically price advertising depending on how people responded to it,” Kaliouby told me one afternoon. I found more than a hundred other patents for emotion-sensing technology, many of them tied to advertising. Represented: A.O.L., Hitachi, eBay, I.B.M., Yahoo!, and Motorola. Sony had filed several; its researchers anticipated games that build emotional maps of players, combining data from sensors and from social media to create “almost dangerous kinds of interactivity.” There were patents for emotion-sensing vending machines, and for A.T.M.s that would understand if users were “in a relaxed mood,” and receptive to advertising. Anheuser-Busch had designed a responsive beer bottle, because sports fans at games “wishing to use their beverage containers to express emotion are limited to, for example, raising a bottle to express solidarity with a team.”