It's Not Everything

It's difficult to find a television these days that isn't "smart;" meaning that it's connected to the Internet, is sending information about what one watches on it to someone else and is designed to be a conduit for targeted advertising. And now this same mindset is, unsurprisingly, coming for computer monitors as well.

Near the end of the Ars Technica story I was reading on how LG had been pushing advertisements into monitors, and what this could mean for smart monitors, the author makes the following point:

Ads and OSes [Operating Systems] could one day help drive down the price of monitors, as they did TVs.

I get it, but this presumes that price begins and ends with the amount of money one pays for something. If a monitor, or a television, for that matter, is set up so that I have to engage with advertising for some amount of time before I can do what I set out to do, that's also a price to be paid. The fact that it isn't a monetary cost doesn't change that.

A number of services and whatnot on the web are described as "free," because they don't require uses to open their wallets, or grant access to their bank accounts in order to use them. But money is not the only measure of price, despite that social convention. The whole idea behind the concept of the "attention economy" is that attention has value... generally speaking, it's only organizations that are seeking attention without offering anything in return that actively promote the idea that it's valueless.

But a lot of people passively promote the idea. I don't Scharon Harding, for example, doesn't see attention as having no value, but casting trading attention for monetary payment as a way of driving down the price conveys that idea. Which gets in the way of people understanding that they are, in fact, paying something, and can make the same sorts of cost-benefit and value for value calculations they would for anything else. After all, it's well understood that businesses place a dollar amount on the time they can get (or require) that people watch advertising for things they likely don't want. Why shouldn't the public at large?