Decoding cultural production & the Attention Supply Chain
Spending a little time going beyond the basics of attention & effectiveness. Attention isn't simple, it's not binary, and it's not just about time spent with media. Mental processing after exposure matters.
But getting beyond the concept itself, I want to dig into the Attention Supply Chain - where and how are the things people pay attention to coming from today, how are they split across different modes of consuming them, and how do those different experiences relate?
There's plenty more to digest when it comes to the the production of cultural capital when we break free from thinking in formats and look at the total ecosystem (e.g. Narrative Coherence, Persistence, Platform Agnosticism, and World-Building / Derivative Expansion Potential) and audience factors (attentive state, consumption mode, intimacy/parasocial relationship with community or franchise, etc).
But for today, let's look deeper at how ATTENTION FLOW works across places and spaces, using different entertainment franchises. Note, this model works exactly the same for things like News/Politics, but using entertainment here because, well, it's more fun.
Cultural Consciousness is Rewiring Itself
Something fundamental is shifting in how humans process information as a result of fragmentation in the media landscape.
The conventional narrative says we're facing an "attention crisis" - that TikTok is destroying focus, that multitasking is making us stupid, that we need to return to deep, singular concentration. But this is based on a single-node understanding of attention - clear mental focus (or lack) with a singular stimulus. Cognitive processing, or attention, isn't that simple, because humans aren't that simple. We now have access to data that reinforces something more interesting: we're not losing our ability to pay attention amidst the distractions. We're developing patterns for how we process it.
Media consumption is evolving four distinct new patterns: Parallel Processing (the ability to synthesize multiple information streams simultaneously without losing depth), Collective Sense-Making (using distributed intelligence to decode narratives faster and more accurately than individuals), Narrative Threading (following stories across platforms to create unified experiences from fragmented content), and Metamedia Consciousness (maintaining awareness of our own consumption patterns while consuming).
This isn't formats that capture more or less attention. It's not about platforms competing for eyeballs. It's about people developing new patterns of conscious media consumption for entertainment, news, and more, in response to an unprecedented information environment. Understanding these new modes - and flow - of attention might be the key to understanding culture itself.
Parallel Processing: A Multi-Stream Mind
The average Monday Night Football broadcast now involves a fascinating phenomenon. While 15.3 million people watch the game (Nielsen), the full picture is more complex:
8.7 million simultaneously check fantasy statistics (ESPN Fantasy Sports Report)
4.2 million participate in live Twitter/X conversations (Internal Data)
3.1 million engage in Discord channels (Discord Gaming Report)
2.4 million watch alternate commentary streams (Twitch Analytics)
1.8 million create and share memes in real-time (Know Your Meme Analytics)
This isn't distracted viewing - it's orchestrated attention. MIT research reveals that heavy multi-stream users score 34% higher on narrative comprehension tests than single-stream viewers (MIT Media Lab, "Parallel Processing in Digital Natives," 2023). They're not splitting focus; they're synthesizing multiple information streams into a richer understanding.
It's not just sports, reality TV isn't mindless. Take Love Island or The Bachelor as another compelling example. Viewers typically maintain five simultaneous attention streams: the episode itself, TikTok commentary, group chat reactions, background podcast recaps, and meme creation. Yet 78% report feeling more engaged with the content than when watching traditionally (WBD Viewer Research).
Brands seeking to tap into any of these environments need to understand that split focus, and how it precludes other forms of processing - sports may be "high-attention programming" but that's not naturally going to transfer to your ad that appears alongside this content - the mind is working overdrive to integrate each of these different streams of attention into a coherent whole.
In particular, young audiences have developed what researchers call "ambient processing capability" - maintaining multiple attention streams while filtering for relevance across all of them. It's why 73% of Gen Z reports discomfort when limited to single-screen viewing (Pew Research Center, "Gen Z Media Habits"). Their cognitive architecture has adapted to expect parallel inputs.
Collective Sense-Making: The Hive Mind Effect
Modern audiences don't just consume narratives - they collectively decode them. The recent phenomenon around HBO's The Last of Us demonstrated this perfectly. Within 24 hours of each episode:
18,000+ theory posts appeared on Reddit (Reddit Analytics, 2023)
670,000 Twitter discussions emerged (Brandwatch Social Listening Report)
234 YouTube analysis videos launched (YouTube Creator Insider)
2.1 million TikTok views on episode breakdowns (TikTok for Business)
Most remarkably, 81% of viewers reported that community discussion enhanced their understanding of the story's themes (HBO Post-Season Survey). The game's original fanbase created extensive guides for show-only viewers, generating 45 million views on "context you missed" videos (Social Blade Analytics, 2023).
This collective intelligence achieves remarkable accuracy:
True Crime podcast communities solve cases 76% of the time before reveals (Podcast Academy Study, 2023]
Marvel fans predicted 89% of multiverse connections before official confirmation (MCU Fandom Research Project, MIT, 2023)
The Last of Us viewers correctly anticipated 71% of major plot deviations from the game (Fan Theory Accuracy Study, University of Southern California, 2023)
Book communities showcase this even more dramatically. BookTok is more than lists of recommend books - it collectively interprets them. Colleen Hoover's novels generate 3.2 hours of TikTok discussion per hour of reading time (BookTok Analytics Report, 2023). The Fourth Wing fanbase created 12,000 theory documents before the sequel's release, correctly predicting 67% of plot points (Goodreads Community Analysis).
Narrative Threading: The Story Web
Multi-platforming is also giving way to to threaded narratives and non-linear experiences woven together across platforms. This is more than just the format, it's more time, more processing, and more diverging experiences with the culture. Podcasts exemplify this perfectly:
Take My Favorite Murder. Listeners don't just consume the show:
Core episode: 67 minutes average
Facebook group discussions: 34 minutes (Facebook Groups Insighs)
Instagram story updates: 12 minutes (Instagram Business Analytics)
Live show clips on YouTube: 23 minutes (YouTube Analytics)
Fan-created TikToks: 18 minutes (TikTok Creator Fund Report)
Total engagement: 158 minutes for 67 minutes of source content. The podcast has spawned an entire ecosystem where 217 billion annual podcast hours generate an estimated 502 billion hours of total engagement across all platforms (Edison Research, "Infinite Dial"; Cross-Platform Engagement Study, Northwestern University, 2023).
Books demonstrate similar patterns. A reader spending 8 hours with a novel now typically engages:
Goodreads reviews and discussions: 1.3 hours (Goodreads)
BookTok videos: 2.1 hours (TikTok Entertainment Report)
Author Instagram content: 0.8 hours (Publishing Industry Digital Report, 2023)
Podcast interviews with author: 1.5 hours (Podcast Guest Appearance Study, 2023)
Fan fiction/art consumption: 2.7 hours (Archive of Our Own Statistics, 2023)
The "phantom time" for books - the hours spent thinking about, discussing, and creating content around the original text - now averages 3.2 hours per hour read, the highest ratio of any medium (Digital Reading Habits Study, Stanford University).
Metamedia Consciousness: Content About Content
Perhaps most intriguing is the emergence of metamedia consciousness - simultaneously consuming content while analyzing the consumption itself.
Podcasts have become the primary vehicle for this phenomenon:
445 million hours annually are spent listening to Bachelor recap podcasts (analyzing 2.1 billion hours of show content) (Podcast Analytics Collective)
True crime podcasts about other true crime podcasts are the fastest-growing subcategory (Spotify Wrapped for Podcasters)
"Podcast about podcasts" shows generate 89 million annual hours (Apple Podcasts Category Report)
Book review podcasts create 3.4 hours of content per hour of source reading (Literary Podcast Network Analysis)
This recursive attention is most visible in how we discuss podcast listening itself. The subreddit r/podcasts has 2.8 million members primarily discussing their listening habits, recommendations, and analyses of the medium itself (Reddit Community Stats, 2024). We've developed consciousness about our consciousness, creating infinite loops of analysis.
New Attention Patterns are changing our brains
Stanford's neuroplasticity research documents physical changes in heavy multi-stream media users:
23% denser neural connections in the prefrontal cortex
34% faster switching between attention modes
45% improved pattern recognition across disparate data sets
67% higher scores on creative synthesis tests (Stanford Neuroscience Lab, "Digital Native Brain Study," Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 2023)
Interestingly, podcast listeners show the highest neuroplasticity markers, likely because audio processing while multitasking requires more active cognitive engagement than visual media (Audio Processing and Neuroplasticity Study, UC Berkeley, 2023).
New Attention Patterns transform "Time spent" with media
Linear time - where experiences follow sequentially - is giving way to what researchers term "narrative time." Modern attention operates across multiple temporal dimensions:
Phantom Time: Books generate 3.2 phantom hours per reading hour; podcasts generate 2.3 (MIT Media Lab)
Parallel Time: Processing six narrative streams simultaneously
Recursive Time: Re-experiencing content through community analysis
Predictive Time: Experiencing future narratives through collective speculation
A single podcast episode now occupies approximately 5.4 hours of temporal space when including all forms of generated attention (Attention Economics Quarterly, Harvard Business Review).
Time hasn't accelerated - it has developed depth.
How to think differently about brand opportunities in this paradigm?
Success in the evolved attention economy follows clear principles:
Be Additive, Not Interruptive: Add layers to existing attention streams rather than demanding new ones. Like podcasts that can be consumed while doing other activities, brand experiences should enhance rather than replace existing behaviors.
Enable Creation, Don't Just Push Content: User-generated content around brands generates 12x more engagement than brand-created content (Creator Economy Report). Provide tools, frameworks, and reasons for audiences to create.
Respect the Recursion: Audiences will analyze, critique, and recontextualize everything. Brands that design for this - creating content worth analyzing - thrive. Those that resist it appear cognitively primitive.
Think Ecosystem, Not Campaign: Single-platform campaigns feel incomplete to parallel processors. Design for experiences that naturally flow across platforms, enabling audiences to engage how they prefer.
This isn't a crisis of distraction or a temporary cultural phase. It's evolution, driven by an information environment that demands new processing capabilities.
And what it's becoming is something complicated yet accessible: a networked, parallel-processing, collectively intelligent, self-aware form of consciousness that blends every model we've used to understand media, culture, and communication.
The attention economy isn't running out of attention. It's inventing new kinds of it. Understanding this evolution - and designing for it - may be the most important challenge facing anyone who seeks to create, communicate, or connect in the 21st century.
