The world is filled with images, words and numbers vying for our attention — we live in a global marketplace of ideas that is incredibly crowded, and a large part of our daily transactions are the invisible ones — where our attention is sold by big corporations like Google and Facebook.

 

Nobody knows that better than today's college students. Everyday we make choices between watching lectures or Netflix; reading textbooks or reading the news -- and these choices follow patterns and have repercussions, even if we don't realise it. There are benefits to consuming all these varied forms of information coming our way, and motivations for them to exist, and to understand activism -- we need to understand it's position in the media market.

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According to the research of Anthony Downs, the author of 'An Economic Theory of Democracy' (1957), the media market is characterised by four information demands:

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1. Consumer Demands

2. Producer Demands

3. Entertainment Demands

4. Civic Information Demands

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The first three demands have something in common: when a person consumes these forms of information, the benefit from knowing this information goes to the person. There are many examples that can illustrate this -- if a consumer reads about which phone is the best, they benefit from that information because they can make a more informed decision. If an architect reads 'Architecture Monthly', they become a better producer. And when we choose to spend hours scrolling through memes or binge watching Gilmore Girls, we benefit from the enjoyment it gives us.  

Because these information needs have this kind of internalised reward, the supply for them meets the demand, and there is no net loss to society. 

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But civic information is different. 

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Civic information, or voter information, is the information that we need to be better citizens. This kind of information often gets characterised as 'hard news' and is the kind of journalism that gives the press the reputation of being a watchdog in a democracy. 

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It is vital. It is complex.

And more often than not, it's ignored.

 

In his book, 'All the news that's fit to sell', Stanford professor James T Hamilton argues that this is because the benefits from knowing these things -- what your representative is voting for, what the policy ideas of a Presidential candidate are -- are diffused through society. And the cost of investing time to consume and understand this news isn't repaid to the individual -- so everyone just hopes that someone else is reading the serious news. 

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This framework of civic information can also be applied to activist information -- because we as a society would be better off if people were aware of the problems activists are talking about, but each of us wants to free ride of off others. In other words, the cause is important and we hope it succeeds -- we just hope other people show up at the protest. 

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This is important to understand for two reasons: one, to understand the competition activists face when trying to catch people's attention, and second, to understand how from the very beginning, activists start from a position of disadvantage.