Yo - Pay Attention!

It used to be simple to know what we were supposed to pay attention to. We usually relied on third-party judgments by gatekeepers and screeners -- journalists, producers, academics -- to tell us what we needed to know. Technology has changed all of that. Soon, the products, services or information judged worthy of people's attention may be those whose providers pay the most money. Business, magazines, websites, software developers, entertainment companies may soon be paying you to pay attention to their creations, rather than the other way around.

For centuries, we saw information as something valuable, something worth paying for; we subscribed to the newspaper, read the ad, bought the movie ticket. But very soon, people may not even be able to give data away.

Buying attention is already an accepted part of doing business, says a new book called The Attention Economy, especially on "a planet with over five hundred TV channels and a trillion Web pages." Attention-getting and screening are becoming a profession all of its own.

Already, search engines like AltaVista can exchange favorable placement in search results for a fee. And publishers have paid Amazon for years for prominent attention of new books (they also pay book chains for placement of new books up front.). It's not hard to imagine a publisher paying a subscriber $50 to get their magazine for two years, rather than the other way around. They would still charge for ads, but ensure a steady subscription base. The attention crisis is becoming so severe that people will have to be paid to receive information. Davenport and Beck suggest this is, to some degree, inevitable.

It's no accident that we're the first society to develop widespread ADD. The controversies shrouding this disorder aside, the very idea would have seemed absurd in the pre-electronic, pre-digital era. It was boredom and ignorance that was epidemic. This is a culture drowning in instant, overwhelming information; losing its ability to figure out what, if anything, to pay attention to. We live in an Attention Economy, with forces on both sides -- sellers and transmitters, consumers and buyers -- struggling over how to manage attention.

The risks of not managing attention are enormous, as countless dot.coms, like traditional businesses before them, have recently learned. Educational institutions know, whether they admit it or not, that many of their students are paying less attention to their curriculums. Citizens pay less attention all the time to civics and voting. Media consumers spend less time reading papers, magazines, watching the evening news. Companies spend billions to design elaborate marketing strategies simply to get consumers to recognize their names, let alone believe their message or buy their products.

It's an increasingly difficult mission. Over the past generation, the amount of electronic information available to everyone has exploded. Executives and managers in particular get bombarded by much more data than they can possibly organize or use. Ditto for consumers, who flounder through sites and databases that sell and rate consumer goods, offer medical and legal information, facilitate research of almost every conceivable kind.

In fact, some information scholars -- like Thomas H. Davenport, director of the Accenture Institute for Strategic Change and John C. Beck of the UCLA's Anderson School of Management -- believe that the new currency of business is creating products and environments that understand the attention span of contemporary humans -- especially those in cyberspace -- and can get them to focus on data.

"Both on the Internet and in more traditional media like television, viewer attention is exchanged for money thousands of times a day," write Davenport and Beck in "The Attention Economy: A New Perspective on Business," published by the Harvard University Press. "Anyone who wants to sell something or persuade someone to do something has to invest in the attention markets. If I want the attention of a large group of customers, I try to get it by paying to monopolize their TV screens, Web pages, mailboxes, and ultimately their brains."

This issue goes way beyond business, though, and getting people's attention is increasingly tough to do. Attention has psychological and bio-chemical limits, and the hype culture is bombarding people with images and messages all of the time. The competition for attention grows daily, even though we only have so much attention to go around. Even the rare boss who gets 100 percent of her employees' attention will fail if she -- or her employees -- can't secure her customers' attention as well.

The authors offer some inventive ideas about managing attention. Education, they predict, will adopt briefer, more varied learning experiences, instead of the traditional lectures that "numb the brain's of today's students." A classroom, they suggest, might be outfitted with a panel of lights at the teacher's workstation, one light corresponding to each student's seat. When brain wave monitors not that a student is paying attention, his light will be green. If the student's attention lags and the light goes red, the teacher can engage the student by asking a question, focusing his voice in the student's direction, or using high-tech graphics or other tools. (This gives one pause, given the post-Columbine hysteria. In U.S. schools, teachers would probably zap kids who were bored rather than challenge them.)

Business will also have to radically alter their existing practices and methods. Since people pay attention most to things they develop and "own," companies have to start including consumers in the decision process at every stage.

Advertisers and other Net business entities are already finding that the "free cash and prizes just for looking at our ad or Web site" tactic is becoming obsolete. Those eyeballs have to be converted to names, subscriptions or memberships, credit card numbers.

Politicians, increasingly frustrated by more entertaining competition for citizen attention, turn to negative advertising or sensational accusations. Once-serious media organizations increasingly focus on scandal, weather and pet stories to gain market share and individual attention. Jerry Springer has always understood how to get people to focus.

So how do you get people to pay attention? By learning individual users' needs, demographics, insights, buying habits, responses to Web design; by hearing their complaints and kudos. Online advertising has to engage the viewer before it can lead to behavior change.

Pop-up ads annoy the hell out of a lot of online users, but they're impossible to ignore, while spam is not only simple to ignore, but something many consumers don't want to reward or encourage. Ads that feature the interests of the user and offer them services that are genuine and necessary are even better.

Anybody who's spent time online in the past few years doesn't need to be told that younger, wired Americans have different attention spans than their elders. They find conventional classroom formats suffocating. They zap away from commercials and mindless programming.They skip from website to website, write messages and chat responses that seem relentlessly shorter and faster; they're almost allergic to the bombardment of warnings, messages and exhortations that pass for news in our media.

Yet even the young are snareable. Personalization -- information that seems created for them alone -- is one way to compel attention. When a message's context is personalized, relating to a group the receiver belongs to or is interested in, or related to a question he or she is concerned about, the messages are often perceived as trustworthy or respected, influential or powerful, charismatic or appealing.

As for the recipient, according to Davenport and Beck, he or she is emotionally moved by the message, able to consider its meaning and implications, convinced that the message is important.

But most communications meet few, if any, of these criteria, so few people pay much attention to the overwhelming majority of messages they receive, often generated at enormous cost to wasteful affect.

That makes Attention Consciousness a hot new field in business, culture, education and politics. Politicians, CEO's, and Web designers who figure out how to incorporate attention-getting principles into their work are likely to prosper. But people and companies who indiscriminately send data out into the ether are wasting their money and our time. They are the next business casualties of the 21st Century.

Clearly, more information will require more delegation. Attention-sorting services will likely be in great demand as consumers look for help in organizing the tidal wave of information pouring over them.

But trading attention for free goods and services -- a favorite tactic of many first generation Net businesses -- is a devil's bargain. If attention is a scarce commodity, people will quickly realize that they shouldn't trade it away lightly. The trend of more information for competing for less attention can't go on indefinitely. The laws of physics and science dictate that people will ultimately begin to withdraw from the stress and complexity of an attention-devouring universe. Information providers will have to focus on quality, not quantity. People will seek respite from and alternatives to Hyperreality, the state fueled by too much media and data. The world may actually calm down, become quieter. The very rich will be able to live in attention-conservation zones, the authors say, and ordinary people will vacation in environments in which their attention can be devoted solely to people and things they love and enjoy.

In the end, the greatest prize for being able to capture attention will be the freedom to avoid it.

Comments

Re:ADD == total fabrication

[Black Jack Hyde]

Some shrink's kid doesn't want to eat her vegetables, throws a fit when forced to eat them, and the shrink writes a book about it, circa 1989. Parents and non-parents rejoice, because now it's not their fault they or their children have the attention span of a rabid ferret on a triple espresso. We can treat this with a pill!

This so-called disorder wasn't diagnosed, it was created. Somehow humanity went a few millennium without having to administer Ritalin like M&Ms. Now the first time a child demonstrates boredom or pique, parents and teachers want to start the prescriptions.

And the grown-ups "affected by ADD" are even worse. Sheesh.

Here's a cure for ADD, and in the spirit of the Net I offer it gratis: go out and do a month's worth of manual labor, 7 days a week, 12 hours a day, regardless of weather or other environmental variables. You'll emerge with a laser-like focus for the most minute aspects of life. And no ADD.

Jack

Audio Time Compression - keep it short !!!!!!

[gelfling]

I read an interview last year with some engineers who pioneered audio timeslice compression technology that's used in commercial audio editing. The basic problem was that they needed to insert a sound byte of 60 seconds or so into a segment 40 seconds long w/o chipmunking it. So they figured out a way to slice out every third millisecond and playback the segments seamlessly. The 40 second boundary was the limit of what people were going to pay attention to.

Similarly a big problem for channels like MTV, BET is that few people watch a video for more than 2 minutes so whatever product they have has to fit close to that or at least not be materially harmed from a commercial perspective if the audience only listens to the first 2 minutes - eg. people will still buy it.

Wonder why...

[rnturn]

...this is such an Earth-shattering discovery. Anyone who'd been paying attention (if you're still able to, that is :-) ) could have seen this coming.

Television programming has been including more and more commercial content for years. Then there's infomercials. (Do people outside the U.S. have these oddities on their TVs?) Should ADD be blamed on Madison Avenue? MTV? Something in McDonald's hamburgers? Who knows. But the increasingly shrill nature of TV commercials (IMHO) and the number of ads you're seeing on most web pages nowadays, especially the increase in the number of those that are animated, seem to me to indicate that these folks seeking my attention are getting quite desperate. But we're tuning them out anyway. Perhaps our minds are erecting a protective barrier against the onslaught of information. If that's the case, greater efforts in making these attention getters more appealing (if one could use that word to describe a commercial) or memorable are just a waste of time.

As for adding technology to classrooms, as in Katz's posting:

``...outfitted with a panel of lights at the teacher's workstation, one light corresponding to each student's seat. When brain wave monitors not that a student is paying attention, his light will be green. If the student's attention lags and the light goes red, the teacher can engage the student by asking a question, focusing his voice in the student's direction, or using high-tech graphics or other tools.''

Looking past the outright stupidity of such a proposal, less, and not more (IMHO), technology in the classroom would be a far preferable solution to the attention problem. Some would say that the explosion of new technologies in peoples' lives may be the source of all the ADD that's being diagnosed. Who needs the teacher keeping one eye on a magic board to tell him who's bored? That's the last thing the students need is something providing a distraction from the teacher's primary job. I had a thermodynamics professor who had a quite a low-tech means of engaging student's attention: If he saw you weren't paying attention, or even busy taking notes when he thought you'd be better off listening more attentively, he'd merely fire off a piece of chalk in your general direction. Got your attention and you tried not to let any more chalk projectiles fly past your ear. No expensive electronic classroom gizmos were necessary. And the money that would have been wasted on such a silly piece of technology went to pay for better educators.

Wean children off the technology that's supposed to be making it easier for them to learn (but are actually just high-tech spoon feeding programs) and perhaps the occurances of ADD will decline. My family just moved and I haven't installed an antenna for the TV and we haven't wanted to pay for cable. I've actually seen a difference in my daughters behaviour in the few weeks that our house has been without the rapid-fire, designed-for-those-with-short-attention-span, programming. And, amazingly, we've all managed to remain sane, happy, and productive. Much to the consternation, I'm sure, of the advertising agencies. (And, No, I wouldn't consider us Luddites. I think the 100baseT network of seven computers would get us kicked out of that club.)

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"Boredom and Ignorance" are MODERN problems

[Zach Frey]

It's no accident that we're the first society to develop widespread ADD.

Exactly. When we train children from practically birth to focus on pretty flashing lights and bleeping noises, anything that doesn't involve pretty flashing lights and bleeping noises becomes tough to pay attention to. In fact, anything else starts to seem ... BORING.

The controversies shrouding this disorder aside, the very idea would have seemed absurd in the pre-electronic, pre-digital era. It was boredom and ignorance that was epidemic.

Sorry, Jon, but you are displaying your own ignorance here. Life was not, contrary to what Hollywood would have us believe, insufferable tedium until the harnessing of the electron. And I'm not convinced that "ignorance" has declined over the last century. Who is more ignorant, a 2001 teen who knows where all the weapons caches are in Quake III, but thinks food comes from grocery stores, or the rural teen of the last century (or the Amish today) who would be mystified by the computer, but read the newspaper and actually understood the myriad complex tasks involved in a farming household.

This is a culture drowning in instant, overwhelming information; losing its ability to figure out what, if anything, to pay attention to.

Right. We are bombarded with a constant barrage of information, most of which is useless and much of which is not even true. Meanwhile, we have lost silence and the time and ability to actually reflect on what matters.

But think for a minute: What could be more boring than this constant barrage? (The channel-surfer complaint: "500 channels and there's nothing on!!!???) And what could be a better definition of ignorance than not even knowing what merits attention?

Modern man is staggering and losing his balance because he is being pelted with little pieces of alleged fact which are native to the newspapers; and, if they turn out not to be facts, that is still more native to newspapers.
-- G. K. Chesterton

Solution to it all

[joq]

Give em all "e-ritalin"

This mentality in education is frightening

[Mano1KAges]

Having this kind of "business" consumers vs. sellers mentality in education could really contribute to a descrease in the quality of that education. I know that concept has been prominent here at Penn State University--that the students are consumers who pay for a service, that is, their education. Unfortunately, this has created lazier students who demand higher grades, because students realize that they are in control. Trying to compete with the Internet, television, and other forms of media to compel students can only make the situation worse.

It is no secret that the classroom experience, for the most part, bores students when compared to the high-paced, personalized media of today's mass media market. But I don't think the answer to captivating students is to integrate and use this technology as a replacement for traditional teaching methods. Once the education system tries to compete with mass media for young people's attention, it sets itself up to become a competitor, which could be a very dangerous game to play. Whereas media has in many ways taken a presentation-over-content approach in order to gain viewship, education cannot afford to compromise subject matter in an attempt to "defeat" television, Internet, etc. To do so is to compromise one of the very foundations of education.

I'm certainly not arguing that the new forms of media have nothing to offer in education; quite the contrary, they can be a powerful tool when used as a supplement. Technology allows the presentation to be altered, the content to be more easily accessible (class notes on a web page, online discussion forums). Nonetheless, it is important to keep the distinction between the two. I mean, imagine if class were like the Internet...students looking at a large monitor as the professor jumped from page to page, each with vital information. But what if in an attempt to keep the students interest, the professor only spent about five seconds on each page? Most of the information would be skipped, lost. As Brooks said in The Shawshank Redemption, "The world went and got itself in a big damn hurry." If that mentality overtakes the education system, it'll be even worse off than it already is.

Re:Nobody pays for my eyeballs :(

[scoove]

You're not the only one. We turned ours off - after trying digital cable for a year only to realize that the overused complaint about "500+ channels of nothing" was horribly true.

It was amusing, however, turning in the digital cable boxes but keeping the cable modem and phone service (which also comes thru the cable line). The cable provider didn't know what to do!

The fellow at the counter who I returned the boxes to thought at first I must be a "disconnected for nonpayment" - since NO ONE returns their cable tv voluntarily. He looked up in puzzlement and said "But... your account is fine!"

Then he figured I must be moving, and wondered where the cable modem was. He couldn't understand that I was keeping that but not the TV. He had to ask a supervisor how to credit the return of the digital TV converters but not the cable modem - and in fact told me I'd have to buy it so they could resolve the account.

The final proof of their confusion was when they disconnected my TV... by chopping the wire in back of my house (immediately killing the live phone and cable modem). A lengthy discussion with the customer service supervisor indicated that they simply don't have a process contingency for people who want phone and Internet, but not TV.

Yes, you're not doing your part for society if you're not staring at TV advertisements every evening! ("Don't make me tape those eyeballs to the screen!")

*scoove*

All right, Jon...

[pingflood]

I read the whole thing -- where's my dollar?

What planet are you from?

[Ars-Fartsica]

Soon, the products, services or information judged worthy of people's attention may be those whose providers pay the most money.

Please don't tell me you are so naive as to not know that it has always been this way.

Re:what was that all about?

[Golias]

How about if I summarize all of Jon Katz's articles for you.

"I perceive that there is a trend occurring in America, because there is an element of our culture which I just became aware of, so it must be a new thing. By telling you about it, I am a journalist, but better than most journalists because I am into that whole Open Source thing that all the kids seem to be talking about these days.

Anyway, everything bad, frightening and/or dangerous about this trend, which I (nobody else) have boldly discovered, is the fault of Corporate Greed. We are in grave immeditate danger of becoming slaves to a Corporatist state. Boo!

Also, everything good, interesting, or revolutionary about this trend is the result of young people, who obviously have more energy, creativity, and all-around coolness than me, so I am trying to associate myself with this new trend of theirs so I can feel that I am superior to all those other aging Boomer journalists, who are just slaves to the Corporate State. By the way, if somebody from Wired is reading this, can I have my job back? Look at how many responses my Slashdot columns get! I can really bring in a lot of eyeballs for your ad revenue."

You are now free to skim all future Katz articles and read the vastly more interesting discussions which follow them.

what was that all about?

[Sebastopol]

What was the author blathering about? I only read a few lines of the article then got bored. Can someone summarize it for me?


---

I'll take a subscription to Playboy

[SomeoneGotMyNick]

They don't even have to pay me the $50 subscription bonus.

Newsstand attendant: Are you going to buy that Playboy magazine!!"
Me: I'm only looking at the pictures....

What was he saying?

[tdye]

I tried to read this, but there were flashy thingies at the top of the screen, and little square things with stuff to click on the sides. And I just got more email. Was I reading something...? Ohyeah, I read some of it, but, umm...

what was I saying? Something about an X-10 webcam... wait... now I'm typing..

nevermi