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Yo - Pay Attention!
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.
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.