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The Poverty Of Attention
There are thousands of working actors, but most of us only have the mental means and technological devices to pay attention to a handful -- names like Cruise, Roberts, Affleck. There are plenty of athletes, but only a dozen or so -- Shaq, A-Rod, Tiger -- are familiar to the public beyond sports fans. The same is true of software or computer games like Quake and Tomb Raider. And in politics, attention consciousness or lack thereof is upending civics. Only a few leading candidates get widespread attention or are considered electable.
And of all the technology companies vying for their dollars, most Americans can only name Microsoft, AOL or IBM.
In the U.S. and other wired countries especially, this reflects a cultural and civic attention deficit. Attention Consciousness is the growing realization that the new economy depends as much on gathering attention as it does on selling particular services, because if the first isn't done, the second becomes irrelevant.
This largely Net-generated change is as important as it is ironic. The poverty of attention is changing society, and is often misundertood. Younger people in particular are often derided as apathetic or ignorant, but the brutal truth is that their new information lives are much more interesting than the old civic and entertainment options.
Social and political activists complain they can't get the media or citizens to pay attention to political issues. This seems indisputably true, but they might do better to learn about Attention Consciousness than to lament widespread apathy. There's a growing mismatch of supply and demand that has already led to a constantly-worsening attention deficit. Most people have no way of processing vast amounts of information effectively; most of us are already confused about how to allocate our attention effectively. Software, people and services that can do that for us are in urgent demand, and they should grow and prosper.
When there is competition, those who seek attention turn to the most reliable magnets: sex, calamity, scandal, confrontation. Everybody paid attention to the Monica Lewinsky scandal, even though it ultimately wound up having little real civic significance beyond the act of presidential impeachment itself. Yet the attention paid to the social impact of the decoded human genome or the global AIDS crisis was a fraction as great. There's been even less focus on new issues involving attention itself. Few people online paid attention to the l996 Digital Millenium Copyright Act bulled through by entertainment industry lobbyists, even though it probably had more direct impact on Net content than any other single act or law in recent years.
This is partly a result of the new Attention Economy we started writing about a couple of weeks ago.
As scholars Thomas Davenport and John Beck found in their book The Attention Economy, every economy has organizational and individual participants, and the attention market qualifies as an economy in that respect. Organizations participate in this economy when they want to attract the attention of customers, partners, investors or employees. But in the new Attention Economy, each individual also becomes a player, especially when it comes to technology. We are all information providers, trying to attract the attention of friends, family members, customers, employers. Those who can gain it -- Jobs, Grove, Andreesen, Torvalds - do well. Those who can't struggle or even disappear.
Attention doesn't automatically mean success, though: Andreesen's business ventures have struggled, as have some of Grove's, and Open Source has yet to reach a commercial critical mass. As wealth is glorified -- and gets attention -- people become hungry for other ideas and ideals, which then also get attention. But not always as much, or as profitably: corporatism is now so inextricably linked to the Attention Economy that it's brutally difficult to compete.
In the Attention Economy, the qualities that lure attention are not necessarily the finest. Sheer brilliance, generosity, innovation or ethical behavior rarely generate much attention. What counts more is impact, utility, timing and presentation.
The hard reality is that there is only so much attention to go around. It can only be increased in small increments, either by stretching humans' mental capacities or by increasing the number of humans on the planet. Just as the Attention Economy concentrates disproportionate attention on a handful of celebrities who know to get attention, it marginalizes everybody else. That means more and more attention will be paid to fewer and fewer people, and information and services will tend to become homogenized for most people. How many different kinds of gasoline, for example, can you actually buy for your car? How different is the programming from one TV network to another?
Talented people have always generated attention -- in the summer, Spielberg and Lucas come to mind -- but they were innovative, successful in creative as well as financial ways. E.T. and Star Wars arrived a bit before the Attention Economy had fully bloomed. Now they all face difficult issues of independence, integrity and compromise. It takes more marketing, more revenues, more of everything to assure a blockbuster now, and the tie-ins surrounding the Star Wars films got nauseating a couple of episodes ago, undermining the credibility of the idea itself. As great as the series has been, it sometimes seems that half the characters were conceived as premiums to be sold with Happy Meals or Whoppers. The Attention Economy is ravenous.
This has enormous implications for technology. Which applications from genome research is the public likely to focus on? Those that promote health and well-being, or those that promote beauty and longevity? Which software merits attention: the genuinely innovative and empowering, or the latest product mass-marketed by Microsoft?
Beyond sensationalism and whorish marketing, how can smaller entrepeneurs, events and products gain attention?
By paying people. Magazines, websites or TV shows could simply offer users a fee to eyeball their products regularly (there are ways to track this) rather than the other way around. Open Source may well be one of the culture ideas that has to pay it's way into the Attention Economy.
And somewhat more obviously, attention comes to things that provide real utility. Customers paid plenty of attention to the car, the Web Browser, the phone and to the Net itself, simply because they wanted mobility or instant communication. Revolution gets attention. But that kind of revolution occurs rarely.
Meanwhile, narcissistic, me-to-me media have become fashionable online, the newest example of the confusion between what's neat and what's significant. As good as many of them are, outside of their creators they don't command much attention. But modern corporations like Microsoft and AOL Time-Warner manufacture attention as much as anything else. They can do this by advertising, by the sales of synergistic products, or by political and media lobbying. They have the skills to manipulate regulators, elected officials and journalists and the money to bombard our consciousness with advertising and marketing. Af if that stops working, they may be the first to start sending us checks.
For hundreds of years, attention has been a luxury or a by-product. Now it's become one of the most valuable commodities in the world. That suggests the people who will be the most successful at gaining attention are those with the deepest pockets to pay for it.
Could someone maybe summarize that piece for me? I only had time to skim it. Whoa - check out that Moutain Dew ad! Gotta go.
This technologically-driven ADD is transforming politics, entertainment, sports and culture.
There is only so much attention to go around, and we are being bombarded with more information all the time.
No one with ADD could possibly finish reading a Katz column though!
So tell me, is there only so much attention to go around?
Stop keeping us in suspense!
WWJD? JWRTFM!!!
The problem of a short attention span or information overload will not be solved at the organizational or technological level.
It will be solved by every single person individually.
Next time your TV goes to commercial, mute it, get up, and go get a glass of water. You have just cut off all the meaningless advertisements the TV is pouring at you. It is far easier than Katz seems to think to just ignore the "bombardment" of information. The advertising and media industries have not (yet) tied us to chairs and taped our eyes open, Clockwork Orange-style.
And as someone else pointed out, if there is demand for alternative, someone will provide it. MSNBC and friends have huge pointless affiliate sidebars and banner ads displacing the article text, Slashdot has ONE banner ad per page (and usually better content to boot).
In short, this article attributes far too much power to the media and far too little willpower to the audience. Just walk away.
(there are ways to track this)
(reread the 4th to last paragraph if you missed this part)
...was the only comment in this entire essay that was interesting enough to be worth my attention out of the 5 or so minutes it took me to read all of it. At yet Katz didn't think it was worth HIS attention any more than the parenthetical that it got.
I'm not a smorgasbord.
I'd bet good money that over 50% of the college students in the U.S. have never heard of any of the people you mentioned.
Touche'!
=)
Geez! This is old news. Plato already covered this very issue in Phaedrus when he discussed the dangers of writing: "...for this discovery [writing] of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories;"
So in the Internet age history is doomed to repeat itself in a matter of hours instead of years. Besides, I have more important things to do like watch Angry Beavers than read something about spootheads who have no attention.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
Mr. Katz, how do you pick titles for your articles? Do you use Scrabble tiles and see what words you can make, or do you just flip through the dictionary and pick random words?
When problems arise with respect to information, it is not information that is the problem. It is attempts by others to control the information that you get that is the problem. I realize that this is a somewhat pedantic point, but if you don't get your terms straight when you start a line of reasoning, the line of reasoning tends to derail into something nonsensical. I think you're onto something here, but you really need to be more rigorous in your reasoning, or your conclusions aren't going to provide us with any meaningful guidance - they'll just be pretty noise.
A long article about attention deficit. Hmmmm. I'd like to make an informed, interesting comment, but my attention wandered long before I finished it.
Information is what we pay attention to. Everything else is bullcrap.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
http://www.fit2read.com -- shameless plug ;)
http://radio.userland.com/
http://www.vertexdev.com/HeadlineViewer/
http://www.newsdart.com/index.php3
This is notion is as superficial as all of the entities that are trying to get our attention in the first place. The most important thing we can teach kids is treat their attention with as much care as their own dignity or self-respect, because most of the time, it's about nothing more than one more attempt to get their money. What they'll often get in exchange is a sense of self that is based on a series of prefabricated, contrived distractions, rather than anything substantive. Where kids are concerned, they need to learn, overall, that the marketing engine is there to manipulate them, and nothing more.
This is exactly how I feel. I just thought you'd like to know you're not alone. :)
<p>PS-I don't usually have time to post comments because I'm reading everyone else's.
"... I declare our city to be a free and independent state to be named Tri-Insula!" --Fernando Wood, Mayor of NYC 1861
10) Do not play games.
9) if you can't follow rule 10, don't play non-aerobic games.
8) if you fail to observe rules 9 and 10, don't play drinking games.
7) if you blow off rules 8-10, don't play computer games.
6) OK, well, don't play any Sid Meier games.
5) at least don't play first-person shooters!
4) don't have a job or social life.
3) don't even consider having children.
2) don't read any Jon Katz articles
1) DON'T IRC (it causes hairy palms anyway).
--Charlie
Ok, so some of ya don't like Katz. Big deal, get over it, if he's so damn bad then why do ya read what he writes? As far as I'm concerned you can go away, stop bellyachin, and find something to do with your time.
Now, on with the regularly scheduled program...
Katz makes some valid points. I've noticed this trend on attention also. We are inundated daily with all kinds of attention getting mechanisms to the point where it's just a real pain in the ass to deal with. Everywhere you go your faced with advertisements for one thing or another. It used to be bad enough when it was just consumer items being advertised, but now there's a growing trend for political or religious advertisements put up by anybody who can pony up the money to broadcast to the world their own little assinine message or parrot the trend du jour. On top of this are the seemingly innoculour 'info' advertisements for various technologies (emergent or otherwise). You can't even surf the web without having an irritating pop up ad window crapping up your machine till you can click it away like a perverted version of whack-a-mole. None of it makes me more likely to buy, subscribe to, or get all touch-feely than I was before. As far as I'm concerned the value of a product, idea, or information is in inverse proportion to the attempts to get it attention. If your product is selling well, and making a profit there's no real need to advertise. If your ideology is really noteworthy it won't need advertisements to get it recognized. If your trend du jour is meaningfull enough it won't need the advertisements either. Attention getting simply signals items on the decline.
Let the usual snide frat-boy, aids activist, linux activist, diety activist, etc... responses begin!
Steve's Computer Service, Hobbs, NM
To Katz? Nahhhhh..
Oops, wait....
"Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm." - Anonymous
Then we all agree then, there ain't no Nobel prize given out in Economic Sciences or whatever you want to call it.
I am of course well aware of the honorary prizes, but they are just that, and calling them "Nobel prizes" is wrong.
That was my point.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
so...
Belief is the currency of delusion.
JON SUCKS!
Sorry, I'd have an intelligent conmment, but Jon still isn't paying me to read his stuff. Send me a few dollars via PayPal and then I'll come back.
:^)
-- Gordon Worley
Mindshare==good.- -
-------------------------------
Only in America will someone order a
Big Mac, large fries, and a Diet Coke.
From chaos comes clarity -- Nick Hexum, 311 - "From Chaos"
"This amp is special, see all the knobs go up to 11, that means it is one louder than other amps"
Add another case to the anti-drug argument - I am a thoroughly unhappy person on medication, and I only take it when I'm in a business situation that I need to take care of that wouldn't involve fun anyway. In the end, I wind up having pride and confidence for getting the job done, which is a lot better than being happily unfocused and then a failure.
And you're right about how ADD is induced by jumping around from topic to topic. I found that I was a far better student in my two-course winter sessions than in my five-course semesters... and the workload:time ratio was about the same for each, maybe heavier for the winter sessions. I think our high school system is a failure for that reason too... You can't expect a kid to take 7 serious subjects plus gym and lunch and work to their peak performance in anything. It's a waste of youth, no wonder the kids all smoke weed today...
hahaha... I have a problem with verbose posts. Apparently, my condition doesn't disable me from writing... it prevents me from keeping my ideas brief and manageable at times.
Not now though. I already started drinking.
... the usage of the term "technologically driven ADD". This trivializes Attention Deficit Disorder. I have what you would call "biologically driven ADD", and in the past year alone I've had many smart, respectable people tell me that ADD is a load of bullshit and an excuse for people who choose not to perform well. This usage of the term just makes it sound like the term ADD can be applied to any situation where people don't focus as much as other people would like them to. Plus, it's used carelessly and reinforces the idea that it's a throwaway term.
ADD is a true condition... not a "get out of jail free" card for when you fail to live up to your responsibilities, but a personal problem which must be overcome to achieve goals in life. Many people fail to acknowledge the fact that many people put a lot of effort into overcoming symptoms related to ADD, more effort than their non-ADD peers... but are quick to pounce on someone when they fail to overcome their personal difficulties exacerbated by symptoms of ADD. Again, I'm not saying people with ADD should get special priviledges, but it's not fake, and it certainly is a learning disability that should be accomodated for and not discriminated against - WITHOUT lowering the expectations of the individual. Handicapped people are still expected to do their own food shopping in most cases, but at least they have special parking spaces in front of the store. People with ADD, on the other hand, are routinely fired, kicked out of school, and rejected in social circles for problems related to ADD. Yes, it's unfortunate that kindergarten age children are fed amphetamines at any time they don't behave (yes it works in reverse too... ADD is also applied blithely and mistakenly as a brand to people who don't conform or act as expected), but two wrongs don't make a right.
I know this looks like an offtopic troll, but society throws around the term ADD yet doesn't respect the condition. And the Slashdot crowd is particularly arrogant about such things... I'm about to get flamed and modded straight to hell for this. But I would appreciate it if people would use the word "jaded" instead of referencing ADD in these cases. ADD is serious and I fully resent the overuse and jargonizing of the word. It's exactly why I've had mature, well-respected, well-educated adults scowl in my face when I simply mention my condition as a fact. Please don't encourage that line of thinking.
Another symptom of this "attention deficiency" is the fact that people DON'T pay attention when driving. Yes, they may pay attention to a pretty car, but one of the most troubling things I have seen in my (mumble) 16 years driving is people becoming less and less aware of their surroundings and paying less attention to the act of driving itself.
NPR had a piece talking about how operating cell phones while driving is dangerous and cited a study on how when people focus on one thing they block out other things. The study was they had students watch a basketball game on a TV and told them to watch the people in the yellow shirts. In the middle of the game, a person in an ape suit walked on the court, pounded his chest for about 5 seconds and walked off. The majority of the people never noticed the gorilla because they were intent on watching the game.
Oh, it's a Katz article. You don't need to read anything more than the first paragraph.
Now where the fuck's my million dollars?
> But that also means that I'm missing 45 minutes [1.5 x 30 days] of valuable information every month.
Not really.
I did the same thing you did - gave up TV news except for business coverage - for exactly the same reaspon.
I don't care about the dippy chick who offed her brood, the hot new cuisine style (that's really just an ad for a restaurant, all footage provided by the restaurant's PR agency), or the "news" that (surprise surprise) once again, there was violence in the Middle East and Balkans today. Sports and Hollyweird gossip are permanently in my mental killfile.
So that's all but the 1.5 minutes of useful information.
But 30 seconds at each of cnn.com (mainsleaze), freerepublic.com (right/libertarian), salon.com (left/liberal), Slashdot (geek), thestreet.com (business), and finance.yahoo.com (news reports on my own holdings) gives me a 99.9% probability that I'll already have seen the 1.5 minutes of useful info on the news that night.
Add onto that a few NASA and science sites, and even if the nightly news does a 90-second segment on Galileo, odds are I'll get far more out of 90 seconds on NASA's site than I will on the evening news, which will burn 60 of those 90 seconds explaining that Galileo is a spacecraft, that Jupiter is a planet, and that Galileo's main antenna is b0rken.
(Cripes, I'm not looking forward to Cassini. When we finally get to Saturn, I'll bet 30 of every 90 seconds of mainstream Cassini coverage will still be about the eco-freaks whining about the RTGs. And another 30 seconds interviewing some guy who remembers protesting it. Gotta get that human interest angle in there somehow.)
I'd argue that it's because mainstream news tries so hard to have "something to draw everyone's attention" that I've turned it off altogether. "Jack of all trades, master of none" doesn't work when you grew up online and want the detailed scoop.
True -- but what are the odds of it appearing on the ultra-filtered TV news?
Freerepublic seems rather like a Republican version of Slashdot without a moderated story queue. It'll often give me coverage of stuff like "man bites dog", "All your base!", and what-not.
> I fear that we're in danger of becoming a world of narrow specialists, none of whom have anything approaching a Renaissance view of the world.
During the Renaissance, it was possible for one person (e.g. DaVinci) to know Everything Worth Knowing. 20 years ago, it was possible to read all the messages in all of USENET. (Even 10 years ago, you could read all the messages in most of the groups you followed.)
That's no longer the case.
> It's not that there is too much information out there, it's that the difficulty in sorting the wheat from the chaff forces us to limit ourselves.
I'd argue that it's both -- even given a magic wand that instantly separates wheat from chaff, there's too much background information you need to assimilate in order to make sense of the new information ("wheat") you've sorted.
Today's Slashdot is a good example -- lots of people posting to this thread, because everyone understands enough about mass media to have an informed opinion on it.
Yet we have very few people posting anything on the artificial heart thread beyond "whoa, cool!" or "How does this differ from that guy with the artificial heart in the 80s", because almost none of us are Biology grads / med students, fewer went through med school, and probably only one or two of them went on to become cardiologists.
Just as most of the general public isn't going to spend the 2-3 years in geekdom to understand why DMCA is a Really Bad Idea, most of us aren't going to spend the 2-3 years in med school to enclue ourselves on the new heart.
See, brianvan, there's your answer... you should just go talk to DAVID KEIRSEY, and then you won't have any problems at all. DAVID KEIRSEY's got it figured out. Tell ya everything you need to know, fix ya right up, hell, fix up the whole dad-blame system, that DAVID KEIRSEY. He knows what's what. DAVID KEIRSEY. He's even written some articles. Imagine how different your life would be right now if only you'd met DAVID KEIRSEY years ago. Pffft. And you thought you had some kind of problem.
Hey, don't take my word for it, take DAVID KEIRSEY's.
He's written some articles.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Meanwhile, narcissistic, me-to-me media have become fashionable online, the newest example of the confusion between what's neat and what's significant.
I beg to differ, most people according to survey's aren't browsing sites like Salon.com, Slashdot.org, Microsoft.com, for things. The majority of people aside from Slashdot'ers, and those involved with some form of computing related work, are searching for things on sites like Yahoo. Many others use the net for learning, many simply browse blindy. To compare above average Internet users is biased.
As good as many of them are, outside of their creators they don't command much attention. But modern corporations like Microsoft and AOL Time-Warner manufacture attention as much as anything else.
It's called marketing, and that's the only way these businesses will survive. What's so different about MS or AOL-TW advertising, than those who come around and leave a menu fliers near your door for their restaurant? If they had the same amount of money they'd do the same. Does it mean they're whoring their restaurant? Everyone does it, and it does not mean every company is a narcisst. Business, it's what makes the world go round.
They can do this by advertising, by the sales of synergistic products, or by political and media lobbying. They have the skills to manipulate regulators, elected officials and journalists and the money to bombard our consciousness with advertising and marketing.
They don't have any skills that others don't possess. They have money, and to state they have money to manipulate politicians although it may be correct, is a bit biased. Companies are companies, if a politician has stock in a company do you think he would honestly manipulate it in such a way to lose on his/her investment? By dealing with people like these, you should point them out, since it has nothing to do with the company entirely. Sure some companies do some back handed dealings, but that doesn't mean all politicians are underhanded scum.
Af if that stops working, they may be the first to start sending us checks.
They already do so via way of rebates, where have you been? There's nothing wrong with doing so either. There is no law against offering someone cash back for trying a product, or offering them rebates. If it makes people happy, all the better more power to the company for thinking it up.
For hundreds of years, attention has been a luxury or a by-product. Now it's become one of the most valuable commodities in the world. That suggests the people who will be the most successful at gaining attention are those with the deepest pockets to pay for it.
Attention will never be a luxury or commodity. Information on the other hand ALWAYS WAS and ALWAYS WILL BE. Companies come and go, bottom line, it's all about who generates revenue. Just because companies like MS, and AOL-TW may have someones attention now, if they disappeared tomorrow, they'll be forgotten due to some other company taking their place. However information is always useful, and always worth much more.
Want Root?
With an abundance of information comes the specialist. The specialist makes money based on his knowledge. This is not new to the Internet, the information economy or any other post-industrial phenomenon.
The same thing happened to religions hundreds, even thousands of years ago. As the religions and sect splintered monks sat in their isolated monastaries poring over specialized texts over particular subjects so that they could be well versed in one subject to the neglect of others. An individual may be an expert in the sutras of the Nichiren School, but ignorant of the basic teachings of the Ch'an School.
Today these people are specialist doctors, lawyers, and programmers. They make good money if their skills are in demand, but suffer when they are not. Society moves on most people still ignorant of anything beyond their immediate concerns.
And so shall it always be.
That's the point though, people are theoretically closer to knowing everything about everything now than they were 10 years ago due to the volume of information available to them, but with that much info at hand how do you retrieve the string of random numbers that make up your locker combination without mixing it up with the random numbers that make up your phone number? How do you get the information you WANT out of the information you HAVE? That's the point of the article. People who are able to collect and catalogue data in such a way that regular people can easily find what they want to know are going to be able to make a lot of money.
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
Heh, centralization of information may very well be a bad thing. But using 3 sources that each have 30 sources is still preferably to me having to hunt down 90 sources and check them all to find out what's going on. It's just not possible for me to constantly skim as many news sources as are quantified in Slashdot and CNN alone and still have time left for anything else. Maybe I sometimes get my stories with spin and bias, but I can look past the spin and read more on anything that catches me as VERY IMPORTANT. But I leave it up to a few other people to gather the Somewhat Important, or even Mildly Interesting items together for me to check over.
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
explains why Slashdot is so useful to some of us. It allows us to concentrate our attention down to one site instead of haveing to spread it out amongst dozens to find the same info.
It's also true for places like CNN and many other portal sites, it's the reason that portals actually manage to break even and sometimes turn a profit. People like to be able to focus their attention on one thing and get the information they want. If someone came up with a REALLY good, easily customisable portal site they might actually be able to charge directly for access to it. Though I guess that's kind of what AOL does...
Anyways, information concentration is going to be a key area of web development in the future. People who are able to get a lot of information from a lot of places and condense it down into a few pages on one site should be able to make considerable amounts of money...
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
Sorry for the shameless plug, but it seemed really appropriate.
http://www.oomind.com/
Helping with organizational effectiveness is our job.
A good article appeared in Wired in Dec 1997 on this subject.
Wow.. Jon, I had nearly given up on you. I thought you were just going to drone on and on again about how corporations were evil and we were all victims, and puppies were being slaughtered.. oh.. wait.
Anyways, Mr. Katz... bravo. I really appreciate this piece. It hit home with me.. as I sit here trying to fit more and more windows onto my screen(had to upgrade to a 21" monitor so I could get more windows), I realize my attention is completely consumed.
I get home at around 8pm(long IT style hours), and feed all my attention to my wife and dog until they fall asleep.Thats about 10:30.. then I sit at my computer and feed it attention until about 2am; coding, chatting, surfing, counterstrike, etc. Wake up at 7:30... and pay attention to my hour long commute. Then its work(at least here I don't have to pay attention.. NOT!). Lastly, leave at 7:00pm, hour long commute. Repeat.
Nowhere in there can I say I just "veg out"... I'm constantly having to produce attention, until I finally pass out from exhaustion.
SpamapS -- Undernet #Linuxhelp
One has to wonder if the invention of the printing press ushered in the same. The farmers and serfs of the Dark Ages were probably thought too stupid to handle all of the material that came through the new invention of the press.
Oh wait, we got the Renaissance out of that. The growth of media has always corresponded with the development of society, from the clay tablets of the Babylonians and the Sumerians, to the Internet today. Yes, there's a time when people need to get used to this new information onslaught, but it will happen.
Douglas Coupland wrote a book called Joystick Nation that dealt with the fact that "Generation Y" has grown up with this kind of technology, and already has adapted to it. It's just a matter of acclimitization to all this media, something that people in their 40's and 50's didn't have to deal with. It's going to be naturally difficult to deal with all of that, but later generations will be much more adept.
Cripes!! Do we really need a new word to describe desperate marketing?!? As Steve Taylor has said, there are three things unavoidable things in life: Death, Taxes and Repackaging.
"Lt. Obvious - give them the finger"
Democrats and Republicans only disagree about how to enslave you
Another aspect of products that are thriving in a time of information glut: speed. James Glick has a really good book on the subject, called Faster which I recommend reading.
Katz referd to the attention economy as a new phenomenom, but is it really? I mean, the basis of our economy has always been competetion, where there will always be some little guy fighting to steal the business away from the bigger companies. With this type of ideology, isn't it inevitable to have very few products in the mainstream, yet MANY more products avaliable?
true... true... ok, next subject.
Blender And Linux Fan
Second of all, the fact that only a few people, business, whatever, are famous really doesn't have a whole hell of alot to do with the attention levels of the consumers. Knowing that Microsoft exists and not some other developer is in fact the exact opposite of ADD, If you don't notice all the MS ads on TV, the reviews and hype of the latest windows OS, and the high profile government trial, then your lack of attention is off the chart. Squaresoft for example doesn't get their name in the paper every day, they don't have reviews outside of video game magazines (except now with the movie). Just because people who don't play videogames don't know who Square is or people who don't do high end graphics work don't know who SGI is, doesn't mean that they don't have the required attention to do so.
The same can be said of Tiger Woods. Golf has historically been an old white man's sport, now a young black/thai man comes in and dominates. That flys in the face of convention and get the attention of those not interested in golf. That DOES NOT make Tiger more famous to those who do watch golf than any other high profile golfer, and it doesn't mean that if someone starts watching golf because of Tiger, that they won't be able to follow or remember the names of other golfers.
But perhaps I am taking the whole tone of the article out of context do to your rather unknowledgable use of the word ADD. But then again based on the review I read of 'The last housewife' on amazon, you don't know the difference between a shotgun and a rifle either. I certainly don't want to lower myself to the level of the hordes of JonKatz bashers, but please do try to know the meanings of your words before you write something, that way I don't waste my time reading your dribble when I could be doing something useful. (which by the way is an example of attention WASTE, not attention DEFICIT, after all the attention was there, just not on anything worthwhile)
The solution is obvious Jon...stop contributing to my ADD by stop writing this senseless drivel.
"This technologically-driven ADD is transforming politics, entertainment, sports and culture."
;^)
The ADD reference is not helpful. I do not think this article is discussing the possible intersection of many information sources and the medical condition of Attention Deficit Disorder. Rather it appears to be about finding stuff worth looking at and convincing people that your stuff is worth looking at. "ADD" is a loaded buzzword and misusing it in this context does a disservice to those suffering from it and those trying to understand what you have written. Consider your reaction to misuse of the word "hacker".
"There is only so much attention to go around, and we are being bombarded with more information all the time. Most of us have no idea how to allocate our attention widely or productively."
I think this last is at least a partial contradiction. I can allocate my attention widely but it isn't always productive to do so. And vice versa. "Widely AND productively" would be a real trick.
"Those who can help us will be rich."
These people used to be called "editors". How many of them are rich?
Q:How many libertarians does it take to stop a Panzer division? A:None. Obviously market forces will take care of it.
For example, I don't watch TV news any more, because I know that there may be 1.5 minutes worth of "good" information provided to me in a given half hour, but I don't want to waste the time necessary to sit there and absorb all of the other crap they're sending my way.
But that also means that I'm missing 45 minutes of valuable information every month. Even when we use more refined filtering techniques (such as viewing comments in /. by score), there are still many chunks of information that are not "good". But then, there's no way for me to assign normative value to information until I view it, is there?
Sure, I can choose to filter all of my news so that it only relates to primate research in Guyana. But then what if some really interesting "good" piece of info about related research in the human sociology field came up, and I missed it because of my predetermined filtering habits?
Regardless of how you define "good" information, even though it does invite further investigation, the trickiest part is still to find that "good" information without throwing out information that doesn't have an immediate associative value to you but could still turn out to be of value once investigated.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Quite true, and I do the same thing (perhaps with a few variations ;-), but what I was getting at is that in the random, non-yet-defined-and-filtered info, there is sometimes some good stuff. I fear that we're in danger of becoming a world of narrow specialists, none of whom have anything approaching a Renaissance view of the world.
It's not that there is too much information out there, it's that the difficulty in sorting the wheat from the chaff forces us to limit ourselves.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
...I know this looks like an offtopic troll, but society throws around the term ADD yet doesn't respect the condition...
...It's exactly why I've had mature, well-respected, well-educated adults scowl in my face when I simply mention my condition as a fact...
This is probably because ADD has been exposed as just the latest excuse for poor performance in middle class kids.
http://keirsey.com/addhoax.html
*sigh* This statement contridicts your whole argument Jon. I'm not sure if you are against having so much information or against "big media" ... what's the point? Your statement above is your opinion. Personally I think that people in general in the US, not just young onescould stand to lose a few of their luxuries. Life is more interesting now? When most of us sit around for an average of EIGHT HOURS watching a flashing box??? Come-on!
People don't pay attention anymore to anything because its convienent to be ignorant. People want their little pre-packaged fast-food lives. When it comes to technology people don't choose something better because they can't learn it instantly.
Maybe I'm paranoid but I truely believe that apathy is going to cause the destruction of America. Although maybe that's not so bad :). The funny irony is that Katz himself is a victim. This article runs around blaming everything but the real problem so as not offend anyone. The real problem is that people need to start caring about things that really matter. I know that most people on /. don't do the religion thing but even if you don't that whole "Love thy neighbor" thing can come in handy. Okay getting back on topic :)
The point is that attention isn't a natural resource in limited supply, we can't run out of it. We have to choose at any given point what to pay attention to. The real problem is that people don't care what happens in politics, or society or technology or anything else. We've become so individualized that no-one else matters.
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
The Anti-Blog
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
The Anti-Blog
If I took the time to read all of the articles that I comment on on sites like kuro5hin.org, freerepublic.com, slashdot, etc. I wouldn't have anything even resembling a life. I just skim read usually the first few paragraphs, or the whole thing if it is a little interesting but not enough so that I actually want to read the whole thing.
Most of the time I've found that discussions quickly branch off from the article itself and take on a life of their own, discussing issues raised by issues raised by the article. For example on freerepublic.com it often goes from posts where conservatives trash the left and then we libertarians begin jumping down the conservative's throats saying that they aren't much better or different for that matter. The discussions usually then go from being a bash this or that the left loves to being a fight over whose ideology, conservatism or libertarianism, is best able to address the problems of a post-industrial society. So I really don't see the issue here, discussions online aren't static and strictly on topic, they are dynamic and have lives of their own.
This reminds me of a sermon that I heard. (The complete text of it can be found here.) I know that some of you will be offended by the religous nature of this. If you are among these people, just don't follow the link and you won't have anything to worry about.
This sermon is basically a practical guide to living in an information saturated world.
/. dot wouldn't exist if it were not for ADD. Let's see, what does the average /. user do:
1. go over home page and look for unread story
2. read story
3. maybe read the link in the story
4. post a comment
5. close browser
6. repeat steps 1-5 every 15 minutes.
/. is a symptom of what you speak
I (for once) completely agree with what Katz is arguing/pointing out in this article. As a full-time CS college student I constantly feel pressured that I'm falling behind on everything. I came to college not intimately familiar with such things as Unix/Perl/programming, and have been working hard to try and reach the levels of some of my more advanced peers. In addition to keeping up with current events (social/technological), I constantly feel like there are so many things I have to get done: I've got huge list of books that I'd like to get around to reading, I want to play around with different programming languages, I want to learn how to work with movies on my computer, I want to be able to administer a Unix machine. Yet all of these things take time, a limited quantity in any life.
Sir Isaac Newton once said "If I have seen further, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants." How many scientists have built on Newton's work? How high is the pyramid of giants upon whose shoulders today's scientists stand? It seems clear to me that the base of human knowledge is becoming extraordinarily large, and more and more of one's life must be spent just catching up to the state of current technology and knowledge.
Almost every time I've read an interview with John Carmack he speaks about how he doesn't really come up with new ideas so much as synthesize a lot of previously-thought-of approaches and ideas and make them work together and come to life on current technology. However, how much more background knowledge will the average 3d programmer need in 5 years than was needed 5 years ago? It seems that eventually we're going to get to the point that people need to spend maybe even tens of years studying their respective fields before being able to contribute anything new to them.
As an example, look at the modern Olympics: we've gotten to the point where almost all Olympic athletes spend their entire life prior preparing for these events; it's nigh-impossible to win or set new records otherwise.
What happens when the same applies to fields of research? Or jobs in general? Will we have to choose career paths during childhood so we have enough time to focus on learning everything we need to know for our chosen profession?
As society becomes more advanced, just about everything requires more background knowledge. As Olympic trainers have seemingly perfected their training techniques, one can only hope that our teaching techniques somehow keep up with the rapid advance of technology.
-Angron
To be somewhat pedantic, there is not Nobel Prize for economics.
The five pizes mentioned in Alfred Nobel's will are Physics, Chemistry, Medicine, Literature (The Swedish prizes) and Peace (the Norwegian prize.)
In 1968, the Bank of Sweden (Sveriges Riksbank) instituted the "Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel" in time for the bank's tercentenary celebrations.
There is a Nobel exhibition on at the Swedish stock exchange building in Stolkholm's Old City until 2002. Well worth a visit.
But, the piece itself is misnamed. It should be called, "better advertising". This is more about having people pay attention to what you are hawking, not how to get people to pay attention to what is important.
Fight Spammers!
Speaking of that, I stumbled into a 'game' put in place by the makers of the movie. If you watch the trailer online, you'll notice this name in the credits:
Jeanine Salla: Sentient Machine Therapist
Using a Google search on that name will launch you into a murder mystery game that spans multiple websites, locations and telephone numbers. Very cool marketing idea -- better than Blair Witch.
Check out this site for more information: Cloudmakers.
--
Wooden armaments to battle your imaginary foes!
The article "exposes" nothing. It is a poorly researched opinion piece. It is bursting with unsubstantiated facts and inferences, but no real content. Take a look at the bibliography -- all the books were produced by anti-ADD/anti-psychopharmacology groups or predate the recognition of ADD as a disorder by several decades... not exactly material that exposes anything.
He mentioned some interesting things:
When there is competition, those who seek attention turn to the most reliable magnets: sex, calamity, scandal, confrontation.
It's amazing how those seem to be the best seller's among any form of entertainment and this trend seems to continually grow. Back in the '50's and '60's, when movies stars could act, there was no nudity. You couldn't have "horizontal kissing" for the longest time in movies. Today, if there isn't nudity, most don't believe it was a good movie. If you can count the bullets, most of my friends would think it wasn't worth watching.
Why is this the trend? Why does porn run the world while virtues are not interesting anymore? I don't know, but it doesn't seem to me that we are evolving rather that we are going down hill. Watch what you want, I will stick to Jimmy Stewart and Carey Grant with beautiful women like Kathryn Hepburn and Princess Grace. Those movies had class and were actually interesting.
Of course, that's just my opinion, I could be wrong.
Ironic that the while the opening paragraph talks about attention, 90% of /. readers won't even view the article, and of those that do, 98% will scroll past most of it just like I did.
What, is Katz just a random troll that Taco picked out for posting privelidges or something?!
If you consider all the data inundating us at any one moment--the radio is on, the TV's on, the phone is ringing, the newpaper is open on the table, etc.--it quickly becomes evident that we are literally swimming in data constantly.
How much of the data that surrounds us is actually useful as information? How do we filter the noise from the signal. With the increase in data surely the signal to noise ration is decreasing, which partially explains our inability to keep track of "stuff."
Now, here is where the literacy part comes in: A truly literate person from this time forward will have to develop a keen ability to filter signal from noise. We can lament the rise of bullet statements as a feature of writing, or the reliance on memory aids (palm computers), or the fast paced editing of television, etc., OR we can accept the fact that the way we communicate has changed forever and adapt. (What is going on right now is no different than what went on during the transition from oral to written communication, or from the written to the printed word.)
It's sink or swim.
Oh ... what's that? You're a "little brain" ... tisk ... tisk
"You're not on trial here...."
-- www.globaltics.net
Political discussion for a new world
Hey... this seems like a good article... plenty of HEY! MY MOUSE IS OPTICAL! IT'S GOT RED ON THE BOTTOM! AIEE! Where was I again?
...but it got boring really fast.
Honorary Member of Jackie Chan's Kung Fu Process Servers
The movie A.I.: Artificial Intelligence.
People complain all the time about movies that are "mindless entertainment". This was a movie loaded with subtlety and intelligent themes, yet look at the number who knock it as "slow", "boring", "too long", etc.
While clearly not a perfect movie (Spielberg shouldn't have made the transition from the second act to the third act look like an ending, which set people up to think it should have ended there), it was a movie that encouraged thinking. Even the so-called "sappiness" was loaded with hidden meaning, which the average movie goer just dismisses as "tear jerker moments".
By the way, if you're one of these people, see it again. There is a lot more below the surface.
--
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
The highest density of information is in a wilderness, the second-highest density is in a city with a lively downtown, the lowest, among human habitats, is in the suburbs - except that with advanced media the suburbs can approach the density of a live city (not to be confused with one with a hollow core sucked dry by suburbs).
We are natively evolved for the highest-density information environments. As environments have been simplified by the orderliness of civilizations (e.g., a slave whose life is only in the kitchen, a serf confined to the lord's lands and forbidden the lord's right to hunt, a child in an American grade school), there have been adjustments in enculturation whose role is to make us - by nature intensely alert and curious - fit the constraints of servitude; constraints often dressed up as and justified by religion, ideology and mass entertainment. (The high point of civilization may have been feeding the Christians to the lions for the good of Rome.)
The good news: our cultures are less dependent on servitude than before, more allowing, even encouraging and dependent on, individual freedoms. The good news is also that by our nature we can handle a density of information far beyond our typical modern environment. The bad news: we've only begun to untangle the centuries of cultural adaptation that fit us to information-poor niches characteristic of servitude. This adaptation is displayed in our uncomfortable, neurotic responses to both wide-open freedom and information-rich contexts.
The mentalities we need are those of our distant, more information-rich past: shamanistic, taoist, certain strains of buddhist thought regarding navigating by attention and intuition, more polytheistic or pantheistic than monotheistic, polyvocal rather than TV-announcer-as-scientist monovocal authority. But this isn't the first time we've turned back that way: the Renaissance consisted largely of a revival of older polytheistic insights and alchemies, coinciding with the demise of serfdom and constraints on travel, and the rise of trade and communication.
So all we need is a new renaissance. Simple, really. Our nature can handle rich information environments, it's just a cultural shift - real work, but far more doable (and less dangerous) than either altering our biology with cybernetic implants, or restricting information to accord with the constraining fit of our current neuroses.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
This is not always true.
You also run into the phenomena of Thing X that you are trying to understand is based on ten other things. If you do not have those other things nailed down properly, this sabotages you down the road. This leads to clueless MSCE techs who cannot apply what they know.
For Example, a network tech who has never even built a machine or spliced a wire. Or has never once done basic hexadecimal math
If you are jammed up trying to understand something, you need to be able to figure out the missing piece of the puzzle.
You do have alot of folks who try to skim over things skimp on things skip things that are not important. And every once in a while, you get bit in the ass by this.
The screaming in frustration you describe is a perfect symptom of this. It is not attention deficit, unless the attention deficit is the fact that you did not pay attention in the first place.
Of course being able to spot your own blind spots in technology or whatever is a difficult task, because alot of folks won't own up to it. This is a bit foolish of course, it is what makes you or breaks you.
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
One solution to the attention shortage is Artificial Attention. It is exemplified by a search engine driven by a user profile that biases the search toward the user's interests. Further, the user profile would watch the user's behavior as he peruses the results of the search and modify the profile based on the user's behavior.
The dynamic behavior of the user profile would include a random factor to retrieve information marginally related to the profile. The profile would then watch which of the randomly retrieved items attracted the user's attention and modify itself accordingly.
The profile should be able to monitor the activity of similar profiles belonging to other users to create artificial word-of-mouth.
User could swap profiles with friends to expand their horizons and to build up a community of interests.
Similarly, groups of users could combine profiles to retrieve a common set of information.
A user could adopt and modify standard profiles or incorporate them into his existing profile. These profiles would be based on things of interest to a particular industry, profession or hobby. Organizations might promolgate standard profiles for users to adopt.
If attention becomes the foundation of the New Natural Economy then information might be packaged to conform to the requirements of the standard profiles. There could be an ancillary program to the user profile that rates pieces of information on how attractive it is to a standard profile.
Similarly, users might compare their profile with a standard profile to see how closely their interests are to the norm.
Ultimately, people will have life-long profiles that change overtime and that thereby constitute the intellectual history of the individual. Users will be able to quantify how much they've changed between childhood, when their profile was created, and old age.
Ultimately, user profiles of great men would be archived and made available for users to incorporate into their own profiles. Cult leaders might impose their own user profile on their followers as a way of controlling their thoughts.
Users might specify on their resumes what standard profiles they use as a way of indicating their interests to potential employers. Strangers could compare their profiles to see how much they have in common.
The first step is the creation of an ISO standard for a Profile Markup Language (PML). This standard would enable profiles to interact with search engines in a well-defined way, enable comparing profiles, enable merging profiles, etc.
...but Katz isn't listening. I argued his misuse of the term "ADD" following his last column, and finally gave up when the only interested party refused to consider anything but Katz' point-of-view. Some people simply like to think that ADD is exclusively a product of corporate media, because it justifies their belief that all corporate media are Evil(tm).
If this is true, the why do so many dang people read slashdot? I've never seen an ad for it, I don't find it a particularly well designed as a website, and they sure as heck are'nt paying me. It certianly has'nt 'homogonized' and generally stays close to it's intial purpose.
In the 'information economy', ultimatly, the only thing that will keep peoples attention is quality. The net is different from things like television or gas insofar as the resources needed to produce and distribute information are so small. Nobody has to get stuck with an information provider that caters to the lowest common demoninator.
And how do people find out where the good stuff is? In the end, word of mouth. A freind told me about Slashdot. I discover most of the websites I visit through word of mouth, or through 'portal' sites like Fark.
And after a while, when we no longer have time to search out the best information, we will search out the best places that tell us where the information is ... and nobody will have to pay us.
The Internet is generally stupid
This is really nothing new. It seems apparent to me that for the past 100 years, capitalist[1] interests have been intent on capturing and monopolizing the attention of the general public. They don't need an "information society" to get it done, either, though it does make things much easier. As John Taylor Gatto, former NY State Teacher of the Year, said:
And we wonder why so many people have "mental illness."
[1] I'm not a raving Communist or anything, I just call 'em how I see 'em. Capitalism by its nature will seek maximum profits. What better way to maximize profits than brainwashing children into buying your product?
FreeBSD - the power to serve.
Katz starts off by talking about how those who 'help us' decide what to pay attention to will be rich. He's right; we do need something to help us decide what to pay attention to, but relying on the portals isn't the way to do it. Slashdot is a great example of a tool to help filter out all the crap; the collective brain picks out the truly good information, and effectively votes on it as worthy of our attention...
Given the growth curve of information, content_had become a commodity product, and was going to overload anybody who tried to keep up in any industry. Context, however, was going to become a huge industry, if someone could find a way to make it work. Being able to find the right/relevent information for your information consumer(s), in a realistically useful amount of time, would be huge. It still is - notice that most of the online "information" sites you read today are not producers of information, but aggregators of it. Yahoo started out well because they provided context and organization to something people didn't understand - and it's still their core business.
Like I said, the train has left the station. Tell me something I wasn't speaking at Seybold about 5-6 years ago.
-- .sig are belong to us!
All your
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Oh I get it, i must be a lte April Fools joke. Man this had me going for a little bit. I mean why would he talk about not paying attention to things and post this LONG article about it and expect people to read it all. That's damn hilarious. Too bad its a bit late though....
Who lives in a pineapple under the sea?
"Good information requires attention, but it creates more, and better, attention. Good information pulls our minds out of the chaos surrounding us. There is then more attention, and less chaos"
I don't believe that you are correct. Many good ideas and much good information is ignored simply because media outlets do not want to distribute it, and most people are unwilling to go in-depth to find something that is not in mainstream circulation. Good ideas are ignored because the 'herd' isn't looking at them.
I don't watch TV anymore because I am tired of being told what to think and what shows are popular and the like. I don't subscribe to the newspaper for the same reason. If I want information, I go actively seek it out, and sometimes I'll end up using mass-media as a source, but I do that as rarely as possible.
the problem is that anything that is 'the authority' or 'the establishment' has the problem of now that they are mainstream, they can do what they want and for at least a while, their audience will buy it. They reach a point where true quality isn't important anymore, for perceived quality is present, and this doesn't lend well to maintaining the long-term credibility when the publisher can make more money by tailoring things to specific groups that are willing to pay for the priviledge. It's reasons like this that I don't care for groups like Microsoft, AOL, or any of these huge conglomerates that are built to cover dozens of markets to milk every last cent out of an unwitting population.
Just my two cents worth...
IBM had PL/1, with syntax worse than JOSS,
IBM had PL/1, with syntax worse than JOSS,
And everywhere the language went, it was a total loss...
This shows that Nobel-Prize-winning economists are not always right.
Good information requires attention, but it creates more, and better, attention. Good information pulls our minds out of the chaos surrounding us. There is then more attention, and less chaos.
Bush's education improvements were
Beyond sensationalism and whorish marketing, how can smaller entrepeneurs, events and products gain attention?
By paying people. Magazines, websites or TV shows could simply offer users a fee to eyeball their products regularly (there are ways to track this) rather than the other way around. Open Source may well be one of the culture ideas that has to pay it's way into the Attention Economy.
Consumer: I'd like to rent these, please. (places three DVDs on counter) ...nine, ten, eleven... ...damn. (puts money back in register)
Clerk: OK, sir, that'll be twelve dollars and fifty cents. Just a minute here...(clerk starts counting bills, placing them on counter)
Clerk:
Consumer: Ooh, shiny thing! (starts wandering away towards front door)
Clerk: Wait, sir! Sir! Fifteen dollars! Twenty? Sir! Sir?
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
Well, I would have read this article, but all of my attention is being diverted to information on how to get godly items in Diablo II Expansion pack.
two posts, and only one has anything to say, but you had to click both to know that. (mistake) as a group we help each other attend to what is important (karma), and each generation determines new things which are to be important (values). though as individuals we have to decide what we would like to focus on (television), and when we focus effectively, we as a group call that success (phd). attention is not provided by attention, inc. (fox news) and, one needs to trust that basic things are in order to focus well (privacy). but when things are out of order, it takes a while for changes to occur, but they do, and fast! (revolution).
While I'd normally just slam Jon for missing the point, this time let's actually listen to what he's trying to tell us. Yes, excess verbiage aside, he's trying to say that future media for future people will be more broadband, more chatter, more Me Too! kind of stuff.
This is a false choice. Take cell phones. In the old days we had postal deliveries four or five times a day and noone had a phone or telegraph. Then the telegraph was invented and someone gave one to the Royal Palace and soon all businesses had telegraphs and stock tickers. Then the phone came along and soon we all had phones.
At first, with normal phones, we always answered each and every call. Then we got receptionists to screen out the unwanted calls and voice mail to help with that. Now we don't even answer when our phone rings if someone's in our office or cube, just let the machine/person get it.
The same will happen with cell phones. At first we shout into the things, talk in our cars, answer each ring, take it with us on vacations and to movies. Soon we'll have a Busy button on them - when you go to the beach you press the busy button and it won't even ring or vibrate, just pops it into voice mail. Soon we won't let them interrupt us when we're eating or we have a friend over - life's not designed to be hectic, and being more broadband, more scattered is something that humans are not wired for. The phone may even talk to our car, and if we're stuck in traffic it may ring, but if we're near an exit we need to take, it won't.
The same will keep happening with email, web ads, PDAs, etc. We'll find ways to make them fade into the background and not bug us when we're not in the mood to be interrupted. Our web surf glasses will shrink the stock ticker into a teeny icon on the extreme left, make it pulse if our stocks are under major motion, make it get bigger if the market's taking a 200 point dive or one of our stock's is under a plus or minus five percent correction.
And, when we're on vacation, our cell phone wristwatch will only ring when it's mom, and never when you're eating. When we go to bed with that cute girl from Pasadena, ain't none of our electro toys gonna bug us - the CEO of your work could try to contact you and won't get through.
That's what's already happening in Europe - technology is becoming civilized. The future is not Hong Kong, not Japan, not the US - tech won't take over our lives, it will blend in with our lives and get out of the way when it needs to be gone.
--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?
I can't read this article because a can no longer afford to pay attention.
- Do not paint -
isn't this the ineivitable byproduct of a consumer focused society?
w/ more people than ever raised defacto by television, where corporate advertising shifts your focus every 30 seconds, it seems unrealistic to expect people to have their attention drawn to something longer than a minute let alone half an hour or an hour.
hrm i had a point when i started writing this... :)
- Dan I.
I think he might have a point. I got to technology driven ADD and quit reading.
"i blew a booger that i'd swear had it's own spinal cord" "OUCH" Caroline's Spine
I like the quote by Thomas J. Watson, founder of IBM (as quoted by Tom Peters): The way to excellence is to stop doing -- immediately -- all un-excellent stuff. That's attention.
Moral: holding out for the best means saying no to a lot of "also good" things.
It seems that this article itself is pulling attention away from the real issue. The problem is not with attention, it is with controlled mass media.
"For hundreds of years, attention has been a luxury or a by-product. Now it's become one of the most valuable commodities in the world. That suggests the people who will be the most successful at gaining attention are those with the deepest pockets to pay for it. "
Actually, it suggests that the people who control closed mass media technologies, (tv, radio, news papers, magazines, Microsoft Windows, etc...) attempts to steer attention for their own benefit. There was no mass cry of people asking CNN to spend 20 hours a day talking about Monica Lewinski. But lots of people watched it, simply because they were bored and there was nothing else to do. The only thing interesting about that story, is that so much dumb ass attention was focused on it.
The solution is open mass media technologies and time. As individual humans share content with each other, attention eventually turns away from mass media towards open media. Attention is moving towards a democratic order, in which the most popular information is the easiest to find.
For example, look at file sharing software. The most popular shows are the easiest ones to find. Jo blo sci-fi fan looking for a good show to watch, eventually will find a show that lots of people enjoy, because allot of people are sharing it. Jo blo sci fi fan, then delegates some of his attention to see what all the fuss is about. If he likes it, the popularity will continue to grow.
My point is that, when everybody shares information, when everybody has a server, information will be self-ordering. It already is. Look at Slashdot. Look at USENET. Look at Linux. Look at p2p. People by there nature organize information there interested in. As time goes by, more people are sorting more information, and information becomes easier to find.
With the Internet we are not just creating chaos, we are ordering it to. And we are getting better at it all the every day.
This explains why the Drudge Report is so popular. Who's got time to monitor all of the news sources out there?
I wasn't paying attention. ;)
At first I thought this guy was full of it until I realized that I was just scanning the article. As I got closer to the bottom it turned more into a vicious scroll rather than a scan. While I think the author has a valid point I think that there is less and less information that actually merits attention. With all the wealth of information available in the 'information age', how much of it is actually worth reading?
i read the wash post in the morning.... that about does it for my world news...
One thing I love about the net is that attention is focused on only the best site which fits my need(s) at the present time. The minute a better one comes around, my attention goes elsewhere. Brand names mean nothing to me. Loyalty only lasts as long as the best service is provided to me for free...
3 examples
- news
For about a year and a half, my one and only source for news was wired.com and I used to read it daily. Then a couple months ago I descovered that slashdot was both more interesting and more informative. From that point on wired was completely out of the picture... I rarely look at it now where as I read slashdot daily.
- searching
The search engine of the day is google. But do we, as users, actually care about the google name? I really dont think so.. The day that another search engine provides me with a better service than google does is the day that I never use google again.... I have seen this phenomenom change what search engine I use over and over again in the past few years I have been connected to the internet. From yahoo to infoseek to metacrawler now to google. (and yea there may have been better engines to check out, i just didnt know about them).... do I really care about any of the services that I no longer use? the answer is no. I care about google right now because it is the hightest quality search engine right now... tommorrow, next week, next month or whenever a new search technology comes out that provides me as a user with a better product, google is going to be forgotten...
- mp3s
napster is forgotten... the minute they stopped providing a high quality free service was the minute they were gone... nobody but the media cares about what they are doing now...
In conclusion, this "best of the moment" attitude works extremely well and encorages innovation never before seen in mankind.... its an exciting future...
My question to the author is what has changed?
What is the definition of Attention Economy that makes you think it is something new? This whole series of articles is about trying to come up with a story to validate the story. Just because you can conceive of a notion does not make it fact or even exist.
Once you define it you will find that it is nothing new. If you want someone to pay attention you have to provide them with a VALUE. Something that a person would get for their attention.
It's called Capitalism.
"Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself, but talent instantly recognizes genius." - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Let's face reality shall we?
tdogboy wrote: "You could say it is addicted to sucking up attention. It is definitely not us, but something else. It certainly involves us and can even masquerade as us sometimes, but those are times when it is most powerful and has us most in its grasp. I mean us as a society and at smaller levels down to us as individuals and even smaller than that."
then wrote:"Who has the courage to face it? What would that look like?"
You haven't even faced the reality that you are the only one who can give attention from your own mind. No one can take it from you. It is your responsibility to control yourself. Vote by turning off your TV, Internet or whatever place you find these "voracious appetite"s stalk you.
"Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself, but talent instantly recognizes genius." - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
E.T. and Star Wars arrived a bit before the Attention Economy had fully bloomed.
So what's the difference between then and now? One could say that those movies were just in time for the Marketing Economy. Maybe these figures weren't in Happy Meals (did they have Happy Meals in 1977? And if memory serves correct, they did have toys from the Episodes V and VI movies.) There were a full range of products then, ranging from action figures to bedsheets to video games. (Remember gobbling up Reeses Pieces in the old Atari 2600 game?)
It's not too much different now than then. Perhaps there's just more information out there now, but or years, I've felt overwhelmed.
Yeah, well, some of us who were poor performing middle class kids with ADD now make a lot more than you & your daddy & your Dean of Computer Science all put together. Seems that a lot of us are Mensa-types. Some of us now work to help other kids like us so they won't have to feel like we did. Who have you helped lately? Sincerely, Budalite.
I disagree. True, the narrowing of the public consciousness has been a subject for quite some time (e.g., see Neil Postman's book Amusing Ourselves to Death), but the mass of so-called "information" that we have to wade through daily just to get to some content that we are interested in is amazing. It can't be anything but distracting to someone who isn't amazingly well focused.
"When the only tool you have is an axe, EVERY job looks like fun!"
Those of us in the right generation were probably brought up on Sesame Street or an equivalent. These sorts of shows teach us that to learn things have to be exciting, and should come one after the other, BANG-BANG-BANG. We've been taught that if what we're reading/hearing is dull, then we don't need to learn it. I bet Jim Henson's kids are developing a really bloody expensive vaccine for just these symptoms.
SP
Total Katz Buzzword Index: +5
The Nobel Laureate was Herbert Simon, who won the prize in 1978.
Not that anyone cares, seeing as how most people have no attention span for this kinda stuff anyway, but you can check out a brief autobiography at the Nobel e-Museum.
What does this mean for control freaks (like me) who want to make sure that they are as aware as possible about what's going on around them? When your only source of information in through a filter (as it will likely be in the future for most people as the Attention Deficit gets bigger), how can you be sure that you are getting all the info that you need? Sure, you can choose (hopefully) not to use a filter, but there is way to much information out there even today to possibly keep up with it all. Of course, the filter problem is not REALLY a new one, because even if you read the paper, all the people putting together the paper act as a filter determining what information you get. What a tactics used by other control freaks to deal with this problem (apart from reading as much as possible every chance you get)?
Windows is more convenient than Linux just as having an ingrown toenail is more convenient than seeing a podiatrist.
An obvious result is that we will most likely see more monopolies cropping up, even if their product sucks, and regardless of the fact that a better product exists.
As long as the amount of information grows faster than human population the problem will get worse.
What the article does not mention, are what I see as the two possible solutions to this:
1) Most likely a new kind of culture will develop where people will no longer flock to well known companies but actually look at the fine print, and no longer be bought with sexy advertising etc etc (For example: people will refrain from seeing the all too obvious blockbusters that have all to obvious bad acting.)
2) A more exotic outcome, although not very likely, is if P=NP, in which case there exists a polynomial algorithm for finding what you want from a mess of information... (for those who know what the hell I'm babbling about ;) )
Today is probably not a good day to die.
"There are only two constants in the universe: time, and human stupidity. I'm not sure about the former." - Albert Einstein
Some have said that all technology is merely an extension of a human ability -- guns are the technological extension of fists, for example.
Since stupidity is one of the primary characteristics of humanity... Well, you get the idea. That explains the existance of Windows, VB, and a whole lot of other things...
Repeal the DMCA!
You can tell a lot about a person by observing how they spend their money. In deciding how much to spend to fulfill a need, when you have the luxury of being able to pick and choose, you are making a statement.
In buying a dress or suit that has a price tag comparable to an automobile, you're telling the world that you have a lot of money. If you check into a Motel 6 when you could have booked a room at the Waldorf-Astoria it says you're more concerned with getting a room for the night than you are about having a candle-lit concierge down the hall from your room.
As I understand it, the success of slashdot has come from the fact that one can come here and get information that has been ranked in levels of pertinence. The information is willingly submitted freely by contributors and the ranking is performed by the work of the moderators. It is a brilliant concept. Wish I'd thought of it.
I see that 2 posts were given the highest rating, a 5. One was the very first response to your article, which made a joke about the fact that your write-up takes a lot of concentration (attention) to finish and understand.
The other response ranked with a 5 is from someone who, understandably, took offense at the aformentioned joke.
Someone who read the first sentence of your article and then tried to call it a lie had their post moderated as (3, Interesting). Neither of the 2 responses pointing out that there is, in fact, a Nobel prize awarded in the field of economics were highlighted to the same level as the one that was in error.
That says a lot about the amount of attention put into your article and what parts of your article the moderators choose to highlight.
Jon, thanks for hanging in there. I'm looking forward to your next peice.
This piece never explicitly states why getting attention is such a valued commodity. I'm assuming the writer takes it for granted that attention leads to resources (?) but it's hard to tell. The truth and quality doesn't (or at least shouldn't) need a press release to announce itself. And real truth and quality, in art, craft or other pursuits doesn't care about attention.
The whole idea of this article isn't anything new. The basic idea that I see in it has been understood for a very long time, and that is, "whoever has the most attention has the most power."
Part of the lives we all live (and have lived) is that there is something that feeds on our attention. In this article, it's represented as marketers and advertisers and big companies. It has a voracious appetite and can never get enough attention. You could say it is addicted to sucking up attention. It is definitely not us, but something else. It certainly involves us and can even masquerade as us sometimes, but those are times when it is most powerful and has us most in its grasp. I mean us as a society and at smaller levels down to us as individuals and even smaller than that.
This is something that has been with us for a very long time and seems to be present in every society that has ever existed. It's the genesis of competition, oneupsmanship, addiction, hatred, violence, prejudice, punishment and fear. Greed, hate and delusion. This is what can really be seen in this advertising, marketing and these companies. This same thing can be seen in ourselves.
So, you see, this is much larger than this article implies. This is the battle for our lives. Who has the courage to face it? What would that look like?
"Money often costs too much" -- Emerson
Well, i would have read the whole article, but i just remembered that i need to go rewrite /etc/termcap
--phil