Slashdot Mirror
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.
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!
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.
Personally, I like it when I don't have to re-read a sentence five times to figure out what the writer is saying. I don't call it dumbing-down, I call it clearly communicating ideas.
so...
Belief is the currency of delusion.
... 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.
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.
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?
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
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.
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?
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
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All your
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
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
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...