How did I first hit on the Attention Ec. idea?

Jul 122006
 

How did I first hit on the concept of the Attention Economy?

That question arose last evening, in the discussion after my talk at BayCHI. * The talk was an expansion on the one on emerging Attention Economy as a new level in the Massively Multiplayer Interactive Game known as Western Culture that I gave at E-tech. A short answer to the question seems useful.**

In the early eighties, the idea of an “information revolution” become somewhat commonplace. People were excited about things like the “paperless office.” I wanted to know why so many people were working in offices “processing “ information at what even then was clearly an accelerating rate. It just didn’t make sense to me to see all this activity as merely ancillary to what the usual ideas of “the Economy” were – and still are- about. That idea was that all this office work simply permitted the production of goods to flourish more smoothly.

But the information processsed had already increased by many factors of ten. Since then it has gone up many millions of times more. But life, at least for the average American was better, if at all, only by by a small percentage increase over what it had been three decades earlier in the post-WWII era. Produycts were more and better, but by nothing like enough to justify this radically increased amount of effort on info. Even now, while various aspects of life might be somewhat better, any realistic assessment of “standards of living” wouldn’t indicate that it is even ten times better than then.

So it was – and is – obvious to me that this huge outpouring of information represented some kind of turn into a new dimension that standard economics wasn’t seeing or picking up. Like others, I toyed with the idea that we were entering an “Information Economy.” But that idea never would really jell. WHY was all this info being spewed out? Who was benefiting so much from it? That’s when I began to notice that wherever I went in official or unofficial Washington, DC, where I was living at the time, there were endless meetings, and at all of them, getting “the floor,” that is having a chance to speak, was not easy. I began to think of “the scarcity of the floor.” ***

That led me to realize that the true scarcity was of attention, and that all the outpouring of information could be understood as a part of the effort of various people to get attention.

Some have pointed out to me, including Karen Weinstein, last night, that many people might not want any more attention than what they get from family and close friends. Maybe so. I don’t know how to test what people “really want.” Still I can speculate.

And, as far as I can see, the desire for attention is the only thing that coherently explains how our real economy now works. And I can offer tons of evidence that fits with that thought. Also, if there is an inherent desire for attention, the extent to which it is activated depends on changing cultural norms. Now it is perfectly ok, at least for many people to get tons of attention.
________
NOTES
*The (S.F.) Bay Area chapter of the ACM’s [Association of Computing Machinery] largest “SIG” [Special Interest Group] – on Computer-Human Interaction, or “CHI.”

**In a later post, I’ll offer a connection with a podcast of that talk, as well as a synopsis. The talk was perhaps a bit confusing, because I was doing my very first presentation using Apple Keynote, and without my realizing it some of the “slides” had been set to whisk ahead after a few seconds,. This added a note of hilarity that was probably helpful to those there, but perhaps not to those trying to listen to it and follow the visuals. These will also sooon be available, probably as a pdf.

***I remember spending a day walking around with the eccentric (ex-Bulgarian Jewish) Catholic priest, Ivan Illich, (one of my idols at the time) one day when he was visiting Washington from Mexico. He had just spoken about the role of religion in poverty and development at an informal meeting at the World Bank, and we were walking back to the Institute for Policy Studies, when I suggested to him that the floor was intrinsically hard to get. Many people who had questions or comments after his talk hadn’t been able to speak. He said something like, ”At a certain point, one should shut up and go home.” That evidently did not refer to himself, since he had been perfectly content to monopolize the floor.

Very short Q and A

Jul 062006
 

Q. Hi!
I’m an italian science writer …..
It would be fantastic if I could get your opinion: do you really think “attention” will be the true value of coming future? Why?

A. Yes. I have written about this extensively.. Click on the link “Older writings” to the right and look at earlier entries in this blog.
The (very) short answer as to why is because attention from other human beings (or our own) is intrinsically scarce AND desirable, so when possible the competition for it mounts and mounts, more and more dominating how we live.

The Dream Life of Money

Jun 212006
 

Some lumber to be erected into an essay.

Plank 1 “The present king of France.” This is phrase much beloved for thinking about by (Anglo-American) philosophers, because there is no such animal.

But there used to be. In fact, the kings of France were the ultimate feudal lords, the area around Paris having been the very birth place and center of pure feudalism, and the French kings the most successful agglomerators of feudal power. (I suppose the Hapsburgs might share that title, but they were less pure.)

The fact that the present king of France doesn’t exist indicates just how completely feudalism is gone, gone, gone, even if traces survive all over the place.

Plank 2 “The present value of money (or the almighty dollar – take your pick).” Will future philosophers like this phrase for its equal lack of meaning? My guess is yes. When? Sooner than you would expect. Likewise it would have been very hard in the reign of Louis the XIV, the Sun King, to predict that his successor once removed would be removed from the throne, the throne also removed, and finally the king’s head removed. It is true that a century after Louis XIV’s death, a couple of his great-great-great grandsons were restored to the restored throne, and monarchy in all its forms was not utterly denuded of meaning in France until another 56 years had passed and the Prussians had occupied Paris. But history moves faster now. Hang onto your hats (and heads).

Plank 3 What will replace money is of course attention, directly, and just that. (See my recent openness paper for an example.) In the meantime, like the Sun King’s palace of mirrors at Versailles, we have now entered what I call the “dream life of money.” The power of money and the method of its accumulation now devolve into separate channels, and there is nothing the federal reserve can do about it. More and more, money tracks attention. But if you have attention, in addition to banking whatever money you get from your fans in the conventional ways (but see below), you also bank the attention in the minds of those very fans, ready to be drawn on very fluidly in the future.

The other track of money is through an increasing variety of legal cons into the hands of the superrich or at least other con artists who will be superrich pronto. These include hedge fund managers, who sometimes employ mathematical algorithms to skim money off stock markets and other financial markets. Also, CEOs and their ilk who hand select the compensation committees of their boards to include other CEOs and ilk who also benefit from their own super-valuing. And probably a growing number of out-and-out crooks. These people operate at a confluence of two basic streams.

Plank 4 A Bend in the Rivers (acknowledgements to V.S. Naipaul, his excellent (if singular) novel title and excellent novel to match.) On the one hand, corporate CEOs and some money mangers can generally claim to be stars, acting on the stage that is their companies, or their funds, and to some extent all the varied attention-getting activities of the former, and whatever record the latter has.

The other stream is the conversion of money — once a standard set of industrially and uniformly manufactured products — pennies, dimes, nickels, dollar bills etc. — to simply bits on various computer disks or other sorts of memory, capable of being packet-switched around the Internet at lighting speeds. In this shell game, bits can be inserted or diverted at an ever-increasing number of points, and in an ever-increasing and changing number of ways. New lines of credit can be created to enter in the system. Fast and legal trades of stocks or much fancier derivatives can be so aligned as strip off some extra bits in hedge-fund accounts every microsecond. To the extent the money isn’t simply created in the interstices of the network, the bits are shaved from the accounts of less high-speed and savvy investors.

Plank 5 The Golden Age turns leaden. Many of these investors are middle-income folks who have been led into investment as a way to provide for their “golden years.” Here in the US this is to supplement social security. But the social security funds are, in effect, also invested, in such ways that the money will not be there when demanded either.

What people actually need as they grow older is the attention of younger folks. There are, barring extensive immigration, not enough younger folks to go around. Even with immigration there still aren’t necessarily going to be endlessly enough. Some older generation will get shafted (unless they manage to stay so healthy they can take full care of each other and pay sufficient attention as well.

To return to Social Security, back in the 1980’s, a committee headed by Alan Greenspan claimed to have solved the problem of the “bulge” in retirees expected to start about now as baby boomer retired. Additional funds would be collected through increased social security taxes that would then be there to pay off the retirees. (This is all explained well enough in David Cay Johnston’s book “Perfectly Legal”). Meanwhile, the extra amounts in the Social security funds couldn’t just sit there. They were lent out, to the government mostly. That led tot he possibility of reducing taxes on high incomes and corporations. But in order to have the money to pay back these loans, taxes will now have to be raised quite a bit, which is said to be politically unfeasible. Thus the old age of the top two percent of the population is supposedly assured, but not that of most people.

Of course, the idea that either Social Security or investments could guarantee attention in old age for ordinary people was wrong to begin with. It is more wrong now.

Plank 6. Money to burn. What are the very rich actually going to do with all their new wealth? For the most part, it will be hard to find useful investments. Even today companies use their tax windfalls not mostly to build new plants or something of the sort, but to buy up competitors. Where does the money made on those sales go? Presumably into the stock market, where it ends up with the CEOs and the hedge fund folks, etc. But what good does it do them? A few yachts, fame for being superrich in some cases, the chance to start a foundation or to pay outlandish sums for art. (Ronald Lauder just paid $135 million for a gold-flecked Klimt! That’s a lot of lipstick for a gaudy work.) Expensive ways of buying a little attention.

FURTHER CONSTRUCTION TO COME

New Interview now hearable!

Jun 192006
 

I’m on after TV! Andrew Keen who set up After TV to discuss new media now has up an interview with me. It’s a telephone interview we did several weeks ago. LISTEN

Paper for FM10 conference

Jun 092006
 

The complete paper abstracted below may now be downloaded as a pdf 

The Value of Openness in an Attention Economy
Michael H. Goldhaber
(delivered) Monday, May 15, 2006
(submitted 6/6/06)

Abstract Virtually all forms of openness can be motivated by the scarcity of attention, they lynchpin of the Attention Economy. This term, which I introduced previously, is often misunderstood as simply a variant of the money economy. Instead it is an entirely new system that I continue to argue, is fast becoming the dominant economy on the Net as well as in the world as a whole.

A theory of how we pay attention to other humans suggests why receiving it is both desirable and difficult. Humans can absorb as much attention as can be obtained, which differentiates it from other sorts of scarce goods. The theory also suggests a typology of openness, permitting an analysis of the different forms addressed in this conference, along with others, both existing and potential. In this context, it seems reasonable to speculate on how attention-economic activity manifested through openness may help lead to further dominance of this type of economy. Groupings based on and espousing openness eventually may come increasingly to replace profit-making firms and even non-profit institutions such as universities, while making the pursuit of money largely irrelevant.

My E-tech talk

May 272006
 

The pdf version of my e-tech talk “slides” — a rather clumsy power point presentation — can now be downloaded.
(This is my talk “The Real Nature of the Emerging Attention Economy,” including the metaphor of economies as massively multiplayer interactive games a “keynote” delivered at the O’reilly “Emerging Technology Conference” San Diego, March 8, 2006)

download e-tech talk pdf

Brad DeLong's remarks about my "famous" 1997 paper, and my response

May 252006
 

I didn’t know my paper was famous, so it is a great compliment for the attention-getting DeLong to say so. Here’s how he quotes me and comments:
DeLong: The Transformation from Feudalism to Capitalism to Attentionalism
The end of Goldhaber’s famous “attention economy” essay:
[what I wrote:]
The Attention Economy: The Natural Economy of the Net: At the end of the feudal period, the pomp and display of the nobility reached a level never before attained; the most gorgeous armor, the most magnificent tournaments of knights, the most elaborate ceremonies between rival nobles, the most brilliant marriages, the greatest interest in noble lineage. But by then it had lost all real function or importance. So today, when the stock market goes up and up, when money wealth itself seems a source of fame more than ever, when being number one on Forbes 400 list seems the height of perfection, when every basketball superstar wants a contract that is at least a million more than the last record one, we seem to be more dazzled by money than ever, just as we seem to be more intrigued by material goods than ever. But these interests are superficial and faddish. They are signs of decadence not of a glorious future for the money economy. Even in themselves they speak to the growing desire for attention, the need for it as well. Money is now little more numbers, one number among many, and as a source of lasting attention it can fade in an instant. The attention economy is already here, and more completely so every day…
[DeLong’s comment:]
Goldhaber misses, I think, one important thing. The feudal system was about command and control and fealty but also about money. Fealty to your lord was a two way street: you fought for him and he fed you and give you presents. It’s not the “money economy” that will be made obsolete by the “attention economy,” it’s a particular fraction of today’s money economy.
Posted by Brad DeLong on May 16, 2006 at 09:26 AM in Economic History, Economics, Economics: Growth, History, Internet, Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (11) | TrackBack (0)
It may be foolhardy to take issue with such a sure-footed and self-confident economist and economic historian as Brad DeLong. But I still think he is mistaken, if he is talking about pure feudalism.

The history is of course complex. Furthermore, feudalism remains controversial since it was carried on largely by illiterates, especially at its height. But the reason feudalism is called feudalism has to do with the awarding of feoffs (or feuds) rather than other sorts of wealth to knights in return for their loyalty and military and other services. Feoffs were estates that the knights had no right to alienate, say by selling — although a knight who had several feoffs could in turn assign some to other knights in return for their own fealty. On a feoff usually lived a number of peasant families who worked some of the land for their own and their families’ benefit and gave some of the proceeds to the knight in charge, while also performing some services for the knight, his family, and possibly for his knightly entourage, if any. At the height of pure feudalism, say in the eleventh century, this generally involved no exchange of money at all. Nor was it barter in the usual sense. Feudalism was an economy based on loyalty, fighting, and, a little later marriage and inheritance, with feoffs as the reward. Successful knights, over the years, managed to accumulate several or even many feoffs, and often to amalgamate them into larger holdings. Although money was in use before, during the height of the Roman Empire, for instance, and certainly after, for most purposes money was virtually non-existent in the part of Europe where feudalism existed most purely.

(As far as I can discern from the economic historical literature I have looked into, this has been obscured in part because most economic historians take it for granted that economic history is largely the history of prices and money. Where these cannot be found in the record, nothing, it seems can be said. Wherever these are found, they dominate the discourse undeservedly.)

This is all still oversimplification, of course, but I think it suggests several truths:

1. There are very different kinds of economies possible besides the one that now seems familiar, which is (or was?) based on money, markets and industrial production of standardized goods.

2. Thus, it is unwarranted to believe that the money economy or, indeed any economy based primarily on money is going to survive forever.

3. Feudalism eventually more or less succeeded in its implicit goal of providing security from Viking, “Saracen” and Magyar raiders, and later from the maraudings of different knights themselves. The more it succeeded, the more it left openings for different needs and a different kind of economy to emerge, in a largely internal evolution that eventually gave rise to the money, market, industrial system in which the economic profession grew up and has taken to be the norm.

4. Similarly, the money, market, industrial economy has met most material needs for a comfortable swath of the influential middle class in the advanced countries at least, and in this sense has certainly succeeded. That leaves openings for a new economy to evolve.

The attention economy in the sense I mean the term has a structure different from that of the money economy, as well as encouraging different and in some sense opposed systems of values. Therefore, it will be hard to participate in both economies for too long.

We are already in a period in which money mostly tracks attention, in that the more attention one gets, more or less, the more money one can get, and without attention one generally earns quite little money. If you just have money wealth, even a lot, but without having much attention, in whatever form the money is, you are in significant danger of losing it; without having enough attention, there is nothing you can do about that. On the other hand, if you have attention but no money, you can fairly easily get some of the latter.

Without going into further details, I will close with the thought that it is therefore plausible — if by no means certain — that the lure of money will fade quite substantially within a couple of generations. Traces of the money economy might indeed persist, but without generating the passions and the resultant responses that are commonplace today.

For more, see other articles on my website — now in the process of a large-scale update.

  •  May 25, 2006
  •   Comments Off on Brad DeLong's remarks about my "famous" 1997 paper, and my response
  •   Attention Economy, Writings

The Value of Openness in an Attention Economy

May 122006
 

Thursday, May 11, 2006
Invited paper (by MHG): FM10 Openness: Code, Science and Content
Presented by First Monday
http://numenor.lib.uic.edu/fmconference/index.php

As with other kinds of human decisions and actions, any of the various choices and instantiations of policies of openness can stem from several different motivations at the same time. One may choose openness out of a philanthropic desire to aid the most people, out of an enjoyment in being part of a community, out of a sense that openness is the best way to get an interesting puzzle solved or curiosity satisfied, a dislike of privacy or holding on to secrets, or perhaps simply from throwing all caution to the winds and just putting out there whatever one thinks with no thought as to consequences.

Yet I want to argue that acting from any or all these different sorts of motivations may also be self-interested action of a particular type, namely action that makes sense in terms of the existence of an Attention Economy, in which one’s primary motive of action is to increase one’s supply, not of money or material goods, but of a very different, but intrinsically scarce entity, namely the attention of other human beings.

I have argued previously that the attention economy is the natural economy of the net. In my view, this economy, while in certain ways very old, is now moving to be the dominant economy, replacing, not merely transforming, the economy based on money, on the market, and on the industrialized exchange, distribution and production of standardized material goods. The new economy I think cannot simply co-exist with with the market economy permanently, because each demands its own social structures, its own mindsets, its own modes of life, and its own values.

All these differences come out in a consideration of the kinds of openness this conference is dedicated to discussing, as well as some other categories of openness perhaps less to be discussed here.

Before explaining that, I want to try to offer a clearer understanding of what attention is, or, more specifically, what it means for one person to pay attention to another. First of all, one pays attention not merely to another person standing there, but by paying attention to that person’s actions and expressions.

Suppose you are at a tennis tournament, watching a singles match. As you focus on one of the players, you begin to recognize what the player is doing through the action of certain nerve connections or neuron chains in your own brain, probably especially in your frontal cortex. If you see the player raise the racquet over her head, you recognize the action through activating exactly the neuron chain of your own that would cause your own arm to lift over your own head. You activate the chain – that is, the nerves fire — but, unless you are quite abnormal, you actually move either not at all or only very slightly. This is the phenomenon called neural mirroring.

It was originally discovered in Milan, Italy, about 1991 when a graduate student walked into a lab where rhesus monkeys were being studied with an usual apparatus. The lab’s neuroscientists had managed to wire up the chain of neurons activated each time one rhesus monkey lifted a peanut to its mouth; they then connected the wire not only to some sort of recorder, but to a loudspeaker, so they could easily note every time the chain fired, so as to be able to observe what the monkey was up to when this happened. The graduate student walked in licking an ice cream cone; the loudspeaker went off. But the monkey was doing nothing except staring at the student.

Subsequent mirror neuron experiments less invasively set up have been done on humans. Humans respond the same way as the monkeys, but in much finer detail. For instance different neurons in your brain would fire if you observed someone picking up a glass in order to drink from it than would if the intent were to put the dirty glass in the sink.

To return to our tennis player, left suspended in mid-motion on the court — you don’t just mirror the motions, you most probably also mirror the intent, namely to win the point, and also the emotions that go with the desire to win. All this binds you to that particular player. You probably cannot switch the feelings of wanting this player to win as fast as the ball goes over the net, so you can’t pay attention in quite the same way to the opposing player. To some minimal extent, just by watching you become a fan. If this player stays active, seeing her name or her face will reactivate some of the feeling so loyalty you developed while watching her play the first time. The more you watch her, the more she takes over your mind (albeit not completely for all time) and the more you want her to win or simply come to want whatever she wants.

The simplicity of the mirror neuron process in connection with athletic motions probably helps explain why sports are much attended to, but we know from the work of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson that all thought has a certain muscular, bodily quality. In following an argument, for example, we are engaged in mental motions that to some extent must mirror the implicit motions of the person arguing the thought.

To pay attention to anyone, we activate certain chains in our own brains, and each time we do, it becomes easier to activate similar processes from similar viewpoints, the next time we encounter that same thinker — which is to say the same person, whether a philosopher, a country music singer, a software programmer whose program we adopt or try to so study, a scientist, or whoever.

I only learned of mirror neurons this past January. Prior to that, I was loathe to use terms referring to brains, and in some ways I am still wary of it. I explained paying attention in terms of reshaping one’s mind to the thoughts, viewpoints, mental processes and emotions of the person one is paying attention to. Think of the shape-shifter toy that was popular among five-year-olds a few years ago. To pay attention to any particular person you do your best —however temporarily — to reshape your mind to hers. You think their thoughts, you feel their feelings, you want what they want, or you are not paying attention. Of course, by the time you are an adult, if not long before, you have also developed certain resistances, certain critical faculties that allow you to get out of the total mindset, to perhaps to see some of the train of thought as mistaken, false, against your deeper interests, or even evil. But that takes additional effort, additional self-centeredness, and still may leave you partially willing to shape your mind and intentions according to that of whomever you are paying attention to. And whomever it is, you will be laying down memories that will again make it easier and more natural to turn your attention to that same person later on .

I’ve so far focused strictly on what paying attention is about. What about getting attention? As I’ve already indicated, to some degree an audience full of people paying attention to you will want whatever it is you want. They are implicitly on your side. They are also thinking your thoughts, enlarging, as it were, the size and scope of your own mind. They can keep paying attention, through remembering and recalling past experiences to mind, or through reading a text of yours over or looking at an old video or v-log or whatever, even in principle long after you are dead. Since your own mental processes recur to a substantial degree in their minds as they do this, having attention can make your mind live again, in a way. It is perhaps the closest humans can come to life after death, as well as to an expanded life while still living.

Here are some conclusions about the economics of attention that follow from what I have said;

1) Attention wealth is in the minds of the beholders, not in any bank; because memories persist, that wealth survives and can be drawn upon in various ways much later on ;

2) Attention is not the same as reputation. It might be possible to look up in some list, say, that you have a reputation for repaying your loans on time, without having any real idea about who you are or what your thoughts are. Even if you in some way choose to remain anonymous, putting out your thoughts to the world allows other people to think them, which enlarges you. Even with some degree of anonymity, if your are canny, say, in your use of the internet, you may draw on this attention as well.
3) At the same time, to activate others’ attention it helps to present as much of yourself as possible, so as to increase the number of associations that will connect various memories to you, so as to reawaken attention, etc.

4) The more people pay attention to you, the more they want what you want, whether this is something for the good of the world or something personal.

5) Paying attention slips easily into heeding, serving, waiting on, waiting for, satisfying, taking care of, etc. It is through that adaptability that having enough attention can guarantee you whatever you want, with or without converting attention into money.

6) Again, you don’t have to be consciously focused on yourself to want attention, yet the attention you get is still taken from the essentially scarce supply. Think of Chicken Little. To the extent that any conscious or even unconscious reflection goes on in the mind of this human-like chicken, it would have to include something like the following line of reasoning. “Something fell on me; I think it was the sky; I am frightened that the sky is falling; my thoughts and fears matter (because I matter); I need help: because I need help and my thoughts and feelings matter, and, ultimately, because I matter, it is quite all right for me not to keep my fears to myself but to go around screaming, ‘the sky is falling, the sky is falling;’ if I do that enough, and enough people — or animals — pay attention, maybe someone will help me by keeping the sky from falling.” Whether one views this as wanting and feeling one deserves attention for oneself or simply feeling that one’s thoughts or feelings deserve attention on their own, it pretty much amounts to the same thing.

And when Henny Penny takes up the cry, the same things apply. Henny is thinking Chicken Little’s thoughts, but they now are also her own thoughts. So it is that the motive for seeking attention for certain thoughts or facts or ideas can seem perfectly philanthropic, but only via the implicit belief that one’s own entertaining of those thoughts and so on amount to a reason that others ought to entertain them as well.

7) Still, chicken Little will have an easier time getting people (or animals) to pay attention to her thoughts about the sky if she has already entered their attention before, the more easily, the wider their prior experiencing of reshaping their minds to hers, or their knowing her appearance, name, etc. Thus to get attention for your thoughts on some future occasion it helps to have gotten attention for various aspects of yourself earlier.

All this suggests that there are various desirable forms of openness:
1. Open access —having your thoughts, expressions, etc. as available and accessible as possible, with as few barriers as possible. Obviously, charging money for access is one such highly limiting barrier. If such a barrier were easily enforceable, it would be even worse in limiting the attention you can get.

2. Self-revealing — the more aspects of yourself that express who you are the more opportunities for people to open their mind to you, and the richer the accumulation of attention you can get. Let me add it may not pay a software programmer to also put sex videos on the Internet, especially if it turns out the programmers are especially squeamish about such videos or even worse, totally oblivious. It may also be too personally painful, of course, to contemplate doing that.

3. Claiming priority by putting out your thoughts in their most preliminary forms. Since “waiting for” is one form that attention certainly takes, early hints can be successful and tantalizing.

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