Michael H. Goldhaber

I am not a big fan of the numerical sociologists of the Internet , Fang Wu and Bernardo A. Huberman., but I thought for a bit they had finally come up with something interesting with their paper “Persistence and Success in the Attention Economy”. Their data reveal a seeming paradox: the more videos a person uploads on YouTube, the less likely the video will be an attention success, that is will garner more than 1% of all downloads for videos uploaded in that week. They make it seem that persistence in continuing to upload new videos in that situation is foolish at best.

What they ignore is that seeking attention does not automatically mean seeking the widest possible audience. Given the popularity of Youtube overall, there are probably many specialized audiences, and it could well be that persistent up-loaders are seeking and even have found a substantial niche audience, even though it be less than 1% of the undifferentiated total. They also ignore that uploading a video takes very little effort, is free, and may be intended just for friends or relatives. What this study really demonstrates is only that individual motivation cannot be determined just by numerics. An actual look at the videos of the “persistent” up-loaders would probably offer more insight into the aims behind them.

There has been much discussion of leadership at Apple recently. Is Steve Jobs indispensable? Short answer: “yes” In fact: “absolutely.” Jobs is the star we pay attention to through all Apple outpourings. Even in the unlikely even that an Apple user or would-be user, or even hater, has not heard Jobs’s name, or seen him on video or in a photo, what that person would most likely align to as special behind Apple products is clearly Jobs’s sensibility, his outlook towards the world, his remarkable vision and foresightedness, his particular aesthetic, his contact with the zeitgeist and so on.

I wish Jobs the best of health and a long life, of course. He has done so much to affect  so many current experiences, even of those who have never once used and Apple product. Still, though Apple Computer, Inc. might persist and possibly even do well without Jobs at the helm, I suspect it is only likely to flourish under his continued leadership. Without him, even with some other visionary at the helm, the strong alignment we have with Jobs – for those of us who do — will dissipate over time. The urgency of buying or checking out the latest Apple products and services just will not be the same.

In an article in Sunday’s NY Times (1/18/09), Steve Lohr oddly quotes two different musicians, one of whom is now a corporate “innovation  consultant” to the effect that this is not so, that Jobs has solid people in place to continue the company without hIm.

“ ‘Nobody is indispensable indefinitely,’ said John Kao, a jazz musician and innovation consultant to corporations and governments. ‘The “great man” theory does hold water, but mainly at times of transition when a charismatic leader lends what psychologists would call an individual’s ego strengths to the organization or country as a whole, to allow it to regroup and move forward.’ ”

AND

“ ‘As special as Steve is, I think of Apple as like a great jazz orchestra,’ said Michael Hawley, a professional pianist and a computer scientist who once worked for Mr. Jobs. ‘Steve did a superb job of recruiting a broad and deep talent base. When a group gets to be that size, the conductor’s job is pretty nominal — mainly attracting new talent and helping maintain the tempo, adding bits of energy here and there.’”

Bull. I submit that these musicians don’t understand their own fields, much less the secret of contemporary management.  Quite the contrary of what they say, the larger a musical ensemble, the more crucial is the conductor. This is especially true of jazz orchestras, which is one reason the great ones of the past — such as  Duke Ellington’s or the two of the Dorsey brothers — are no more. When even a standard, classical symphony orchestra changes conductor, the whole sensibility and a good deal of the fan base changes, and these are orchestras who, to a large extent, keep playing music by the same few composers. The conductor doesn’t just choose the musicians and the pieces to be played, but approaches them with a style and sensibility and a personality that the musicians as well as the audience must respond to.

I have no doubt that Jobs is gifted at spotting and nurturing talent, but that is not his only role at Apple (nor was it at Pixar or NeXT). People in the company might come to him with many wonderful ideas, and it’s possible he initiates few innovations these days. But he very clearly exercises remarkable powers of selection in choosing what should go forward — and when — and what should not. (Sometimes he makes poor choices, and he probably ignores certain areas, but that’s inevitable.)

Looking at the way Apple spokespeople (who are sometimes managers of one area or another)  dress makes it clear they follow Jobs slavishly. I very much doubt that among the talents Jobs has nurtured or could nurture is another Steve J. Such a person would almost certainly be at sharp odds with Jobs and would have gone his or her own way. And of course that person would be very unlikely to share Jobs’s exact style or vision. By way of analogy, think of a great dramatist or novelist or painter (or a great conductor to stick to the musical metaphor). Such a person might mentor another but not in any way someone who would draw the same set of fans, or resonate with similar enthusiasm.

And Other Companies?

What has all this to do with corporations in general? Quite a lot, I think. Companies that lack strong vision and can thus draw and keep consumer attention are going to have an increasingly hard time staying afloat as they encounter others that compete in one area or another. Any area that begins to be lucrative under current conditions will quickly engender competition from others who will pour into the field. The only moderately long term success will be among those who develop the kind of fan base few besides Apple have now. When the original leader quits for whatever reason, any such company will face an increasingly perilous transition. A new charismatic leader will be needed for the long term if the company is to continue to prosper, not just for the supposed transition period. Generic executives such as John Sculley and Gil Amelio were no good at running Apple. They will be less good in general anywhere, I suspect. (Though Bill Gates is more of shrewd businessman than a Jobs-like visionary, he is enough of a visionary and inspirer that Steve Ballmer, his hand-picked successor,  has been unable to replace him at Microsoft.)

Of course, though I hope that like Elliott Carter, the composer, Steve Jobs stays healthy and at work past 100, that doesn’t mean that Apple or any other particular corporation is likely to survive that long. Even if he remains that vibrant, Jobs will at some point perhaps not be so good at responding to the zeitgeist. Keynes famously said that “in the long term we will all be dead,” and that’s true of companies too. In fact, their life expectancy is growing ever shorter, I think, even as that of humans increases.

Subtleties to Bear in Mind

However, 2 caveats: (1) Just as Elvis still has fans long after his death, fans of Jobs would certainly continue to have an interest in Apple products for a long time should Jobs leave the Co. for whatever reason. Still, in the fast-moving world of computers, etc., oldies but goodies are not of much value, so a Jobs-like vision would still have to be in effect.

(2) Still more germane, the visionary behind a line of products or services need not be the CEO. Consider Google in this regard, where Larry Page and Sergey Brin are sill very active despite not being the CEO.

(Disclaimer: I own some Apple stock.)

When I wrote about Palin shortly after McCain chose her, I said she did not have enough time to gain fan loyalty in order to have a significant positive effect on McCain’s votes. I think I was right on that, despite her obviously having gotten a big bump in popularity, simply by being a novel sort of candidate. I wouldn’t be surprised, after seeing her disastrous interview with Katie Couric on CBS news, if she in fact does what was bruited about during the Republican convention, namely resign from the candidacy. Maybe McCain could now pick Lieberman.

But McCain has said he is suspending campaigning, ostensibly because of the looming financial mess. He has not said that he will restart his campaign,and perhaps he won’t. This may turn out to become one of the oddest elections in US history, a candidate essentially giving up.

In the Couric interview, Plain did not come across as someone one can easily align one’s mind or emotions with, since she bordered on incoherence of a depth far beyond the worst George W. Bush ever offered, and she looked continually scared, while pretending to be confident, not a winning combination, nor one that it is easy to identify with. I think few people will be won over to her, rather than seeing her as more of an object than a person.

McCain cannot have failed to note that Palin is a disastrous candidate, how cannot keep his campaign afloat. (He would have not gotten much bounce in the polls at all, had he not chosen this unconventional candidate, so he was counting on her for a lot. Barring a disastrous mistake by Obama, McCain probably knows he now cannot win. His choice is get rid of Palin and take a gamble on Lieberman, or just forget the whole thing. I suspect he will find losing badly to be highly humiliating, so he might take the former course, though the precedent (McGovern’s dropping Eagleton in ‘72) is not hopeful for him.

If it does happen, you read it here first. And, by the way, McCain might do really badly in debate himself.

Why should we elect Obama? One obvious reason is the mess the American Economy (as traditionally defined) is in right now.  Does this mean that Obama and his economic advisors will come up with good plans for reviving the economy and preventing a further slide? I suspect they would do better than McCain and his crew, but also that they will not be very well equipped themselves to understand the real problems. They come from the University of Chicago or at best are of the Robert Rubin-Larry Summers school, which in my mind makes them more part of the problem than the solution. Still Obama, if elected, will have a huge positive impact, I suspect. Let me explain, starting with a bit of history.

The Post-war Surpluses…
After World War I, the US became the leading world economy in conventional terms. This status was considerably strengthened after WWII, which had mostly destroyed other advanced economies, while building up huge reserves of demand everywhere, demand which US industry alone was in any position to satisfy. The US ran a long trade surplus, partly because it stimulated trade by foreign aid, particularly via the Marshall Plan, which aided Western European recovery after WWII. The trade surplus helped promote good factory jobs, and the money earned through such jobs filtered through the rest of the economy, keeping employment fairly robust. This was further aided by high military spending, along with other government spending such as on the race to the moon, which was often financed through borrowing.
The Deficits that Followed …
However, by the 1960’s, with the lengthy Vietnam War and a continued growth in optimistic government programs, government priming of industrial efforts expanded too much, and a cycle of inflation commenced. That problem was added to in the early ‘70’s by the formation of OPEC, which led to an abrupt rise in oil prices. That led in turn to a US balance-of-payments deficit.
Now, a strong argument can be made that a balance-of-payments deficit resulting simply from high oil prices is not much of a problem; the OPEC countries were just taking advantage of a situation they had relatively little to do with, since the oil coming out of their territory they usually didn’t even directly do much to produce, leaving that to western companies or contractors. Their spending on luxury goods or armaments or their “recycling” the money to the US by investing in US businesses only enriched some Americans at the expense of others. (In fact, to the extent that the US was the main recipient of recycled oil payments, it might even have benefited from payments made to the OPEC countries by other oil purchasers.)
The main effect in the US, then of the initial oil shocks was to redistribute money mostly upwards from factory workers to investors. But since a large portion of US investment is channeled through institutions such as pension funds, non-profit foundations, university endowments and the like, the riches from abroad were distributed more widely than to a small investor class.
However, the combination of inflation of wages through union contracts and higher oil prices caused profits from domestic industries to stagnate or fall. Then the heads of the institutional investors such as pension funds, along with bankers who stood to profit from recycled oil investments and other capitalists, pressed for a combination of measures. These included restraints on unions and higher productivity, or failing that, moving  production offshore to lower wage countries. The wealthy and would-be wealthy also pressed for lowered taxes for themselves,  In addition, a relative fall-off in US innovation led to big gains by exporters from countries such as Japan.
All of this increased the balance-of-payments crisis, since now (that is by the 1980’s) not only raw materials, but also manufactured goods were coming from abroad. How was the US able to sustain this continued trade deficit? One main reason was that the flow of attention to the US was and remains very large, though it is now shrinking fast.
The Attention Economy to the Rescue…
Being tied together via advanced communication (i.e., attention) technologies, the US is a huge and mostly inward looking audience, which means that US stars have a built-in advantage in dealing with the outside world. The larger one’s existing  audience, the more attention outsiders are likely to offer. This advantage is compounded by the fact that English, spoken as a first language by more than half a billion people, it is a second language for many hundreds of millions if not several billion more. In addition, creators in the US have figured out how to make action movies and video games that attract even across language barriers to a surprising extent.
Being  a fan makes you feel part of the most visible fan base; it also makes you eager to please the stars you care about. IN the case of American stars on the world stage, their existence exalts the whole country in the eyes of others. The net outflow of payments in money was counterbalanced therefore by a net inflow of attention payments. This meant foreigner were eager to get close to the stars by various sorts of loans or investments in the US, with Japanese investors at one point buying up Rockefeller Center in NYC and Arab investors buying stores such as Saks Fifth Avenue. Neither of these probably made a great deal of sense as strict monetary investments, but they made much sense as homage to famous and star-used institutions. In addition, living in the most advanced attention economy has come to mean living with few restrictions on expressions and a ready fan base for new stars, even if they come from abroad, in whatever field they happen to be. America now depends on this openness to maintain its place in the world.
….. But Then Came W…
All that has been eroded by  Bush administration policies, however. Its invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, its use of torture, its condemning prisoners to Guantanamo, as well as its resistance to immigration, has eroded, and if it continues, will further erode the US attention advantage.

…So Now we Need O.
Due to his race, his personal background, his intelligence and relative youth, Obama’s election, just by itself, will markedly change perceptions of the US. If he is bold enough to follow through on his promises to change foreign policy, especially  around Iraq and  in terms of increased diplomacy, as well as in areas such as global warming, he will greatly increase the world’s willingness to pay attention to everything American. The 200,000 person crowd he attracted last week in Germany, plus the excitement about his candidacy in much of the world already attests to this. He may be a “rock star” but that is just what we need.

Like millions of other Americans, I watched Hillary Clinton’s “meltdown,” as the media called it, as an Internet video on Monday January 7, the day before the New Hampshire primary. I am on record as opposing Hillary, for a number of reasons, including dislike of many of her stands such as her belligerent votes on Iraq and Iran, never apologizing for  the Iraq vote, dismay at her connection to the Democratic Leadership Council, and revulsion at the whole notion of perpetuating political “dynasties” (Bush, Clinton, Bush, Clinton). Edwards, not Clinton, has been the candidate I most supported and still support, long shot though he now is. Yet I found myself emotionally touched by seeing Clinton “well up” and by hearing the quaver in her voice.

Even as I felt that, I also was thinking that what she was emotional about was not so much her long commitment to serving the country — millions of people have made that commitment, after all — but rather that her campaign might be faltering, her ambitions of being President might come to naught.
The point is that in paying attention to her, I viscerally felt the emotion she was projecting—regardless of whether she was sincere in projecting it, and regardless of my own reservations about her and what she stands for.  I was, in the terms in which I have explained the act of attention paying, deeply aligned with her. As such I wanted what I took it that she wanted, which was for her to emerge victorious in the NH vote. When she did the next day, I was very pleased. My impression is that many other people reacted much as I did. When you align with someone, you want what they want, even if there may be other reasons you don’t want to go along with what have become your own emotions.

With videos on the Internet enabling more of us to to view particularly emotional moments related to political candidates and others,  we must expect that  the emotional connections that result will play an even larger role than they have in the past, when it comes to deciding whom to vote for. This is not necessarily going to make us eager to support candidates we disagree with too much on other terms, but it will influence us to put relatively small differences aside. We will put less emphasis on the candidate’s “record, “ and more on what they say and how they say it. In 2004 Kerry overemphasized his record in Vietnam, leaving himself open to being “Swift-boated.” With past records less important, outside groups’ abilities ot vilify a candidate n the basis of the pst should play less of a role. That is to the good. What is less attractive is the chance that pure acting skill will allow a candidate to distort who he is and what he is for. George Bush , in my view successfully did this in 2000, with his “compassionate conservative” and “I’m a uniter, not a divider’ lines. These went right along with his “just plain folks” demeanor.

Fortunately, perhaps, in a long campaign, a candidate will have a hard hiding more unpleasant sides, if these exist. They will be circulated on YouTube and be seen by many.  Is it conceivable that eventually highly genuine people with real emotions will turn out to be the new star candidates? If so, will that be good?

0. Preface

In this and the next few installments, I will be addressing a number of connected ideas: the changing role in our lives of material things; the changing nature of firms; the rise of what I shall term hyper-creativity; how it interacts with slower moving institutions such as government; some examples; and the connection of all these with advertising.  All these are involved in the change from what I will now call the “Money-Thing Epoch” to what I will call the “Attention Epoch.” The terms in quotes are my latest attempts to find suitably apt and evocative terms to replace my earlier coinage: the Money-Market-Industrial Economy on one hand and the Attention Economy on the other.  

1. Who’s Riding Now?

According to  a poem by Ralph Waldo Emerson,  the “sage of Concord” (Massachusetts) and  the pre-eminent nineteenth-century  transcendentalist, “Things are in the saddle, and ride Mankind.”  Nowadays, as I’ve said, American and other advanced societies are passing beyond the Thing Epoch to enter the Attention Epoch, in which relations between minds tend to dominate, and the scarcity and desire for attention are what mainly structure our relations with each other. That doesn’t mean that we suddenly do without things, of course, but rather that their main function changes. Emerson’s observation does not hold any longer in the way he probably meant it. Where once the main value of a human-produced thing was utility, convenience or comfort, now it is its role as an attention focuser or intermediary.

Once you have first paid attention to someone you can then pay further attention merely by recalling that experience to mind. Mostly, that recalling will be triggered by some jog to your attention, as, for example, some situation that reminds you of some aspect of the earlier experience. Often, and perhaps reassuringly, that will be through objects you surround yourself with.

People put photos of close friends and relations — or pets or celebrities — on their desks and around their houses for this reason. But reminders of past attention paid certainly need not be images of the person in question. They can be anything that even slightly triggers recall. Any gift that you keep around can remind you of the gift-giver and turn attention in her direction. Sometimes this can be very subtle, even unconscious. The object need not be material, it could be a tune or an idea, a quote, almost anything. Still, material objects, just because they occupy the space in which we live our lives, are particularly likely to engage our senses and thus serve as reminders. As if they were windows, we pay attention through such objects to the people that seem to us to be behind them.

2. Through the Thing to the Mind Behind

Take the case of this blog, for instance (though it is only a material presence for you while you tune it in on your computer,   unless you happen to have printed out this entry). It’s pretty obvious that you are paying attention to me through it, or, in the terms I commonly use, you are temporarily aligning your mind to mine. If you happen to see the name of this blog on a list you keep, that might remind you to check it, and in even considering doing so, you might very, very briefly return to alignment with me. The same would take place if you had a book written by me and happened to see it in your house.  If you had read only a bit of it, you might be reminded by seeing it to read more. Whether you open it to read on or not, seeing the object in this case clearly would remind you of prior attention to me, and that recall would be an additional act of attention.

Whereas a book or written work quite obviously connects you to the mind of the writer, whose name you can easily discover by examining the book, in the case of many other objects, there is a distinct mind behind it, even if that is all you know. Say you have —  and like having — a Rabbit corkscrew. If so, you are somewhat aligned with the mind of the ingenious person who thought about and found a neat way to solve the minor problem of how to uncork a wine bottle smoothly, elegantly and nearly effortlessly. In having the object, sometimes using it, possibly showing it off to your guests, perhaps prizing it for its esthetic qualities, you are drawing attention to the connection between its unknown inventor and you, and both can gain. (A guest sufficiently impressed might obtain her own, and then bring you to mind a little along with the unknown designer whenever she thinks of or sees the corkscrew. Even if she never buys one or even intends to, every time she opens a wine bottle or sees her own corkscrew, she might  recall yours and you, as well as the Rabbit instigator.) It would probably be difficult to have an iPhone, and not be aware of the connection to Steve Jobs. In a slightly more complex chain, seeing, driving, or riding in a Prius might help focus your attention not only on its unknown design leader but on Al Gore.

3. Mmm-mm Good

Infants start out life generally connecting the objects around them to their parents, and in many cases find an object such as a blanket or pacifier the presence of which seems to include a parent’s attention. Similarly, food represents a parent’s loving attention, at least when it is liked. The whole category known as “comfort food” like macaroni and cheese owes its comforting status to its resemblance to what was provided by a loving caretaker in childhood. If you never were given mac and cheese in your early years, you are unlikely to find it particularly comforting now. (Remarkably, a study of medical students has shown that these college graduates are more likely to trust a drug salesman who plies them with foods like pizza than one who does not. Perhaps more teachers should feed their students if they want them paying attention. That should include medical school professors explaining why drug salesmen have ulterior motives,  in my view.)

In the case of a parent and child, the attention tied with the food passes both ways. The parent is certainly showing attention to the child in feeding her, especially when feeding her what she likes. When you buy macaroni and cheese in a store, most of the attention you might feel coming to you is illusory; the chef who possibly provided the recipe probably doesn’t know of your existence, and if the store is a supermarket probably nobody will be paying much actual attention to you. What you get instead is the illusion of attention coming your way. Very often today, material objects tend to serve as repositories for this kind of illusory attention.

4. Star-infested Underwear and Prada Bags

Children a little older, if they watch children’s TV, want items associated with the apparent stars of these programs, such as Elmo or Sponge-Bob Squarepants. Adults do much the same thing, in a slightly more sophisticated way.  We associate food or songs or even furniture to the original times we paid attention to this particular item or sort of item, and thus to whoever first fed it to is or sang it or showed it to us, or perhaps simply was whom we thought we were paying attention to when we first noticed the item. (For instance, it might have been in an ad associated with a particular TV show, possibly starring a favorite actor, or simply a show we love that came from the mind of a certain producer, whether we know her name  or not.) In the case of food, it can be a chef or cookbook writer or star on the food channel who gets our attention as we eat or even cook.

4. The Future of the Present

As I mentioned earlier, many items that are purchased in America today are bought as gifts. In fact, our lavish level of gift-giving, including not only Christmas and birthdays but all sorts of occasions including weddings, baby showers, Bar Mitzvahs and the equivalent, account for perhaps nearly half of all sales in American retailing. Some of the items are purely functional, of course, and some of the gifts are more or less exchanges between equals or merely what seems to be required.  Yet, even then, the giving is intended as an act of mutual attention. The recipient is supposed to feel that Uncle Clarence, having paid attention to her, thus aligned with her mind, is aware of her needs and wants. Once the gift is given, Uncle Clarence need think of it no more, but as long as it stays out of a dark closet somewhere, the niece so gifted will be paying attention to Clarence whenever she notices or even thinks of  the object in question.

5. Object Lessons

We have been thinking mainly of material objects, but the word “object” is commonly used in two other, more specialized senses.  Many followers of the psychoanalytic tradition speak of “introjected objects,” meaning persons one had paid enough attention to that they are in some sense present in one’s mind at all times. In the terms I prefer, that means that one can easily , and often even unconsciously align or reshape one’s mind  in the image of that personage’s. Psychoanalysts tend to think of “significant others” and especially parents and primary caretakers as the main sources of such objects, but anyone one pays enough attention to will be internalized as well. Meanwhile, in computer programming, there is the quite different notion of semi-independent objects that  in some way can be approached as units “inside” computers. These objets can be connected bits of code that  perform a certain function, or, very often, things such as images that would appear on the computer screen.

While there is no necessary connection between these different usages, my point is that there very well could be, and, if you consider something like a blog or a YouTube video to be an “object,” the connection can be strong.  I suggest that an almost inevitable future direction of computing and the  Internet will be  to make virtual objects that are more like material objects in that one frequently encounters or glances at  or feels as if one is touching them even while doing something quite different. This would make them like objects you have in your home, very much as if they were physically present. They would also be likely to evoke memories of attention paid in specific ways to specific people in the past, and incline you to pay more attention to those same people.

6.  Virtual Things

Simple versions of this already exist: the lists of “buddies” available for instant messaging, or the links to individuals one knows or feels as if one does on the social-networking sites such as MySpace or Facebook. But computer operating systems could go much further, incorporating something rather more like Second Life, or any computer game in which three-dimensional objects of all  sorts seem to exist in a 3-D space you can move through. Such virtual things could remind you of specific “objects (people) to whom one has given one’s attention, and that in some way demand more, just as a half-finished book lying beside your bed might beckon.  It might be a moving image of Beethoven or Bruce Springsteen, invoking memories of their music and maybe a desire to hear more, which might be accomplished , in part by clicking on these images. An image of an Eames chair might connect you with all about Charles and Ray Eames, so the virtual space you inhabit through your computer would radically revise the details of how you pay attention. The virtual world would be a sort of pictorial encyclopedia organized around what you had paid attention to before, but always opening up new avenues as well.

Today, already, many of us  walk around listening to iPods or talking on iPhones or sending and receiving Blackberry messages. So inthe not-too-distant future, we will be even further immersed in the enhanced virtual world, perhaps with virtual objects appearing next to “real” ones through the computerized spectacles we will wear.   Purely attetnional objects then will increasingly replace material things.

As readers of this blog already know, I first came up with the phrase “Attention Economy” to describe the entirely new kind of economic system that I see as increasingly dominating our lives. It is an economy in the sense that it involves allocating of what is most scarce and precious in the present period, namely the attention that can come to each of us  from other human beings. As you also know, ever since Thomas H. Davenport and John C. Beck appropriated my term for their own, different purpose in their book with my title,  my usage has gotten lost in the more unreflective usage they proposed. They do not mean a new kind of economy, basically, but really refer still to the economy based on money, the market etc. This is utterly mistaken. More and more of the activity in which we engage involves paying, passing along, receiving or seeking attention. Even the money economy is ever more tightly an appendage to such efforts, and not anymore a free-standing economy in its own right. (Even D & B’s usage has been further down-graded to refer mostly to the collection of so-called “attention-data” via the Internet, for the purpose mostly, of advertising, a misusage that nonetheless led me to the investigations that will be forthcoming on this blog shortly. )

Overall, the book Davenport and Beck put together with my title has been very hard for me to read, though lately I have gone through it. As it happens, the very makeup of their book reveals they have barely a clue about attention, not to mention writing. (See my draft chapter on attention for a better understanding. An additional annoyance I feel is that book editors inanely tell me that there is already a book “on my subject,” namely D & B.)

The design (of D & B’s book )includes as many distractions as possible on every page, leading to hundreds of reasons to stop reading. Further, like most books with two or more authors, there is no single mind behind it with which the reader can hope to align. Rather, it reads as a middling sort of high-school textbook, put together by a committee and with no real goal other than making the publisher, and perhaps the authors, some money (though D & B are probably smart enough to realize that they want attention as well). As to the contents, the authors occasionally make quite astute comments,  but  their level of self-reflection is amazingly low, while the amount of nonsense they include is quite high.

The book has no overall point or even a consistent point of view.  Unlike even a better-quality high-school text, D & B’s  does not call upon the reader ever to think critically or reflectively or ever to have to struggle to get a key concept.  Any time a flaccid half-thought can be introduced, they put it in, as they bounce around nearly randomly from topic to topic. They never consider just why attention or its economics should be of particular importance now, partly because they seemingly have no concept of history or historical changes, of the kinds of changing motivations that arise at different times or even of the desirability of attention and why that should be.

D&B are both apparently psychologists, and there is of course  a huge but problematic psychological literature on the subject  of attention. (One reason it is problematic: psychologists, in doing experiments on how people or even animals pay attention rarely consider that the experimental subjects’ attention may mostly be focused on they themselves as experimenters. The subject, especially any human one, continually understands she should be doing what the experimenters ask, and that is the primary attention focus. )

D & B  introduce and misuse Abraham Maslow’s 1970’s “hierarchy of needs,” which, taken literally, is nonsense anyway,  just made up without any attempt to verify that needs actually occur in such a hierarchy, or in the order he proposed. It in fact conflicts with much that psychologists and ethologists (students of animal behavior) had already discovered when Maslow wrote.  According to Maslow, the need for food is more fundamental than the need for attention; this is a reductive falsehood. Virtually every mammalian infant has parental attention as at least as primary a need as food; anorexia is only one sign that attention-seeking can come even before physical survival. The historical fact that the Thing Epoch came before the Attention Epoch is a matter of historical and perhaps technical contingency, not biological fact. Of course, D & B don’t have nay particular point to make in introducing Maslow’s thought, other, perhaps, than to impress the gullible reader that they are saying something weighty.

At several points, D & B imply that attention may simply be bought for money, though in other places they make fairly clear that they do not themselves believe this foolishness. They do not ever seem to offer the simple truth that all that can be bought is some chance to get and hold attention, which then depends entirely on the abilities of the would-be attention-getter to connect with the audience; nor do they have a coherent theory as to how the latter might happen.

Perhaps I should not be surprised at D&B’s low-brow approach. Their book is after all intended to be read by business people. The average business person probably coasted through high school without being much interested in any complex thought that did not have to do with making money. The current occupant of the White House was in fact touted as the first President with an M.B.A. (from Harvard Business School, incidentally, the very same school whose Press published D&B).  By now almost everyone can see what a disaster that has been. Despite the aura surrounding this degree,  the number of best leaders in any field — including even business itself — who hold it as their actual  pinnacle of formal education is not high.

I would guess that most business people simply flip through D&B’s book, get the idea that, as they put it “paying attention to attention” is somehow important and probably leave it  at that.  Then, every time this reader notices the book, she gives a tiny bit of extra thought to attention, which is an example of how objects do focus attention. My next blog entry, in fact, will discuss just how material things — of all sorts, but especially  human-made ones — now have as their primary role just such attention focussing role. D&B’s book may not really be worth reading — if indeed it can be read — but it does serve as a model of how a certain part of the actual Attention Economy, while a mystery to them,  operates.

Here’s some Q &A from the Encyclopedia Britannica online:

Quick Facts about Bellow, Saul
Biography
Q: Who is the author of “The Adventures of Augie March”?
A: Saul Bellow is the author of “The Adventures of Augie March”

Q: Who is the author of “Dangling Man”?
A: Saul Bellow is the author of “Dangling Man”

Q: Who is the author of “The Victim”?
A: Saul Bellow is the author of “The Victim”

….
Quick Facts about Plath, Sylvia
Biography
Q: Who is the author of “The Bell Jar”?
Sylvia Plath is the author of “The Bell Jar”
…
Q: Who is the author of “Ariel”?
A: Sylvia Plath is the author of “Ariel”
…..

Q: Who is the author of “The Collected Poems”?
A: Sylvia Plath is the author of “The Collected Poems”

Does the Britannica believe that anyone of any age would be interested in this nonsense? It certainly makes one wonder why Andrew Keen, in his the cult of the amateur: how today’s internet is killing our culture, is quite exercised that the “professional” Brittannica may be replaced by the “amateur” Wikipedia. (In passing, Keen exults that one college’s history department banned references to Wikipedia in papers, but most college teachers would look askance at citations of any encyclopedia, I think. I certainly would.)  But the online version of the Britannica is guilty of a number of quite amateurish moves, the above idiotic Q & A being just some.

Keen does not appear to have made any actual comparisons of the Britannica and Wikipedia, perhaps relying on publicity handouts from the former. He mentions for instance that Albert Einstein, Madame Curie and George Bernard Shaw all once wrote for the Britannica. He neglects to point out that all these authors have been dead for at least half a century. He further ignores the fact that Britannica has been significantly dumbed down since those days. One can, indeed still read Albert Einstein’s article on “Spacetime,” but rather than being part of the current edition, it is described as from “classic Britannica.” It is prefaced by remarks that it is probably going to be a hard read.

2. The Once and Future King of Reference Works

The encyclopedia, as a form, made its appearance in the eighteenth century as a multi-volume compendium of knowledge that the rich might put in their personal libraries. But by the 1960’s, at the least, the full-fledged encyclopedia as a tool for adults was largely outmoded. For one thing, significant knowledge was multiplying at too rapid a rate to be confined in a reasonable number of volumes. The Britannica hit twenty volumes long ago. By now, to keep up the same level of coverage of various fields, it might well require a thousand volumes, and would have to cost something over $50,000.00 in print versions. That would be pretty much impossible, of course. Besides that, substantial revisions would be needed very frequently to keep the knowledge at the forefront. Relatively low cost books and large public and university libraries have meant that other sources of knowledge would be as readily accessible. The Britannica in its 15th edition of some 40 volumes at best became a slightly odd status symbol, one that most educated people found they could well do without.

If one adopts Keen’s outlook of opposition to “today’s Internet”, it is ironic that with its arrival, the problems of too great length or the need for rapid revision can be addressed in new ways, so once again the idea of an all-encompassing encyclopedia becomes feasible, at least in part. To a degree, the web itself is an encyclopedia, with every search engine some sort of index. But this is a difficult-to-correct set of articles, with no necessary or obvious indications of bias, lack of knowledge on the part of the authors, etc. In this situation, the wiki method is a brilliant innovation, though perhaps it could be improved slightly. Anyone who believes she has something to say about a topic can address it in the Wikipedia led by Jimmy Wales, but if others disagree, they can make alterations. When there is great dispute, Wales or the council working with him and somehow led by him can enter in, as of course can any other outsiders. As long as the overall council acts on more or less reasonable principles, the articles tend to get better, and revisions tend to settle down — most of the time.

There are problems inherent in any work being written by a committee: lack of literary style, repetitiveness, lack of overall organization in individual articles, great variation in quality between articles, some bias, etc. But these problems are also present to some degree in the EB or in any encyclopedia. The Wikipedia is very manifestly a work in progress, and it is only going to improve on the average, while already encompassing a larger swath of knowledge than the EB, with a reasonable degree of accuracy and with more currency. It is a key to Wikipedia’s success that one does not have to pay to use it, so that anyone interested can check an article and add their expertise. Because people believe that what they know and care about deserves attention, they are eager to make sure articles that matter to them are correct. They average Wikipedia writer is less good at making sure that non-experts can understand, but on the whole they do not do such a bad job with this

I looked at a few dozen articles in a wide range of fields, comparing online EB with W, all being articles about which I have considerable background knowledge. These include articles about such subjects as feudalism, string theory and other aspects of current physics, various modern writers, art, recent European history, botany and zoology, American politics, simple geometry and some other math, philosophy, auto mechanics, and more. On the whole, I learned more from W than from EB, though, in general, EB articles were better shaped and less repetitive.

Keen sneeringly suggests that an auto mechanic is just as likely to write or “correct” an article on physics as a physicist.  (He fails to consider articles on auto mechanics, which might also be of considerable interest the average reader. W is far superior to EB on the subject of anti-lock brakes, for example.) Why anyone not an expert would choose to write on a subject, Keen does not explain. In truth, as far as I can tell, the W article on string theory as well as other articles in recent or contemporary physics topics were probably written by physics graduate students, up on the latest, but not so knowledgeable about history, for example. The EB String Theory article was written by Brian Greene, a Columbia physics professor and author of a couple of “popular” books on the subject. His article is too brief, but what it does say it says well. However, anyone patient enough to follow the somewhat more awkward W article will learn more about the contemporary situation and the background as well, and even the very earliest history.

String theory emerged from an interpretation of a formula offered for different purposes by Gabriele Veneziano, in about 1968. He offered this as satisfying a set of requirements for what was known as the S-Matrix that had been proposed by Geoffrey Chew. When I looked up S-Matrix theory in W, I found an article that W’s editing mechanism informed all readers was not appropriately written and should be cleaned up. The obvious reason was too many unexplained terms. The article was basically correct, in my view, but poorly written. No one reading W can be in doubt that this article has problems, and gets some sense of what those problems are. On the other hand, when I looked up S-matrix in EB online, I found nothing, and the same happened when I searched for Geoffrey Chew, who also at least has a brief entry in W.

W’s article on feudalism is also better than EB’s because the latter is written by an especially biased writer, whose main claim to fame is disputing that the term “feudalism” should ever be used at all. W’s article references her work, but also that of many others.

Still, W does have some pretty foolish articles. Anyone who has ever read the works of Thomas Pynchon knows that their plots are pretty much secondary to the telling of the story, but in a bizarre effort to match Cliff’s Notes, the article on Pynchon’s novel V offers  a plot outline that covers about half the chapters. Some dolt might use this as the basis for a paper to submit to a college class, but less harm would thereby be done than in most cases of the use of actual Cliff’s Notes. EB says almost nothing about V, so, while not informative, it does no harm in this case either. On the other hand, the main article about Pynchon in W is better than the one in EB.

And so on.

Wikipedia is already better than Britannica, in my view. While it will continue to have some eccentric articles, it will almost surely get better and better, and it will do so precisely because it does not charge set fees. It might do even better if it figures out a way for most contributors to have their names attached. That will increase the rewards of attention coming to the writers, and that attention will encourage care and accuracy where that has meaning — and perhaps better organization and writing.  At least this is worth some experimentation.

For instance, Wikipedia could start allowing authors who submit a brief bio and a photo to list their names, and then allow readers to judge what they have written. Those authors whose work is rated highest, and who have therefore contributed the most of an article, would have their names listed first among authors. Separate listings could be for editing. There could also be an honor roll of the best contributors to the most articles, and so on.  Writing a good article remains a difficult task, but it is also a wonderful exercise in understanding and learning how to explain. I think any offer of monetary rewards should be rejected, but the attention one gets for good article writing could logically carry over into the rest of one’s life. Of course, this would create some new problems, with attempts to gain unmerited attention, claims of precedence, and many other well-known problems of scholarly infighting. But one aspect of W that is good is that it already leads to a degree of protective watchfulness on the part of large number of readers.

With or without that change, W will revolutionize the notion of a single source of comprehensive knowledge in the Internet era. And it will do that in dialogical fashion, which is of course the source of all worthwhile knowledge except for individual expression and autobiography. The recognition that everyone is to some degree an expert in something and that that expertise can be of value to others is one of the implicit glories of the Internet.

Friendship might be defined as a state of more-or-less mutual attention paying. From little acts of attention, including times when you just are together, talking, walking, or engaging in some joint activity your minds get into sync so that you can align easily (that is pay attention)  to what the other is saying or doing, feeling or thinking. Long friendship makes attention all that much easier and full.

No wonder people clamor for friends, and even for claiming friendship in crude ways. For example, the social networking site Facebook makes it easy for people to try to establish a somewhat ersatz friendship with you when all they may know of you is your presence on the public friends list of someone who is indeed your friend.  And that can quickly accelerate to claming friends with even more degrees separation. Friend of friend makes some sense, of course. If someone is genuinely friends with both of you, you can align with the second –degree friend in part by however the two of you both align with the one you have in common.

What you know about your friends includes funny little things, little admissions, some somewhat scandalous pieces of action on their parts, their little annoying habits, as well as their pleasant enjoyable ones, and it all helps make them real, making it easier  for you to align with them.

Take this one step further. What you don’t happen to know about a friend of yours you will eagerly want to learn from some other friend, and in so learning, you not only can feel a surge of guilt over stumbling upon a secret, but a new sense of connection both with the friend you are gossiping about, and the friend (or would-be friend) who passes on the gossip to you.
And now one more step. Suppose you don’t personally know the object of the gossip, but are familiar with them as a star. It could be Paris Hilton, David Letterman, Angelina Jolie, Barack Obama, Venus Williams or even a dead celebrity like Jean-Paul Sartre or Sylvia Plath. You have occasionally aligned with this person in listening to them on radio, or seeing them on TV, reading their words, in hearing of their performance, in repeating a joke they have told, and so forth. They have or had no knowledge of your existence, but they act or acted, in some way, like a friend. Anything that will add to this sense of familiarity will only make it easier for you to pay more attention to them, because the more real and human they seem the easier it is to align with them.

That is why we soak up memoirs, biographies, interviews and other less formal kinds of connection, such as gossip, about stars. The better it feels as if we know them, the more easily alignment becomes. That’s true even as we cluck over some scandal that might comport with some behavior we might dare not engage in ourselves, but still find in some degree enticing. And its equally true if they are caught in a behavior considered scandalous that we ourselves or those actually near us have engaged in many times.
Some celebrities may hate being gossiped about, being followed by paparazzi and all the rest, though often they also realize that gossip only helps build fan interest, gaining them more attention of a completely desirable type.

For a fan, even a mild one, gossip about the appropriate celebrities is an avenue to getting attention from other fans of the same stars, in the same way that gossip about close friends is.  We must be careful in easily accepting part of Paul Salomone’s response to my previous post : “I know of plenty of folks who waste hours a day charting the obscure maneuvers of far-off celebrities, whilst their personal lives are in high disarray. Were they actually to put some energy into their local communities, paying attention to local causes rather than watching Access Hollywood and collecting memorabilia, we’d all be better off.”

Unfortunately Salomone seems to ignore how the Attention Economy (or Attention Society) generally works and the real value that many people find in such gossip.  Attention equality is certainly in some ways a desirable end, but it is also hard to achieve, and not without some significant costs. For example, a  purely local outlook would still leave us blind to many issues in the global system we inhabit. If Angelina Jolie, for instance, tries to acquaint us with suffering in Africa, that would still less than it does if she could not get massive attention.

(In my next post, I will address the issue of what concerns are “important,” in response to other lines in Salomone’s comment.)