Michael H. Goldhaber

I have long maintained that paying attention to someone (or that person’s expression) amounts to aligning your mind to that someone’s. In seeing the world from their point of view, you partially “become” them. This can be through listening to and trying to understand their sentences, through reading something they have written, through looking at a picture or work of art that they have created, through watching them play a game such as golf or football, etc. To the extent you do take on their viewpoint,  you want what they want. And so on.

Recently, an experiment (reported by Benedict Carey in the NY Times) was described in an online science journal under the title  “If I Were You: Perceptual Illusion of Body Swapping” that demonstrates the ease with which seeing (in this case literally from another’s point of view) makes you feel you are they. A commenter, Alan Peters, said the following: “I have been doing research at Johnson Space Center in Houston with the NASA Robonaut robot for a number of years. One way that the robot can be controlled is through direct telepresense.{sic} That is, the operator dons a VR helmet, data gloves, and some other sensors. The operator sees through the robot’s stereo camera “eyes”. Any motions the operator makes with his/her arms and hands are reflected by the robot. In that way it is possible to control the robot in highly dexterous manipulation tasks. After operating the robot for a short period of time, one feels quite like the robot is one’s self. At least that’s how it felt to me. It was interesting to watch the world through the robot’s eyes. The first time I operated the robot, I could see this bearded, out-of-shape, older guy with a potbelly, sitting on a chair, wearing a helmet, and moving his arms around. It was me, of course. Didn’t seem like it though. And frankly, I didn’t look so good to me. I feel much better than I look! After having finished operating the robot, I always watch myself taking the VR helmet off. I am in the robot until the *instant* my eyes loose contact with the display. Then I have the uncanny sensation of snapping back into my own body. It’s quite an odd feeling, not unpleasant, but unlike anything else I’ve experienced.”

All this demonstrates how fully, and yet how easily we can take on the persona of another, or as I put it aligning our minds to that other. No other model of attention paying makes much sense.

This is supposed to be the era of knowledge. Yet I think we should be increasingly worried that it is in fact even more the era of ignorance. The two are in some ways complementary. An expert has long been known, at least by cynics, as someone who “knows more and more about less and less.” That means that even experts — as well as the rest of us — also know less and less about more and more. And more gets missed by even experts. We might view expanding knowledge as a yeasty sort of bread — the faster it expands, the bigger the holes all through it. Meanwhile, there are new reasons that cause people to adopt ignorance as a stance, as all right, as even desirable. Many people have noticed this, but it seems to me some of the root causes and the nature of the new ignorance escape them, just as some elements still escape me.

Still, despite my own ignorance of the topic, this this is my contribution to the study of ignorance, a study I think we should all take more seriously.

So, welcome to Ignorance Studies 101.

First, ignorance comes in more than one flavor.

Ignorance type A = not knowing what no one else knows either, also known as “Society-Wide Ignorance.” As overall societal knowledge grows and grows, igA obviously decreases.

However, that leads to a growth in Ignorance type B, not knowing what some other people do know. If experts each “know more and more about less and less,” a corollary is that they also know less and less about more and more of what is known. Non-experts also each find igB growing.

But both types of ignorance can be further sub-divided into: Ignorance about things humans cannot affect (call this “Nature”); and Ignorance about things that we can, including things that humans ourselves create (call this the “Human World”). Of course, as knowledge of Nature grows, so does our often unknowing ability to affect it, increasing Human-world ignorance in a sometimes dangerous way. (Think global warming.)

Ignorance about ignorance grows too: Ignorance about what is known (by society, in other words by someone somewhere) — and ignorance about who knows or does not know what. Finally, comes ignorance about whom and how to ask about what one does not know. You can’t even begin to ask if you don’t know you don’t know, but even if you do know you are ignorant, that may not help you much.

What about Google and Wikipedia?

Wait! Don’t Google and Wikipedia and the web in general immeasurably increase each person’s effective knowledge and so decrease effective ignorance? I certainly use both of these frequently and think they are each a real step forward. Still, knowledge is not simply an assemblage of information; it must be rooted in an understanding of connections, limitations, context, and so on. If you could study all of Google, or even follow a line of links from each and every web page that surfaces from a particular query, or could study all of Wikipedia, then you would surely have knowledge, indeed almost all knowledge on a great many subjects. but this is clearly beyond anyone’s ability. So you would have to select on the basis of prior knowledge, and the incompleteness and holes in that knowledge are precisely why neither of these tools can be assumed to provide you with effective knowledge, or effective lack of ignorance. Instead, the best they can do is little more than make us more aware of the very breadth and depth of of our ignorance. As they enlarge every day, our ignorance only grows.

Attention, Knowledge and Ignorance

If I’m right, our actions are increasingly governed by the scarcity of attention that we can pay and even more by the scarcity of the attention we can get from others. That is the Attention System, or what I meant originally when I introduced the so much misunderstood term “Attention Economy.” Living in this system greatly affects and is affected by what we know or don’t as well as what find it valuable to know or to skip.
One key axiom of attention is that to pay it to someone, you must align your mind to hers. The more you know what she knows, at least what she knows that is relevant to her right now, the better you can pay attention. If, for example, you don’t even know what language she is speaking you will have a very hard time paying attention.
The first corollary: If you want attention, don’t assume much specialized knowledge. In other words: assume ignorance on the part of your listener, viewer or reader, and don’t challenge that ignorance too much. Example: the US media, but also most media throughout the world. This also explains much about politicians, business people etc.

The second corollary: don’t bother learning what won’t get you attention, because you have to pay a lot of attention to do that.
This second corollary explains a lot:
• The ignorance about many things (history, geography, science, politics) of American high school students, (along with countless other students around the world);
• The narrow focus of many business people, entertainers, scholars and other experts, etc;
• The appeal of religious fundamentalism, at least in part.
• The fact that the pursuit of knowledge itself is increasingly subject to what the philosopher or historian of science Thomas Kuhn called “paradigm shifts.”

Once Upon a Paradigm

In a paradigm shift, knowledge gets a new basis, with some brand-new central ideas, and in the process, old knowledge can safely be ignored as no longer relevant. I think it works like this. As a field grows, so much knowledge accumulates in it, that only narrow specialists can really familiarize themselves with it. Then, new people find it much easier to start over with an almost clean slate, which they can if there are hints of another paradigm around.The new one explains certain phenomena while allowing a completely new set of knowledge to be developed. “Early adopters” of this new knowledge are at a special advantage.They can reach a relatively large audience without themselves necessarily having to know much.

Paradigm shifts of this sort are not limited to science. The same causes make advantageous to be a fan of or participant in a new sport, a new music genre, or a new kind of art. You don’t have to be familiar with all the nuances established over many years. Similar reasons led to young people eagerly adopting new technologies, new kinds of web links (such as Facebook or MySpace or Second Life) new computers, new operating systems, programs, new video games, etc..

Through this process, the attentional value of having old knowledge rapidly decreases. This would be fine if the new knowledge always included or trumped the old, and if there were not whole areas left out as “progress” increases.

What a Tangled Web..

We are all now intertwined in a global society, six billion strong. As the universe of knowledge relevant in some way to each of our lives keeps expanding, the share of it we individually have any mastery over keeps dropping. In terms of attention, the accelerated demands on our attention outrace our individual supply at ever-greater speeds. We do not know enough to form reasonable judgements about many matters that will affect us quite a bit, nor do we know sufficiently well how our actions affect the world. We are often less and less capable of knowing that we do not know, or even knowing whom to ask about who would know about a host of issues. So we punt. With ignorance and half understanding, a certain carelessness is the inevitable outcome.

We can see the effects of that all around us. Take the growing technosphere in which our lives are ever-further embedded. We assume, for instance, that someone at the phone company or the cable company or the computer company or the software company or even the open-source community is “minding the store,” but often it turns out that as tasks have been sub-divided and farmed out, even simple possibilities have not been considered, or whoever was supposed to know about a certain issue has been downsized, fired, retired or forgotten. Systems simply do not work, or work increasingly badly. The managers of such businesses do not know much about the desires, limitations, habits and customs of their customers. The eagerly install such things as voice-activated automated phone systems, which add to the complexities of correcting or even finding out about how to solve common or unusual problems. And life is full of unusual problems.

Here in Northern California, we have perhaps the world’s largest congeries of technical expertise, but it is not large enough so that the companies trying to save a buck will be able to hire technically competent and knowledgeable people to do things like keep Internet or cable or even electric services going seamlessly. Perhaps even if they paid fairly well, no one would find it of interest to do seemingly mundane maintenance when that same person could be involved creating something completely new that potentially could be of interest or even value to millions.

Or take the money economy in its most direct form — the world of high finance. Very clever people invented things like mortgage bundling, which led to the bundling of sub-prime loans in ways that most actors assumed to be pretty fail-safe, at least in the short time horizon on which investment bankers now work. Theoretically, rating agencies were supposed to evaluate the the risks associated with such loans, but they simply did not understand them well enough, it seems. Rating financial risk may be one of those rather uninteresting areas, most of the time, anyway. No one gets a lot of attention for such activity, unless she offers a completely unexpected rating. If there had been no rating agencies, the bankers who took on the loans might have felt they had to be a bit more cautious, but as it was, it was easy to pay minimal attention, since it was easy to take for granted that the rating agencies knew what they were doing. No one was rating the raters. Similarly, it now seems, many other kinds of loans, such as industrial bonds and “commercial paper” may have been incorrectly rated as to risk.

Banks have suddenly realized that they are in the dark as to the risk environment, so they are newly frightened about extending loans even to other big banks. This re-creates the same sort of problem that occurred at the time of the Great Depression, even though the amount of knowledge of the financial (money-based) economic systems is supposedly so much greater.

Not Ads but Adages

Politicians are another class of people who seemingly know less and less about more and more. They rely on experts to fill them in on how to handle all sorts of areas, but these experts in turn may not really be terribly knowledgeable, nor do they necessarily understand the complex interconnections necessary to make their advice any good. Whether the subject is education, healthcare, international relations, security from terrorism, control of media, the environment or economics, politicians of all stripes seemingly adopt a few rather dogmatic ideas as a way to get by. The citizenry who elect them are even more reliant on mere adages to understand what is going on. Or they rely on the politicians to find out what they themselves have given up trying to understand. But politicians dare not go against those who do believe in certain adages, whether it is “the free market is always best” or “we need protection from foreigners stealing our jobs” (or both) or “Islamo-fascists are out to get us” or “Israel is the biggest violator of human rights, ” or “it’s cold this winter, so global warming is a false alarm,” or “we need population control in Africa to slow down global warming” among equally many other views based mostly on over-simplified ignorance. Awareness of ignorance itself breeds paranoia, such as the conspiracy theories floating around 9/11, or the view that those who warn about global warming are secretly trying to impose socialism on everyone.

These simplified adages function as paradigms, even though there is often very little behind them, and they can often be very easily be replaced, with new paradigms — that is, nice fresh adages. When a politician such as Barack Obama excites voters with talk of hope and change, he succeeds largely through his lack of being specific. If he tried to spell out detailed policies, many of his listeners would not be able to continue to pay attention, though some others might be able to follow him and perhaps like what they hear.

Deeper

A deeper problem is that no politician really is willing to recognize that a deep change is under way. They may pay too much lip service and attention to the bromides of conventional economists to see that we are entering a whole new era, in which the very meaning, for instance, of continued economic success is thrown into question.

But no Air Crashes

We should expect that the varying degrees of ignorance I have been discussing will eventually cause more and more severe human and natural world problems, if we do not find some way to keep growing ignorance somehow at bay. How might we do all this? One example that comes to mind is an area where the technosphere seems to be excelling of late, rather than breaking down. It is the system that prevents air crashes. The example may be instructive. To be continued…..

In a recent post, Gwen Bell cites my work as a partial basis for her thoughts about “personal branding.” She has some sensible suggestions, but I think the idea of personal branding — common though it is — gets things backwards.

1. Meet the Smith Brothers, Trade and Mark

Of course, most of us know or would recognize hundreds or even thousands of brands: Heinz Ketchup, Toyota Prius, Apple iPod, AT&T, Hilton Hotels, Pepsi, Dr. Martens boots, Republic of Tea, Tamagotchi  “pet” and on and on.  But what is a brand? Why do they relate differently to persons than persons do to each other? Two aspects of brands are important.

The first is their linguistic role. Superficially, a brand name is an example of a “proper noun,” similar to a the name of a place or person. As it happens, I just returned from Spain. The word “Spain” is a proper noun or name, signifying a particular place, a particular country, and a particular society, all at once, and all with the same complex history. But Spain, at least in this sense, is not a brand similar to those I mentioned above. There is only one Spain, while there are many, many identical bottles of Heinz Ketchup on tables throughout the world, just as there are many, many Toyota Priuses on the roads, and millions of iPods plugged into people’s ears, etc.

Linguistically then, a brand (name) is more like an ordinary noun. It differs from a common noun, such as “table,” “cow,” or “strawberry,”  in that it is supposed to refer only to a line of pretty much identical products that all are associated with a particular company. Heinz Ketchup, Toyota Prius, and iPod, for instance, are to be kept separate in our thoughts from similar, more generic ones such as no-name ketchup (or catsup), just any hybrid-drive car, or any old MP3 player. But you or I or any person is as singular and unique as Spain. There is only one of you, not many identical versions Even if your name happens to be as commonplace as “John Smith,” you are a particular John Smith, found only in one place at one time, specific in yourself, and except perhaps for relatively rare cases of identity theft, in no danger of not being specific. (Common “identity theft” does not steal anything more than financial identity; it does nothing to the individuality of your thoughts, feelings, personal relationships, physical movements, expressions, etc.) You are already much more individual than a brand would make you.

(Philosophers sometimes say that common nouns have a definition or sense, whereas proper names only refer to or label individuals. For instance, your name singles you out, but does not define you — except perhaps by implying you are human being. Here again, brands are intermediate between definable things such as cars, and mere labels.)

2. Which Smith Brother, again?

The second point is that regular brands — far from being something that individuals need to emulate — are actually reminders of the singular persons or personalities who originated or stand behind the branded products or services.  Microsoft has thus far equalled Bill Gates as the driving force. It’s possible that it will come to mean Steve Ballmer as well or instead, but that remains to be seen. Apple represents Steve Jobs; Ford once represented Henry Ford; Kodak represented George Eastman, who invented the notion of easy photography; etc. The founder or re-founder’s personality sometimes continues to inform and shape the company in question long after she or he is gone. In the terms I have offered before, your attention  passes through the brand (or the branded object)  to the prime person or persons behind it. It is the same as how your attention right now goes through the words you see on the screen to me.

As the influence of the prime personality or personalities fades over time, the brand itself almost always tends towards the generic. It eventually becomes meaningless, except in those cases where it clearly comes to represent a new personality, who gives it new singleness of meaning. The process of dry photo-reproduction by electrostatic means was invented by Chester Carlson and introduced to the world under the Xerox brand. But soon enough, the word “xeroxing” just came to mean generic dry photo-copying, using any machine that could do it. Xerox, Inc., had to go to ludicrous lengths to “defend” its brand, but it still cannot prevent ordinary people from using the verb, “to xerox” in a generic sense, with no regard for what company produced the machine being used. The company has had a hard time finding a strong personality to give new meaning to the brand.  When you use a copier without thinking of the brand, whatever attetnio you pay to it May go without your knowledge to Chester Carlson, but  not via the Xerox brand particularly, that is it goes to no instigator in the Xerox company or any other.

Without such new personalities, the best a company can do is to stick rigorously to the initial impetus of the founder, say in the case of an unchanging product, like Tabasco sauce.  But even this is going to be a matter of interpretation, especially if there is to be any further innovation at all; someone has to at least be the “high priest” who interprets the founder’s or founders’ intent in new circumstances; so that personality will then be who is behind the name. This will be true, of course, even when most customers have never heard of this leader, just as they may never have heard of the original founder by name.

3. Why Pablo Picasso is Not a Brand

Of course, in being the brainchild of relatively few distinct personalities that still influence the “culture,” corporations are from alone. The US still is partly shaped by the visions of the likes of Jefferson and Hamilton, and, more distantly, Locke and Montesquieu, though the details have certainly changed. The Roman Catholic Church to some degree still represents the historical Jesus and some of his early interpreters.
On a still more personal basis, the great artistic, musical, literary and architectural creators are still represented by their works, and to some degree by the styles they introduced. In Spain, I went to see Picasso’s famous Painting Guernica.  It used to be in New York, but now you have to go to Madrid to see it, because it is unique, and totally unlike  Heinz’s Ketchup in being so.  A Rembrandt is a Rembrandt; a J. S. Bach cantata is clearly Bach; Hamlet is a Shakespeare play.  Much the same goes for philosophical, political  and even scientific innovators. Also for actors, singers, and other performers, especially since around 1900,  when it become possible to record their work.

The point is that by being who they are, taking their own expressive and creative impulses and thoughts seriously, all these people do not need to pay any attention to the concept of branding. They are themselves, and they reveal themselves in everything they do. As selves, they all evolved throughout their entire creative lives. A late Rembrandt or Picasso painting or drawing has some connection with earlier ones by the same artist, but also substantial differences that can only be connected by studying the works in chronological relationship. The late Wittgenstein takes off from the earlier one but is profoundly different as well. Much the same holds for more recent or living creators in whatever medium, even minor ones.   Being true to one’s evolving inner sense of what is right and important and what comes forth now — this minute —  is what one has to keep at, not some superficial characteristics.

4. Moving the Goalposts

Gwen Bell says that a blogger, be distinctive needs to be clear about “goals. In  what sense she does not make clear,: ultimate goals or the immediate creation at hand? I think goal setting is mostly a misleading concept taken over from crude business how-to texts.  A significant creator pours all of who she is into the work, and the goal of the moment can be as specific as finding the right word to use in a sentence or poem, the right gesture in acting a role, or can be much more long-range, but the goal emerges from the intensity of what one is about and who one is, not the other way round. As a portraitist, the artist Giacometti had the goal of actually capturing the face of the sitter as he saw it, but he was really never satisfied with his attempts. The intensity of his striving is what counted for him. Goals constantly change as one proceeds, just as in creating anything one continually redefines oneself.  (A corporation can have goals only to the degree that its few real leaders do, and they too are less in need of defining these than in maintaining personal intensity and expression.)

The vast majority of would-be artists, novelists, actors, essayists, columnists, journalists, political leaders, etc., get much less attention than they might like. There simply is not enough attention from other people to go around. No matter how they try to conform to some model of good blogging behavior, such as Bell’s, most bloggers will face the same problem (of not enough attention to go around).  Being successful as a blogger or at any other form of attention getting is primarily a question of luck, and after that, I think,  of being as fully yourself at the moment as you can be. Even this rule is not any guarantee of success, and breaking the rules, whatever they are, is often a good way to stand out.

5. Look Before you Leap — or Don’t

Bell mentions thinking carefully about what you are doing. That may work. (It certainly appeals to me, except I already do too much of it.) But being very spontaneous and not thinking consciously at all might work better, for some. Personal branding, though,  is a red herring, not worth worrying over. Don’t give it another though. (Except, perhaps, the one that follows….)

6. Addendum: Subtleties about Copies:
One possible response to the above would be to point out that while each creative person may be a unique individual, nonetheless, just as there are many identical but distinct Toyota Priuses on the road, defined or guaranteed as such by their brand, so the particular creative works of a person — a novel,say,  might exist in many many, identical but distinct copies. Why then should we distinguish between the author’s “personal brand”  and something like a car brand?

You could even say a blog exists in many copies, on the computer screen of every different person who web surfs to it. You want to read only “a John Grisham,”  let’s say, just as you may want to drive only a Prius.  But when you get to the bookstore, it turns out that all the John Grisham’s they have you have already read. You do not mean by that that you have read the exact copy that is on the bookstore’s shelf. To have read the book is not to have read the specific copy. The book exists more basically as an idea, separate from its physical manifestation. So in a very real sense, each novel is as unique as its author, in a way that each car of a particular brand and model is not. A painting or sculpture or building has a physical manifestation, of course, meaning it can only be experienced in a particular place at any one time, and that it is not the same as copies of it.  You cannot confuse having Picasso’s Guernica in your living room with having a reproduction of it, though you would be unlikely to think you drive a reproduction of the Prius instead of the real thing.

The idea of the Prius  is of course just as singular, just as much the creation of a single person or small group of people as a blog entry or a novel or a movie  or a painting is.  But a Prius, like most branded objects is a product of the industrial system, valuable not just for its idea, but for its utility in transporting you — in reality and not just in imagination — from point A to point B. It required many, many people’s efforts to make each individual one, whereas the human effort needed to create a copy of a blog entry on your screen is very very small. Blogs, like other works of mental value, are part of the attention system, not the industrial one. That is why personal branding does not make sense.

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.

A couple of years ago, the philosophy professor Harry Frankfurt made publishing history of a sort by allowing his 7,000-word paper “On Bullshit” — which lives up pretty well to the second word in its title — to be published as a book. Bind some printed pieces of paper together, preferably in hard covers, distribute them via bookstores, at a cost of around $20, and voila, you have a book. If you choose not buy that one, however, you can read the paper free online. A book is thus a cultural artifact ,the form and meaning of which has changed throughout history. Books today tend to be printed words on paper, bound together, and thick enough that they can be located on the shelf by reading their spines.  They are sturdily enough held together so that you can carry them around, and today they are, especially when paperback, cheap enough that price is not the main preventative of reading them. Also today, books tend to have one author, and at least some pretense at coherence (though the occasional volume of selected or collected shorter works can be quite incoherent, and a number of books are edited collections, justified as not be a single author but as the selection of one or two editors). Books are of course only one way that printed works are presented; other common modes are newspapers, where articles, editorials, letters to the editor and columns can all be quite short, and magazines or scholarly journals. Pamphlets exist too. But books stand a better chance of being read form cover to cover, and of making a deep impact on the reader — at times.

Andrew Keen’s the cult of the amateur: how today’s internet is killing our culture  is somewhat longer than  On Bullshit — some 40,000 words, but it is still closer to a pamphlet than a book. However, the future of the book is one of Keen’s deep concerns. Here’s a key quote:

“Silicon Valley utopian Kevin Kelly wants to kill off the book entirely — as well as the intellectual property rights of writers and publishers. In fact, he wants to rewrite the definition of the book, digitalizing all books into a single universal and open-source free hypertext — like a huge literary Wikipedia. In a May 2006 New York Times Magazine ‘manifesto,’ Kelly describes this as the ‘Liquid Version’ of the book, a universal library in which ‘each is cross-linked, clustered, cited, extracted, indexed, analyzed, annotated, remixed, reassembled, and woven deeper into the culture than ever before.’ And Kelly couldn’t care less whether the contributor to this hyper-utopia is Dostoyevsky or one of the seven dwarfs.

“’Once digitized,’ Kelly says, ‘books can be unraveled into single pages or be reduced further, into snippets of a page. These snippets will be remixed into reordered books and virtual bookshelves.’ It is the digital equivalent of tearing out the pages of all the books in the world, shredding them line by line, and pasting them back together in infinite combinations. In his view, this results in ‘a web of names and a community of ideas.’ “

Who is right? Keen or Kelly, or neither? Here I, Goldhaber, just snipped Keen, who snipped Kelly. It’s not so alarming. The practice is as old as literature itself, or even older. The “Five Books of Moses” or The Pentateuch or Torah, better known to Christians as the first five books of the Old Testament, is clearly a compilation of texts with a variety of authors and origins. Some of these come from still earlier traditions such as the Book of Gilgamesh, the codes of Hammurabi, and no doubt a variety of tales handed down orally. Later, Jewish rabbis wove a huge series of comments and interpretations and further comments on and interpretations of those into a lengthy, multi-volume text known as Talmud. Today’s theologians keep this up with further commentary, and lay authors weave aspects of all these into countless texts, songs, plays, movie scripts, derivative music, etc.

(The snipping has sometimes gone even further, down to the level of letters. The medieval Aramaic Zohar was put together by Jewish mystics who believed the meanings of the biblical texts were to be found by viewing the letters of the words as a kind of code. Much later, around 1900, supporters of the idea that Francis Bacon wrote the works attributed to Shakespeare argued that Shakespeare’s First Folio was printed with two different sets of type, and that the two were placed so as to encode in binary statements about the actual authorship. )

Similar things happened with Greek mythology, woven into the oral tales later written down as the works of Homer, which were culled, added to and re-snipped to be the basis of the works of the great Greek tragedians, Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. The Roman poet Virgil used Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey as a basis and model for his Aeneid (a dreadful piece of gore, in my view) and the greatest poet of Italy, Dante Alighieri, used Odysseus’s passage into the underworld as one source of his Divina Commedia or Divine Comedy (which, in the translations I’ve seen, gets boring as he leave tough, cynical Hell —Inferno —and ascends towards sweeter-than-sugar Heaven —Paradiso). Not long after Dante, his fellow Italian, Giovanni Boccaccio, wrote a collection of tales probably based in part on earlier works, which he called the Decameron. Geoffrey Chaucer soon stole many of its stories – some by direct translation, with no authorial credit — for his own Canterbury Tales.

To jump to a later time and another medium, the earliest-produced installment of George Lucas’s space epic, Star Wars, was based in several ways on famed Japanese director Akira Kurosawa’s 1958 Kakushi-toride no san-akunin or The Hidden Fortress, a samurai tale of Shogun-era Japan.  A later Kurosawa film, Ran, in turn is a Japanese version of Shakespeare’s King Lear.

Here is what Alfred Harbage, in his 1958 introduction to the Pelican Shakespeare edition says about King Lear itself:
“The story of Lear and his three daughters was given written form four centuries before Shakespeare’s birth. How much older its components may be we do not know. Cordelia [Lear’s loving but mistreated daughter] in one guise or another, including Cinderella’s, has figured in the folklore of most cultures, perhaps originally expressing what [Ralph Waldo] Emerson saw as the conviction of every human being of his worthiness to be loved and chosen, if only his true self were truly known. The figure of the ruler asking a question, often a riddle, with disastrous consequences to himself is equally old and dispersed. In his Historia Regum Britanniae [History of the Kings of Britain] (1136) Geoffrey of Monmouth converted folklore to history and established Lear and his daughters as rulers of ancient Britain, thus bequeathing them to the chronicles. Raphael Holinshed’s (1587) declared that ‘Leir, the sonne of Baldud,’ came to the throne ‘in the year of the world 3105, at which time Joas reigned in Juda,’ but belief in the historicity of such British kings was now beginning to wane, and Shakespeare could deal freely with the record. He read the story also in John Higgins’s lamentable verses in A Mirrour for Magistrates (1574), and in Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, II, 10, 27-32. He knew, and may even have acted in, a bland dramatic version, The True Chronicle History of King Leir, published anonymously as in 1605 but staged at least as early as 1594.

“…. [the earliest date  for Shakespeare’s version is after ] March 16, 1603, when Samuel Harsnett’s Declaration Of Egregious Popishe Impostures was registered for publication. That this excursion in ‘pseudo-demonology’ was available to Shakespeare is evident in various ways, most clearly in the borrowed inventory of devils imbedded in Edgar’s jargon as Tom o’ Bedlam….”

It is a good thing copyright had not yet been invented when Chaucer or Shakespeare worked, or we wouldn’t have much of their work. Besides, if eternal copyright were the law, as some have suggested, we would not have numerous careful, scholarly editions of Shakespeare now available to us, along with the numerous adaptations and even bowdlerizations (such as those by Thomas Bowdler himself in the early nineteenth century). Probably Chaucer’s and Shakespeare’s works would have been long lost, as some heir, abashed, denied permission to reprint. No publisher could be quite sure who the rightful heirs were, and would certainly receive legal advice not to mess with the chance of being sued inherent in putting out an edition.

2. Attention Leads to New Works

In any medium, expression whether worthwhile or not, if anyone at all pays attention to it, has been influenced by earlier expressions and in turn often influences later ones, so that none stands in a vacuum. Expressive works of all sorts have always been transmitted, copied, riffed on, varied, quoted, translated, honored, given homages, lovingly or unlovingly parodied, satirized, pastiched, collaged, sampled, anthologized, excerpted, used as background, restated, adapted, and so on. Sometimes the whole work is lavishly reproduced, sometimes only a plot outline is kept, sometimes there are extensive quotes, sometimes only loose paraphrases. Everything of this sort took place long before the Web was a gleam in anyone’s eye. It is an inevitable result of paying attention to any work that it influences one, for better or worse, even one is an artist seeking to do something brand new.

3. Sitting by the Samovar

Keen specifically mentions Dostoyevsky.  Few non-Russians can fluently read his original words, instead having to settle for some translation. Which translation should you choose?  One way to decide is to compare them. It might be ideal to have many different translations available, so that you could flip from one to the other. It would also help to have at your disposal knowledgeable commentaries by Russian speakers very familiar with Dostoyevsky, though they will not necessarily agree among themselves. An average reader could not afford to buy all the necessary works, and it would be cumbersome to get them from a library, or even to make use of them if you had them all. You would have to open all the books, keep the pages turned to the right point, pick up each one when you want make a comparison, etc. It would be much handier if all the translations, all the critiques, all the bits of historical or biographical background, as well as the original, were on the Internet, and that you had handy ways to access it, much as Kevin Kelly proposes.

Andrew Keen is frightened of this, because he imagines it somehow means that the original version, of, say, The Brothers K (no, not Keen and Kelly, but Karamazov) would not remain itself, in easy reach also for anyone who sought it in itself alone. Or even that the good translations would not remain whole. I doubt that Kelly intended that, and, even if he did, the Internet does not need to work that way. There are plenty of ways that what each person expresses can be kept separate, even if someone’s expression is a mishmash of other people’s expressions, a sampling or collage or dictionary of quotations.

As long as an author has an any sort of audience there will be those who want to bask a bit in her reflected glory, getting attention through the attention that goes to the master. In effect, whatever their conscious motives this has long been the case for all those who prepare new translations, or who seek to edit critical editions or write biographies, or even find the work sufficiently interesting that they want to mention, discuss or brag about having read it. This group has a vested interest in ensuring that what they consider unadulterated versions of the master’s works will be available and easily discoverable online. Where they disagree, to be sure, they will put up variant versions, but these will all be available, accessible, searchable, and so on. Each work anyone cares about will be enriched, not lost at all.  If anyone took the trouble to mislead, by putting up a phony or adulterated version, fans of the author would quickly discover and denounce this, while making sure versions they consider authentic would remain findable.

I would rather trust in that kind of certainty than have to place my reliance on the local librarian, who might decide to clear the shelves of works that somehow no longer fit with local mores, limited shelf space, cataloguing requirements, or idiosyncratic policies. And I certainly would not be willing to rely on giant publishing conglomerates whose main motive is making a buck or increasing annual profits. Today printed books are commonly remaindered within a year of publication, and remain available only by dint of the Internet market in used books. An actual all-encompassing Internet library would be far more usable.

4. A Camel is Still a Horse Designed by a Committee

Keen implies that Kelly favors readers and — possibly — clumsy authors taking apart great works and rearranging them as multiple-author messes. I do think Kelly might have gotten a little carried away in that particular direction, but we don’t have to worry, partly for the reasons I just gave, and partly because of the nature of attention.

The glued-together kind of works that Keen thinks Kelly favors are usually not very attention-holding. In paying attention, as I have emphasized before, it is much easier to align one’s own mind to one other specific mind than with a whole crew, especially if the participants in that crew are not highly coordinated. A small group of very good jazz musicians may be able to jam together beautifully and coherently, but that sort of collaboration is rare, and rarely works well. You never hear a whole orchestra just jamming, because it would be impossible to follow. We do not find novels, plays, poems, paintings, sculptures or musical compositions with fifteen authors, and usually not even as many as two, unless their tasks are strictly sub-divided, or there is one clear leader for the whole work. Members of dance troupes work in coordination, not by individual whim, with one director or choreographer overseeing the totality of movement. Sports teams larger than those in doubles tennis have coaches who coordinate their practice sessions, decide on the range of plays they can handle and instruct them when to use different ones. We could not follow the plays otherwise.

What about movies? Anyone who sits through the credits rolling at the end of current ones sees that hundreds or even thousands of people are often involved. But they do not each work autonomously or have equal say. Rather, one, or sometimes two or still more rarely three equal collaborators shape each movie by directing and coordinating all the rest. Often the key person is the director, sometimes a screenwriter, sometimes a producer, or even an actor. But whenever more than one person is the key, conflicts can arise and the work loses coherence, to the point that virtually no one can pay close attention to it.

That was not always so, of course. Early books were simply collections of anything that could be copied and seemed to hold the copyists’ attention (as in fact Kelly points out in his article). But with the advent of printing, and in fact somewhat earlier, the idea of the author took pretty strict form, and as books became common, the one-author work predominated.  The fact that each book is a single physical item, visible for itself, whether on one’s bedside table, in a backpack or on a shelf, is a goad to reading it, picking it up again if one has started it, and basically reminding oneself of its separate and hopefully coherent existence. If you have access to all the books that have ever been written, even on a handy book-sized device you can carry around with you as conveniently as paperback, you will not have the same physical goad to continue reading where you left off. At the very least, a different kind of mental discipline than has been common will be required.

In today’s world, with so many calls on our attention, it is quite possible that many readers will lack the sustained concentration to get through an entire book. Though more novels are written than ever, the readership of “serious” novels seems anyway to be getting smaller. People buy thrillers to read on plane trips and then throw them away. Even that habit is under threat by onboard movie or video watching, whether on screens provided by airlines or laptops one takes along. But none of that implies the absence of a steady and even growing audience of truly dedicated novel readers, sub-divided into groups with different kinds of tastes, following different “schools” of literature, which also include comic-style “graphic novels,” such as Art Spiegelman’s Maus.

There is also an audience developing for extremely short fiction. Heretofore, the short story could not stand alone. Keen refers to one of the great Argentine fiction writer, Jorge Luis Borges’s articles, which was in fact a precursor to one of his typically very short stories, “The Library of Babel.” Borges made clear he thought novels were excessively long, and many of his stories were intended to imply that each described an actual much longer work. However, because his stories were so short, they simply could not be published individually, and either had to appear in magazines or as parts of collections. With the Internet, extremely short fiction a la Borges — or even shorter — can stand alone, as can mini-essays, poems, etc. (As with texts, since the 60’s or so, our styles of movie going or CD distribution left no room for what used to be known as short subjects> now they can burgeon once more. YouTube-style movies, a few minutes long, could one day have all the sophistication of a full-length film, collected in a very short space. )

For this shortening, the web provides a new means, but insofar as shorter attention spans are now perhaps normal, the web is merely a symptom, not a cause. The “ Western Canon” was under merciless attack in the groves of academe long before “today’s Internet.”  With the death of must-read literature has also come the fall of “Reader’s Digest Condensed Books” and “Book of the Month Club” and its ilk that chose each month what “middle-brow” readers needed to read. Intense calls on our attention come from sources such as the numerous TV channels, ubiquitous phoning, and much else that would exist even without an Internet.

Are all these trends terrible? Of course, in one way they are, in the sense that pleasure and the personal growth that comes about from immersing oneself in serious novels of some length is different from — and in some ways richer than — the obvious substitutes. It’s possible that people who do not take up and get through the challenge of serious literature will be shallower people with less-developed mental capacities than those who do. It is also possible — and indeed likely— that other attention-getting modes, even possibly including computer games, will take up the slack. In any event, since we cannot return to some glorious earlier time (nor would we really want to if we could) it still strikes me that the best way to hold on to what was good about the past is to increase opportunities to latch onto it, much more as Kelly suggests than Keen.

——Part I of a review of (and riff on) Andrew Keen’s the cult of the amateur.

A hundred and eleven years ago, the “modern” Olympic games were born, emphasizing what could have been criticized as a conservative “cult of the amateur.” There were strict rules that only pure amateurs could compete, which meant, of course, that only people of independent means could enter. This neatly kept out representatives of the “great unwashed” or, in other words, the laboring classes. They of course did not have spare money to throw around, so they could only afford to participate successfully in sports if they somehow found a way to be paid to do so. Only quite recently did the International Olympic Committee alter this. We now have the “cult of the professional” in sports. One of its dire effects may be that in order to win or even to join a good team, with all that money (and attention) at stake, athletes are too tempted to use some variety of performance-enhancing drug.

However, today’s conservatives, as exemplified by Andrew Keen, have also come a long way. Instead of criticizing the whole notion of professionalism, Keen earnestly endorses it, because he doesn’t like what “amateurs” are doing on the Internet. His subtitle is how today’s internet is killing our culture. [His or his publisher's chi-chi lack of caps, btw]

1. Whose culture?

If Keen means the culture that most Americans now participate in, which definitely includes the Internet, his sub-title simply makes no sense. The Internet is hardly killing whatever it fosters. Does he mean the gentleman’s culture of a century ago? No, evidently not. He exhibits no awareness of its very existence. His prime example of how everything is being ruined now is the closing of his favorite Tower Records mega-store in San Francisco. As many people do, he thinks back with more nostalgia than realism to the “golden age” that just happened to coincide with his being, I would guess, about twenty.

For someone a little older than Keen, Tower could be viewed very differently than with deep nostalgia. It was part of the replacement of purely local record stores with larger, deeper-pocketed and more profitable stores that were part of national chains. (My personal favorite once was Leopold’s records in Berkeley, an offshoot of the Associated Students of UC, a store that actually was replaced on the same spot by the Berkeley branch of Tower, which many of my friends long boycotted as a result.) The same fate also befell local bookstores, as chains such as B. Dalton, Waldenbooks, and Crown crowded them out by treating books like canned spaghetti. These chains in turn feel prey to mega-stores such as Borders and Barnes & Noble who simply went the earlier chains a few better before falling in turn to the likes of Amazon. Up to the last step, all this was before the Internet had much impact, but it was in a way part of the same process that has now led to Internet retailing of books and records, and even to the free “file-sharing” of recorded music that Keen so much decries.

Even local record and bookstores haven’t always been with us. Before about 1900, for instance, live music was the only kind that could be heard. Orchestras, bands and choirs abounded, and amateur musicians playing at home for parties or just the family were common. Many have rued their decline. Bookshops go back longer, perhaps to the eighteenth century, but before that, one could mostly buy a particular book only from its printer. And of course, when printed Bibles first became available, they were decried by the “professionals” of the era, the Roman Catholic hierarchy who saw the right to interpret scripture as far too dangerous for amateurs — that is, lay people. Go back a couple of millennia from that and you come to Socrates objecting to the invention of writing as debasing memory abilities. (Ironically, we would have long forgotten Socrates’s plaints if Plato hadn’t written them down.)

2. Wading into culture

“You cannot step in the same river twice,” says Plato’s Socrates, quoting the even older Heracleitus. That is certainly true of culture. It has to be in constant flux. Let’s think about culture a bit and see why.

“Culture” has several meanings, some much contested. But one meaning is pretty well established by now: A particular moment’s “culture” refers to all knowledge the humans in question currently have, along with their full repertoire of meaningful practices — excepting only those that inevitably result from genetic endowment or from physical laws such as the law of gravity. You may fall asleep for purely biological reasons; that you sleep in a bed is an aspect of culture. That you set an alarm and get up because you have places to be is also part of culture. So is your understanding of why you do this. Every kind of intentional practice you thus engage in has meaning, and that meaning too is part of your culture.

This wide meaning of culture, we should note, encompasses practices of all kinds, certainly including economic ones. An economy is an aspect of a culture. Yet at the same time, economic patterns tremendously influence all sorts of cultural possibilities.

The word “culture” derives from a Latin word that means tending or attending to or worshipping, but it took on its own current meaning in a roundabout way. Farmers attend to the plants they are thereby “cultivating.” Metaphorically, parents also attend to and cultivate their children, by teaching them by explicit lesson and by example what the world is. (In order to be thus cultivated, children have to pay attention, they have to align their minds to those of the adults, as best they can.) Through some degree of mutual attention, meaning gets passed on, until children are capable of paying attention on their own to other than their parents.

One’s culture is thus the residual matrix of prior alignments — prior attention that has shaped one’s mind. It’s presence allows the individual to create new meaning of some sort, for instance as a way of getting attention and/or acting in the world. Imagine the first generation that developed, say, language. Their children would have grown up in a very different milieu from that first generation’s. As a result, those children would have seen and understood the world differently from the prior generation, and would have thus had a different culture to pass down to their own children, who in turn would again have been raised in a different environment, and accordingly have grown up with a different culture. A culture can only cease changing if it ceases being culture, it would seem, and becomes, in essence totally stereotyped knowledge and practices, no different from instinct. You don’t live exactly your parent’s life, so you cannot keep exactly her culture.

Language is one aspect of culture. It is a scaffolding allowing — indeed almost requiring — new sentences, never before heard, and so the passing on of new thoughts. That process acts on language itself, adding new meanings, along with new words and ideas, while altering pronunciation and grammar too. Words form a network of meanings that depend on each other, and anything new added to this network alters it, changing near meanings slightly and then further off ones. As the relationships among meanings change, new words and new combinations of words must come into play. Since a word’s sound is affected by the adjacent word, the sounds change along with the new patterns. Old grammar no longer works or sounds quite right, and new grammatical rules are born.

The study of comparative linguistics reveals such changes throughout the recorded history of (mostly written) language. Archaeology shows the same sort of thing seems to have happened with tools and artifacts of all sorts. Though records are far scantier, the same seems to hold for music, dance, and every variety of mundane practice — from travel from one village to the next, to tree-pruning, to shoemaking. Nothing ever remained just how it had been.

Not all cultural change has moved a the rapid pace of today, of course. In the past, many innovations were purely local, and often on a very small scale. But even Egyptologists see differences in the output of the many different dynasties that followed each other for thousands of years. Even before that, going back tens of thousands of years, there were steady — if usually small — changes in the artifacts left behind.

3. “Culture” as in Vulture

There is, of course another — actually older — meaning of the word “Culture,” though it comes from the same source. It is not so much human knowledge and practices in general, but rather knowledge of what are considered great and significant works of art, philosophy, science, and other things that have to be learned through lengthy and careful study, or at least through reasonably detailed and close attention. (This often comes via a formal and elite system of education.) This meaning of culture is also highly contentious. Is there “high culture” and “low culture,” “mass culture” or “highbrow culture” ? And where do “geek culture” game culture,” and so on, fit in?

Certainly, in the past, a considerable exposure to what was labeled high culture was a sort of ornament that entitled those so exposed to claim social leadership and superiority. Such was knowledge of the “classical languages” of Latin and Greek and the ancient works written in those languages. (Andrew Keen claims to have been “classically educated,” and this may be what he means, though that kind of classical culture is certainly not what he is striving to save.)
It makes no real difference whether the works in question are paintings, novels, videos, musical compositions, scientific theories or even computer software or games. Whichever ones are considered essential to any sort of being cultured or cultivated, or simply “in,” attention to them does shape the minds of those so cultured.

Every small child who has had stories told or read to her will make up stories of her own; every artist who admires works by past artists will be inspired in some way as a result. Alignment with any significant work will itself take some degree of dedication, and it will almost always lead to some desire to try to do something like what the creator of that work has done. This is a nearly inevitable part of paying attention: aligning your mind to someone else’s includes feeling some of the drive they did to create in that or some similar medium; it also involves wanting to get attention in somewhat the same way they seem to have wanted it. Again, the inevitable outcome is new Culture — now an outpouring of would-be homages, variations, pastiches, parodies, responses, negations, or works intended to break the boundaries of whatever conventions first inspired them.

The greater our access to Culture, the more attempts at more of it there will be, and the sooner past will become prologue and the old forms will give way to new. In Keen’s terms then, the more intense our cultural life, the faster we “kill” it, by overwhelming it with the new. Even though most attempts at emulation or response don’t live up to their models, plenty still do, and we need not worry about culture or Culture drying up.

4. “Today’s Internet”

In all human history, the rate of social and cultural change has never been as fast, as intense, as widespread as it is now, as humans become linked and connected through the Internet and related means. Change at this pace is naturally confusing, difficult to evaluate, often confounding and disturbing. So Keen’s anxious jeremiad is only to be expected, and perhaps is even useful as an exhaustive compendium of complaints about the Internet. One of the problems, though, with what he has to say is that he lacks all sense of the flow of history.

Keen takes it that technological change is inevitable. That is much too simple. Technological changes matter and become common only when new the new inventions strike a chord. Keen just does not like the chord struck. He is a firm advocate of greed for money as a motivator. He even once went so far as to host a conference about the Internet called “Where’s the Money?” However, much as he honors monetary greed, he is disgusted by the desire for attention.

Like a feudal lord who saw lust for fighting and loyalty as primary virtues but decried “mere” commerce as loathsome and petty, Keen stands up for the capitalist virtues, but does not get that a new kind of economy is growing robustly, and that the desires that hold sway in this new economy are mostly what determine which new Internet offerings are likely to catch on. Blogs, social networking sites, and sites that allow easy uploading of and searching through pictures, videos, music or blogs themselves— are the very stuff of “Web 2.0” that Keen especially opposes. But they catch on — that is, are adopted by many — because they hold out the potential of considerable attention, even though the sheer arithmetic means that in most cases they cannot really deliver it.

I have dealt with these subjects many times before — not least in an Internet radio interview conducted and “broadcast” by Keen himself.[The site has now been taken down.] For convenience, I will reprise the argument in outline here. In all past history, the great majority of people were engaged, in one way or another in wresting from nature and then forming for human use material things, from food and clothing to machinery, etc. The incredible increases in productivity brought on by industrial capitalism, have now ended that mode of life. Human energies, whether we like it or not, have thus been freed to move in new directions. The primary direction taken has to do with the new prime scarcity: that of attention from other human beings. An increasing percentage of the world’s people, wherever they are, and in whatever part of their waking day they find themselves, devote their energies to paying attention, to receiving attention or to seeking it.

The new technologies make these quests possible on an ever-enlarging scale. One day soon, all six or seven or eight billion people on earth might form one huge potential audience for each of us. More than ever, our culture as well as our new economy of attention becomes a system of creating more culture. A culture of cultural intensification, in other words. And since each of us has only limited capacity for paying attention, that means, inevitably, a faster giving up of part of the old to attend to the new.

Naturally, this is disconcerting to anyone who has put energy and thought into becoming adept in what was. To some degree, cultural learning is about retention. No one could learn to speak, if every day the people around her had abandoned yesterday’s words, meanings, and grammar for entirely new ones. Or suppose you looked in your closet and discovered that the clothes that somehow had entered it overnight did not have the sleeves and legs and fasteners that you were used to and had to be put on in some way you had to newly discover. Just getting dressed would be a significant obstacle. We can pay attention to the new only to the extent we master a set of habits or routines we can rely on that allow us not to pay attention just to navigating the “background”. Too rapid cultural change is akin to one of those nightmares in which you find yourself in a somewhat familiar place but cannot manage to locate people, items or doors you expect to find.

This may suggest that cultural change is a problem akin to global warming that will destroy us if we do not find some way to rein it in. We can imagine that cultural change alone could become comparable to the chaos experienced today by the inhabitants of Baghdad as a result of America’s ill-considered invasion and the opposition it engendered. That example suggests cultural change foisted from outside on a population helpless to deal with or control it. Clearly, that can happen, but I would argue it is not the main mode in which change is occurring now. Instead, the main forces that change our culture are limited by the degree to which we —or at least many of us — adopt the new culture. Inevitably, the young can adopt new culture faster than the old, but , given that the median age is climbing as children per capita decline and life expectancy grows, teenagers alone are in no position to dictate to all of us. We adopt new culture fast, but not faster than we can.

Cultural conservatives always have another argument, of course. It is that the prior culture contains inherited wisdom that will be lost if we abandon its specifics. Andrew Keen does not really spell out this argument, but I think he implies it. The problem is that if we look at past history, we do not see eras with monopolies on wisdom. The stone age? The Roman Empire? The World War II era with it’s touted “greatest generation”? The sixties? Hardly. 1990 is equally suspect.

Certainly, old wisdom may be lost, but new wisdom can also be gained. In fact, what is wise depends on context, so that much of what was the old wisdom would be today’s stupidity. Inheritance alone cannot tell us what is wise; we have to keep coming up with new ways to do that. And we have no way to measure relative wisdom, so we can only keep striving for wisdom in current terms. Critics would have to argue that we can’t do that, or aren’t trying. If that’s Keen’s point, he is not convincing — as I will explain further in the next installment.

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.)

It probably does no good at this late stage, but let me cry foul one more time. I coined the term “Attention Economy” twenty years ago to refer to a completely new kind of economic system — one not based on material goods nor money but rather on the passing around of what is both unavoidably scarce and desirable in unlimited amounts, namely  ….TA DAA... the attention that can come only from other human beings. Not a version of the money economy, but something completely different, even though, in the transition, money and attention can be interwoven to some degree.

Then Thomas Davenport and John Beck pilfered my term for the title of their 2002 book. Ever since many people have been referring to the “Attention Economy” in a much more limited and less important sense. A major part of that is the notion that by learning where you pay attention, advertisers can do better at getting your attention so as to induce you to buy more schlock…er…stuff.

A related notion is that if you have some “awesome” software or Internet application that somehow garners attention, you can “monetize” this by selling focused ads. A large number of people developing new Internet applications or sites see this ad model as their means to obtain riches.

That indeed may be possible right now, as the success of Google certainly shows, but it does raise a question or two. How many goods or even services can be advertised successfully? How does money flow from the purchasers of goods and services to the people who allow their site to be used for ads? Are not the advertisers and the products they represent in large measure just conduits for money that could flow directly to the attention getters anyway?

Suppose it were to turn out that ninety percent of a company’s revenues go to pay for ads, that is go to the creators of the ads and the sites on which the ads show up, wouldn’t it begin to seem a little odd to think of what is happening as “advertising revenue”? Isn’t the reality what I have otherwise described as money tracking attention — i.e. , following in the same direction as the way attention flows?

The basketball star LeBron James entered into a ninety–million dollar advertising contract with Nike. In order for Nike to make money on this, James will need a lot of fans who pay him enough attention to want to wear the footwear that indicates this attentiveness. (Having someone’s attention, as I have written before, increases the likelihood that they will want what you want, in this case to buy the shoes in whose ads you appear and that are probably named after you.) If instead they just put James’s picture up on their own websites or MySpace pages and sent him ten dollars for the rights to do this, they would save a lot of money, and (or but) would have fewer pairs of shoes in their closets. How many shoes are too many?

At what point does the attention going to the shoes compete with attention that might go to Mr. James or some other basketball player, or some other would-be attention getter including even a would-be software designer or entrepreneur? Will not a time come, relatively soon when the advertising model breaks down for lack of sufficient desire to end up with ever more products? ‘Won’t this time be hastened by the fact products do require attention, attention that otherwise might go more directly to people? Does the fact that buying goods and services and making any use of them generally requires some attention take away from the attention that might otherwise go to you or whatever you are saying, have invented, or otherwise want to point to?

………

One possible response to the above is that people (or at least most Americans) love to shop. It is well known that Christmas shopping has a huge effect on the bottom line not only of retailers but of many of the companies that supply the goods that are bought. I have recently become aware that additional gift-buying is also way up: when someone is about to have a baby, for instance, she is now likely to be feted at multiple showers, at each of which the main activity is opening and ooh-ing and ahh-ing over the presents. The donors, through this, receive attention, perhaps, insincere, but maybe the best they can get. And of course, if you go to a store, rather than shopping over the Internet, you may well hope to get some attention from the sales people and other customers for your full basket or your taste.

A large share of presents are not really what the recipient wants. Even when there are gift registries, as for weddings, the wish lists may be put together more out of a sense of obligation than real desire. The result? Much that keeps the old economy humming are objects that acquire their value strictly as signs of attention received as well as reminders — not always positive ones — of the givers. Likewise, of course, many more objects are bought, like the Nike shoes that are endorsed by LeBron James, as much to get some reflected attention as for any utility in the object itself.

In all those cases, I suspect, shopping, and paying attention to ads too, is a substitute for more intensely personal forms of attention. As we get more and more networked, it is likely that less material ways to get attention will compete with greater success with both the shopping paradigm and the ad paradigm. The result will be companies will, out of desperation, spend more and more on ads, that will appear in every possible venue ….until the whole process finally gets short circuited.

Recently, I happened on an obituary in the NY Times for Rudolph Arnheim, who died at 102. It turned out he had done interesting work on the psychology of visual thinking and visual attention. Since, I have been reading some of his essays. One point he makes [New Essays in the Psychology of Art, p. 78] is that when we are fully absorbed in something, we do not notice time passing. If you are particularly engrossed by some text, it may take you less time to read, not more. Only when we are bored do we normally notice time.

This is very relevant to many attempts to equate time and attention. As I have argued before, there is no clear relationship. But boredom, in my view, is usually the attempted theft of attention: We are bored because someone else tries to determine what we can pay attention to, with no easy escape, except into our own minds or imagination, or looking at a clock impatiently.

If you want someone to pay attention to you, and they don’t, or they keep you waiting, you can also feel bored. To get the attention you want, you have no obvious choice but to pay attention to the other person, even if only in the form of waiting. That is a common predicament for small children, who have limited ability to move or choose ways to pay attention on their own. It is also the experience in waiting rooms.

Boredom by attention theft is also whenever you are keenly interested in some TV or radio program but are forced to listen to ads or announcements that interrupt. Spam is similar. Even something you want to pay attention to, like a novelist’s creation, can have boring passages that you might be afraid to skip over lest they contain something that you will want to pay attention to.

When someone asks for a certain amount of your time, and you agree, you may feel forced at least to pretend to pay attention. If the person has specific power over you, you may be obliged even more strongly to do this. They are forcibly stealing your attention, unless you find what they say or do makes you want to keep attending.

Of course, “attending to someone” often means doing their bidding, waiting on them. Who wants to be an attendant? It’s great only when you feel enthralled by the person you are attending, perhaps by love, perhaps because she is a star you want to be connected with; in paying her attention, you have come to want to see that her desires are satisfied. If you feel you can achieve that, then might eliminate any boredom. Or maybe, at times, you are bored then too, but accept it on the grounds that you will get some attention from her audience and fans just because of your closeness to her.

In world in which the competition for attention is ever-more intense, attention thievery, that is, forced boredom, can only rise. It is only when you don’t stay attentive that time duration matters.

A final note: there are other instances when we are concerned with the passage of time when attention is at stake. When you want to pay attention to something that starts at, say, two o’clock, you may have to pay keen attention to clock time. This takes you away from attention to whatever else might occupy you at the moment. If you have to rush, and that takes focus, then much of your attention is already on what will occur at two. You are already in the future, in effect.

Techniques to escape this time constraint are often highly valued. With the Internet and recorded sounds, videos and movies, we have removed much of the necessity. Still , live events have a special value, often. We want to see the star in person, we want to hear and see a live performance, we want to experience an event as it actually takes place. That gives us either a special chance to be directly noticed by a star or an opportunity to get attention later ourselves, for being there in the moment it happened. Even watching sports on TV is more momentous when it is live as we watch. So we cannot sever time beyond our control entirely from when we pay attention.