In a recent op-ed in the New York Times , “A Great Idea Lives Forever. Shouldn’t Its Copyright?” novelist Mark Helprin proposed stretching the already incredibly long period of copyright (the life of the author plus seventy years) to…well….always. Now Google is again facing opposition from publishers for scanning in books in university libraries. In the unlikely event that anyone would honor copyright in another few decades, authors would be still be most foolish to […]
“There is no such thing as bad publicity.” Does this hold? What does it have to do with attention. How does it relate to being an object rather than a subject? 1. Starting out in life, as an infant, everyone absolutely requires attention, and almost all infants show signs of wanting it. If, later in life, some people prefer to be absolutely ignored, that can usually be taken as a sign of severe mental illness, […]
You are reading this right now. I know you are. That gives the impression that I am paying attention to you personally at the moment. But of course that is a mere illusion. Really I am not. I may know you, but I very well may not. I may know nothing about you other than that you are evidently reading this, or hearing it read, or perhaps you memorized it and are now reciting it […]
An article in the NY Times magazine yesterday, “Sex, Drugs and Updating Your Blog” by Clive Thompson, demonstrates many of the realities I have predicted about the Attention Economy. 1. Fans feel a personal relationship with stars, even though they can only maintain such contact in reality when the number of fans is very small. 2. Fans are also eager to help stars, in and do their bidding quite generally. 3. The fans closest to […]
The other night, eight million Blackberries suddenly stopped functioning, and many users (or abusers) of this portable e-mail and instant messaging device apparently felt bereft. About the same time a friend told me she was in a bad mood because her Internet service was down. That had happened to me a week earlier, and I knew what she meant. Cell-phone users can easily feel the same. Just what is going on with us? An infant […]
When Palestinian suicide bombers blow themselves up, they nearly always have participated in a video, to be shown on TV (and now, the Internet) right after their deaths. It’s a difficult but quick way to achieve a kind of immortality, not in the next world, but this. Iraqi terrorists have a somewhat different pattern, more likely to be visible (at least from the back) when they are executing some poor hostage. The suicide bombers oddly […]
I am frankly peeved. These days I’m noticing more and more that people use the term “Attention Economy,” which I introduced in the late 1980’s, in all too superficial and erroneous a way. It is taken to be about advertising or marketing, or somehow related to ways to make money. It is taken to be just a nonce term – a fad. In reality, as I have tried to emphasize, The Attention Economy is a […]
TIME AND ATTENTION It is commonly thought that attention can be equated with time. “I will give you fifteen minutes of my time,” often implies that speaker will pay attention for those fifteen minutes. It would be a mistake though, to think that this formulation means that attention is particularly tied with time. All human activities — eating or walking just as much as paying attention— occur in time, and each one has some duration. […]
Author vs. Authority The words “author” and “authority ” both have the same root, fairly obviously, but in attention-economic terms they are almost opposites. We pay attention to an author as a person, with a history, feelings, experiences, actions, etc. An authority, on the other hand, is someone whose personal attributes should not matter; it is the position she holds or the body of knowledge she is supposed to represent completely impersonally that mark her […]
Since the total supply of attention is limited, the different ways attention leaves the circulating supply is important. One way is that each of us, in addition to attention we pay others, pays some to herself. Most humans are not perfectly happy in isolation, and probably cannot live that way. Most probably, we each would prefer to get at least a little more attention than we pay out. When you pay attention to yourself, you […]