“Open-Source” Policy Making

Jun 092007
 

In the past three or four years, the Internet has become vastly important for politics. Bloggers like “Daily Kos” help determine how “the grass-roots” will respond to  actions by Congress or the President. Move-On members send petitions on this and that, quite frequently. Listservs pass around messages to “Call your Congressperson;” specific candidates’ campaigns build support and receive contributions and obtain volunteers through vast numbers of e-mails they send out. And so on. Similar things […]

Copywrong

Jun 072007
 

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 […]

Is there "Bad" Attention

Jun 022007
 

“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, […]

A Garland of Attention Terms 5: "Illusory Attention"

May 212007
 

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 […]

Star-fan-omics in Action: Riealties of the Attention Economy

May 142007
 

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 […]

A Letter to "The New Yorker"

May 112007
 

I just sent off the following letter to The New Yorker regarding the new economy: Steven Shapin, reviewing David Edgerton’s The Shock of the Old, (May 14, 2007)  cites the revenues of the largest corporations to argue there is no new economy. Sorry, that’s an old-economy measure, not unlike pointing to Queen Elizabeth II’s descent from ancient royal families to prove the old feudal system still dominates in England. People who measure economies don’t know […]

THE NUMBER or TPI

May 082007
 
THE NUMBER or TPI

My last post emphasized the three economies: the feudal economy, the MMI (or the standard Market-Money-Industrial economy that most economists discuss as if it were the only one)  and the Attention Economy. Since these economies are very different, a direct comparison is not that easy, but taken as a whole, each one has certain characteristics that can be compared, and these comparisons can be combined in a single number for each. I call this Number, […]

What "A New Kind of Economy" Means

May 022007
 

I have been discussing the Attention Economy as new economy, but it seems that many readers still do not quite get what I mean by a new economy. If we think back to prehistory, it is obvious that the economy which is generally studied in school or university economics courses (which I reefer to as the MMI economy — see below) did not exist. There were no markets, no money, and little or nothing that […]

Blackberry Jam

Apr 202007
 

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 […]

The Suicide Shooter Makes a Bid for Attention

Apr 192007
 

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 […]

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