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. […]
What a couple of weeks it has been for politics as performance: the AG, AG (i.e., the Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales) instead of carrying out whatever duties make the AG-ship an important cabinet post, has been spending the week rehearsing for his upcoming appearances before Congressional Committees; President Bush, appearing before the National Cattlemen’s Association vowed again to veto the money bills for the Iraq escalation and pretended that Congress’s second-guessing him on Iraq was […]
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 […]
Last July I spoke at the monthly meeting of the SF Bay Area Chapter of computer-human interface subgroup of the Association for Computing Machinery. Yuu can now download a podcast of my talk.
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 […]
A few posts ago, I wrote, among other things, that Eric Goldman’s concept of Cosean filters as an interface between people and marketers is impossible. A commenter, Sean Ammirati, asks whether I would approve of adopting these filters if they were possible. The question seems strange, rather like asking whether I would endorse time machines as a mode of changing past history if they were possible. Strange as such questions are, the short answer in […]
ALIGNMENT When you pay attention to someone, you align your mind with that of the other person. This means you alter your mental and emotional processes according to your internal model of the other — in terms of her experiences, point of view, intentions, thinking, feelings, desires, will, actions, and/or perceptions. The better you can do this, the better you are able to pay attention. Such alignment is never total. You do not give up […]
In a recent post, I wrote that attention tends to leak out of circulation in the Attention Economy when it goes to the dead. As competition for attention increases, trying to stem this phenomenon and make use of the otherwise missing attention become increasingly important. A number of different strategies have developed: (1) Discrediting the dead for being dead; (2) Stressing the importance of now, this moment; (3) Channeling” the works of the dead by […]