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 […]
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 […]
Whatever your operating system, you ought to be able to download Mozilla Firefox, which is the best browser for viewing this blog.
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, […]
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 […]
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. […]
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 […]