Concepts Assignment - 1 - Information and Attention

33. Information and attention

In this kind of economy, the most valuable commodity is people’s attention (which can be, for example, bought and sold in the advertising industry): successful websites and other Internet publications / communications (says Goldhaber) are those which capture and hold the increasingly distracted attention of Internet users amidst a swirling mass of informational options.(Allen, n.d.)

As I began to investigate this concept further, I began to read Goldhaber’s paper called ‘The Attention Economy and The Net’. He introduces some ideas that not many people are aware of, namely how we make transactions with our inherent wealth of attention. His text illustrates the importance of understanding the new attention economy. As we will see, in the future the attention economy will become more important to understand.

Every day we make transactions without even reaching for our wallet. When, for example, a TV ad captures our interest, somebody comes up and talks with you, or you are driving your car, you are paying for each with your attention. In order to focus enough mental energy on each task (watch a tv ad, talk with someone or drive a car) we need to block out other things so that we can use our brain to do them properly. Can you imagine trying to drive a car while watching a TV ad and having a conversation? If we spent all our attention on each at the same time, we would be short changing the amount that would be required to drive a car safely which obviously is not a good thing. In the real world we have so many different things that we can spend our attention on, but in the new online world inside the Internet there is only one thing we can spend it on, and that is information.

The internet is so full of information that we have to navigate carefully in order to not waste our attention. Of course it requires some attention to navigate, but skilled internet users know how to search for information without wasting precious time and attention. However when we are faced with serial distraction likes chat, Facebook, games and then of course the more evil types of attention grabbers like spam and popup windows we can see how easy it is to waste your attention while using the internet. Marketers have to think much more cleverly in order to capture the scarce attention of internet users, which is a hard task when you are competing with all the other information.

Because the human race is becoming more and more reliant and integrated into technology, we are going to have to focus on processing information more and more. This means spending more attention on this processing. If we want to be able to navigate and filter through irrelevant information, then we are going to have to become good at saving as much attention as we can until we find what we are looking for. Technology will become better at helping us do this, but at the end of the day, regardless of any technological achievement, we are always going to have our limited wealth of attention to spend. With all the people out there that are after it, you are going to need to use it wisely.


Site 1:
Goldhaber, Michael H. (1997, April 7). Retrieved January 28, 2009, from First Monday: http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/519/440

This site is perfect for the beginner who doesn’t understand what the attention economy is. After reading the concept, this article cleared my misunderstandings up and allowed me to build an argument. I think perhaps he tends to exaggerate how much the material economy will shrink though. For example we will never be able to be nourished from education so there will always be production to keep the material economy alive. What he is getting at is that the material economy will most probably shrink down to the bare essentials of what production needs to supply the human race.


Site 2:
Too Much Information - Take back your attention span. (2007, September 25th). Retrieved January 28th, 2009, from Download Squad: http://www.downloadsquad.com/2007/09/25/too-much-information-take-back-your-attention-span/
This site proposes some tactics in which to eliminate TMI or Too Much Information. Going forward, internet users are going to have to come up with or learn as many tactics as they can in order to block out unwanted information. Sure we have started doing this with the advent of spam filters and popup blockers, but there are other streams of information that we can look at. For example the site goes on to look at trying to rid of physical world information such as paper bills. It is a good direction to take if we want to streamline our information processing in the future.