A few weeks back I had an opportunity to present at the OReilly ETech Attention Economy conference in San Diego.
Jonas did a great job in capturing the presentation, and its various contexts, at http://etech.root.net. Check it out.
Between the rest of the ETech conference, the subsequent PCForum conference on "Erosion of Power: Users in Control" and then the Search SIG on Attention in Mountain View, it was a extremely rich couple of weeks for charting the evolution of Attention from the theoretical to the practical. The decision of the Omidyar Network to support AttentionTrust was the perfect conclusion.
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Last June I finished the final chapter of Media Futures, called "Food for Worms," which was focused on the therapeutic aspects of arbitrage. There is a single line from that chapter that continues to resonate with me as a guide to understanding the evolution of media. It goes something like this:
"Innovations in internet media are like handfuls of white flour dropped over the invisible outlines of consumer intention."
Intention is impossible to see directly, just like its parent Attention. All one has access to is the residues of applications that try, in vain, to capture it. But just because we can't see it, or capture it, does not mean that it does not exist. The Web 2.0 movement is the Manhattan Project of Attention Physics, the A-Bomb. We are all throwing features, functionalities, metaphors and languages against these invisible currents to try to surface something more explicit, tangible and replicable. But as much permanence as we want to project onto these experiments (the market cap of Google or the reach of MySpace, for example) they remain just that, experiments.
And so I have come to think that the solution we are all working towards is based on three variables: attention, information and influence:
- In order to get attention, you need to give information.
- The more attention you want, the more information you need to give.
- There is a finite supply of attention and people want to get as much of it as possible.
- Your influence registers the amount of attention you have control over.
- To be influential is to give little information and control lots of attention.
This Spring, instead of writing a collection of extended essays such as Media Futures, I plan on writing a series of shorter statements, observations and descriptions. My hope is that they will reflect back on eachother in interesting ways, and together comprise enough white powder to reveal more of the essential substance of Attention.
I think I am going to call this new series Social Media Investigations.
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