We have a couple of open spots to attend a small seminar that I am moderating this Wednesday in San Francisco featuring Michael Goldhaber.
See the information below and email Curtis Hougland, the Director of Communications for AttentionTrust, if you are interested in attending.
AttentionTrust.org Presents:
“The Founding Father of the Attention Economy”
When:
Wednesday, October 4 from Noon to 3:00 PM (Goldhaber will speak at 1 pm after lunch)
Where:
Marines Memorial Club “Heritage Room”—10th Floor—609 Sutter St, San Francisco, CA 94102
RSVP: curtis AT attentionpr DOT com
For further background on Goldhaber, here are some choice quotes from Goldhaber's excellent essay that he recently published on his blog:
The Emerging Attention Economy
by Michael H. Goldhaber
Chapter 3 (part 3)
BEING ENTHRALLED
What are the limits to this sort of attentiveness? ... most people would risk their lives to save anyone they really pay a lot of attention to — their closest friends, parents or children and so forth — if the horrible circumstances arose that put their lives in danger. Sometimes devotion, even to stars, as well as intimates, goes still further. This thought plunges us into what amounts to the “deep end” of absolute attentiveness. We commonly speak of a state of paying rapt attention as being “enthralled.” Literally, a thrall is a slave. Being enthralled then means being enslaved, though not in the usual way, which is by force. Paying absolute attention to someone would imply totally aligning your mind with hers. Quite unthinkingly, you would take up — as if your own — her desires, feelings and wants of all kinds. With perfect and complete attention, the boundaries between you drop, and you are in symbiosis with that other. Your body and your actions are as much at their disposal as their own body is. You will do virtually anything for them. It is complete harmony, total love.
MONEY TRACKS ATTENTION
...if we have the attention of others, we can fill a large number of the wants of whomever we pay our own attention to by connecting her to the attentiveness of the right other person. The more easily we can make such direct connections, the less necessary money becomes.
“LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT ME!”
To keep minds aligned, you must keep them somehow engaged. You have to offer some kind of mental or bodily motion to align with or mirror, or elsean audience will drift – off to sleep or into some reverie, if nothing else outside captures their attention. You must do something to differentiate your own call for attention from everyone else’s, and even, to some degree, from yours in the past. For full attention, some degree of motion that does not find a complete echo in memory is helpful to maintain actual alignment in the here and now. Generally, that means some combination of the familiar with the new or the unanticipated.
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