[1]Principia Cybernetica Web

                                   Attention Economy

   H.A. Simon: "a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention"
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   Given that the amount of attention that we can devote to our work is finite, a
   growing amount of information clamoring for our attention must at a certain
   moment produce an overload, where a number of (potentially important) items
   simply can no longer be processed. Agreeing about "netiquette" or appropriate
   rules of conduct in communication may significantly reduce this [2]information
   overload, but it will not stop the people who have something to gain in
   transmitting their messages.

   This is most obvious for commercial publicity, where it is in the interest of the
   seller to inform as many people as possible about their offers, but it also
   applies to individuals and organizations (e.g. lobbyists, pressure groups,
   political parties) who for various reasons want to attract attention to their
   ideas. While freedom of expression makes it impossible to strictly limit the
   number of messages that are produced, the concept of attention economy may
   suggest a more flexible approach.

The roots of spam

   Ephemeralization has made the production and distribution of information
   extremely inexpensive, inciting senders to spread their messages ever more
   widely. It costs hardly anything to send a commercial message to millions (and
   soon billions) of email addresses. With such mass-mailings, while most addressees
   would find little of value in the message, only the tiniest response percentage
   is sufficient to make a huge profit. Therefore, there is no real advantage in
   targeting restricted groups. Where the cost for the sender is minimal, the cost
   for the receivers, while individually almost negligible, is collectively huge.
   Assume that an addressee spends on average a mere second to decide that a spam
   message should be deleted. If the message is sent to 100 million people, this
   entails a total loss of some 700 working weeks. Now consider the losses when 100
   such messages are distributed every day!

Information tax

   The cost has shifted basically from sender to receiver. If attention is the most
   scarce, most precious resource to remain after ephemeralization, then it would
   seem logical that people should pay to receive it. While unorthodox, a
   straightforward way to implement this principle would be to instate an
   information distribution tax. Instead of letting email be basically free, a
   protocol could be created so that every sender would pay a small amount (say, 10
   dollar cent) per addressee. Such an amount would be too low to make anybody think
   twice about sending a message to a loved one, but it would make spamming
   uneconomical, forcing publicity messages to target their audience very precisely.

   The tax could be collected centrally, and used by the government e.g. for
   combating information overload at large. Alternatively, it could be implemented
   as a decentralized transaction, an "attention fee", that is paid directly by the
   sender to the receiver. The protocol could be further expanded so that if the
   addressees of the message would indicate their satisfaction with the message
   (e.g. by clicking an "OK" button, or by maintaining a list of "OK" colleagues and
   friends), the fee would be waived.

   In that way, people would be less inclined to send messages that are unlikely to
   be appreciated, while the people who do get more messages than they desire would
   at least receive some form of monetary compensation for their wasted effort.
   (While the intention is different, there already exist schemes where people are
   being paid for their willingness to simply pay attention to advertisements, e.g.
   by clicking on web banners, or listening to commercials during their phone
   conversations.)

   This economic analysis of attention can be taken a step further. While attention
   is a universally valuable resource, some people's attention will be more valuable
   than others'. Generally, the attention of people who are powerful, popular or
   authoritative will be much more in demand, as their reaction to the messages they
   receive will generally have much more influence in the outside world. For that
   reason, presidents, film stars, religious leaders, royalty, and Nobel prize
   winners generally receive immensely more solicitations than little known
   pensioners or homeless people. According to the law of supply and demand, their
   attention should therefore command a much higher price.

   In practice, such people are surrounded by a secretarial staff that processes the
   great majority of the messages, and the upkeep of this staff does require a lot
   of money. The high status of these people is usually accompanied by material
   wealth sufficient to pay for such upkeep, and therefore there does not seem to be
   an urgent reason to force senders to pay huge sums in order for their messages to
   reach a high-status person. Moreover, such a purely monetary way of valuing
   scarce attention would appear highly undemocratic, making it almost impossible
   for non-wealthy people to get the attention of their leaders (though it must be
   noticed that in practice this is just what happens, even without explicit fees
   for attention-getting).

Receiving attention

   An additional argument why high-status people should not be paid more highly for
   their attention is that in a sense they are already being paid back by the
   attention they get themselves. Goldhaber [18] has argued that attention is not
   only valuable because we have too little of it to give, but because it is
   intrinsically pleasant to receive. It is part of human psychology that we seek to
   increase our status, and this goes together with increasing the amount of
   attention we get from others. Therefore, becoming famous is the dream of many.
   Since ephemeralization has democratized wealth, but kept attention scarce, fame
   may actually have become more attractive than wealth. Goldhaber [18] therefore
   suggests that the traditional economy, based on the exchange of material wealth,
   is being replaced by an economy based on the exchange of attention.

   This view of the attention economy has a basic flaw, though: attention is not a
   tradable good. While attention is valuable both when spending it and when
   receiving it, the one cannot compensate for the other. All the attention that is
   focused on a famous person's private and public life will not help that person
   tackling information overload. At best, public attention can be converted to
   money, as when it helps a pop star sell records, which in turn can help the
   receiver buy the support to process more information, but this seems hardly an
   efficient way to direct information processing capacity where it is most needed.
   The market's "invisible hand" that balances supply and demand may be a relatively
   effective mechanism for allocating tradable goods and capital (cf. [19]), but the
   same does not seem to apply to attention.

Controlling attention

   One reason why attention is so difficult to allocate rationally is that people
   have very little control over the emotional drives, such as sex, status, and
   danger, that focus their attention on one subject rather than another. News and
   publicity agencies have very well learned how to manipulate these drives in order
   to sell their messages, e.g. by including pictures of sexy women or cute babies
   that are wholly irrelevant to the message itself. Most of these drives are deeply
   rooted in our genes, being adapted to a prehistoric hunting-gathering lifestyle
   very different from our present information society. Yet, several authors (e.g.
   [20, 21]), building on centuries-old spiritual traditions such as yoga,
   meditation and Zen Buddhism, have argued that it is both possible and desirable
   for people to learn to control these drives.

   While the effort and discipline necessary to achieve mastery over one's emotions
   may be daunting, the first step is simply to become aware of the relatively
   simple ways in which our emotions are being manipulated. This awareness could be
   part of the rules of information hygiene that everybody should learn. Another
   reason why control over drives may not be so difficult to achieve is that,
   according to the need hierarchy of Maslow [22, 23], "lower", material needs
   become less pressing as they are better satisfied. Thus, in a society where most
   basic needs of food, security, company, etc. have been satisfied, people will
   spontaneously pay more attention to higher, cognitive needs. The problem remains
   that there is an "inertia of desire" [24] which keeps desires active long after
   the underlying needs have been satisfied. Here too, there may lie a role for a
   generalized education into "mental" hygiene.

References

   [18] Goldhaber M.: The Attention Economy and the Net. First Monday 2, No 4,
   http://www.firstmonday.dk/ (1997)

   [19] Heylighen F.: The Economy as a Distributed, Learning Control System,
   Communication & Cognition- AI 13, nos. 2-3, p. 207-224 (1997).

   [20] Stewart, J. E.: Evolution's Arrow: The direction of evolution and the future
   of humanity (Chapman Press, Australia): < [externallink.GIF]
   [3]http://www4.tpg.com.au/users/jes999/> (2000)

   [21] Csikszentmihalyi M.: Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. New York:
   Harper and Row (1990)

   [22] Maslow A.: Motivation and Personality (2nd ed.), (Harper & Row, New York)
   (1970).

   [23] Heylighen F.: A Cognitive-Systemic Reconstruction of Maslow's Theory of
   Self-Actualization, Behavioral Science 37, p. 39-58 (1992).

   See also: [externallink.GIF] [4]Attention economy in Wikipedia
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   [5]Copyright© 2008 Principia Cybernetica - [6]Referencing this page

   Author
   F. [7]Heylighen,

   Date
   Apr 9, 2008

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References

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