The Attention Economy | Hacker News Reader

The Attention Economy

firstmonday.org

A great article that explains a lot of things that happen on the web.

For starters take google, they sell attention, to the advertiser´s products, viewers might then decide to buy something; qvc showcases products; your friends on facebook, etc. grab your attention. I guess all of the advertising industry lives on attention and therefore much of the entertainment industry (games, movies, news, tv, social networks) too. Maybe even competing with the education industry.

Other tools (wesabe) save you time so you can direct your attention to what you are interested in.

There's a very interesting indirect link between the article and Google: one of the people thanked at the end of the article is Terry Winograd, an AI pioneer who also happened to be Larry Page's grad supervisor at Stanford, right about the time this article was written! Winograd is also a co-author on at least one of the early PageRank articles.

" Individual attention getters of all sorts will find it ever easier to get attention directly through the Web, without any corporate packaging necessary."

a.k.a Tila Tequila

"In a full-fledged attention economy the goal is simply to get either enough attention or as much as possible. Recall now what I pointed out earlier: if you have a person's full attention, you can get them to perform physical acts, ranging from moving their eyes to follow you, to raising their hands, to applauding, to bringing you a glass of water, to handing you a sandwich, or, as is not uncommon in the case of rock groupies or sports fans, having sex with you (to cite a notorious example)."

Will the next cult arise online? I remember a scene in a Sci-Fi novel (was it Snowcrash) where a online textbook empowered thousands of teenage girls.

Still reading this fascinating article. It puts a dry academic perspective on the madness of Facebook/RockYou/et al.

The novel sounds like The Diamond Age.

Regarding your last remark, I think it's really interesting that the article was published in 1997, and is based on an article from (I think) 1993. Effectively, the author predicted some of the things you mention, and probably a lot of things that haven't happened yet.

The author mentions money flowing towards attention centers in the attention economy. Interestingly, he does mentions advertising as paid attention - not as a money source for attention getters.

How will people be paid in the attention economy? Micropayments? Transaction fees? The brand-called-you. Facebook Beacon v10? I think it's very much up in the air.

Short summary of the posted link: It's now a commonplace idea that online reputation and attention often translate into real world economic gains. This article (and a similar article the same author wrote for Wired in the early 90s) seems to have been one of the original sources for this idea, and still makes for stimulating reading. Goldhaber also has an interesting blog at http://www.goldhaber.org/

I recommend checking "Welcome to the experience economy", from B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore in Harvard Business Review July-August 98.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com