measuring attention?

With so much information and so much to do, we use our own ways and often times we use new technologies help us manage our tasks, time, and attention. Then the debate starts here. There was an article on atlantic.com arguing Google is making us stupid. Guess you know I would not agree with that...... There's counter-argument from nytimes.com, however, saying technology doesn't dumb us down but frees our minds.

I like the second article on nytimes.com a lot more in that it argues we are in an era with so much information that advanced technology helps us save time and spend more time on creating. Similar to what we saw in attention economy, the article from nytimes.com also argued:

In a knowledge-based society in which knowledge is free, attention becomes the valued commodity. Companies compete for eyeballs, that great metric born in the dot-com boom, and vie to create media that are sticky, another great term from this era. We are not paid for our attention span, but rewarded for it with yet more distractions and demands on our time.

It is really interesting to see that a HP scientific calculator was banned in some classrooms in 1972 with the fear that it is detrimental to human intelligence. Well, ban calculators! Ban computers!! Ban SPSS!!

Sorry.... back to attention, thus companies use money to buy attention and users trade in their attention for something else. Attention, compared with cooking pot model, seems to be more concrete in that attention can be transformed into other currency more easily. But even though it seems more concrete, it is still hard to measure. One measurement suggested was time, a poor measurement. How else can attention be measured?

Here's a link to the videos of Poynter's eyetrack method (?).