Attention Economy

Attention economy reminds me of Putnam’s famous argument that TV (or Internet) has a time displacement effect on people’s civic engagement. But the attention economy provides a more sophisticated measure of people’s use of time, which is attention. Most of mass communication studies still utilize the time spent on media consumption to measure the media use. This approach fails to account for the increasing thinner attention people paid to the media, even when they claim to spend time with it.

Attention economy also proposed two interesting laws:
First, the amount of information increases, the demand for attention increases.
Second, the more attention to have begin with, the easier it is to get more.

The first one can be used to explain the information overload phenomenon. However, the increase in demand for attention may be disappointed by the supply. What people are paying attention to and which get the most devoted attention can be an interesting topic for mass communication studies. The second law shows a rich get richer model in attention economy. I am wondering whether some media outlets are more attention efficient than others. Especially new media, would reading twitter less attention consuming than reading New York Times? Therefore, one media does not have to be dominant attention grabber in order to succeed, media requires less attention may attracts more users, who live in a information overload society.

Week 7 Readings

The point highlighted in the green circle on page 14 left some food for thought. In this era of information overload, attention is precious and scarce. One of the ways that has seen some success of retaining attention is to give customers attention. Like the quote says, "One way to get attention from customers is to give them attention." With the plethora of participatory journalists now, and the ability to get attention through many ways (iReport, YouTube, etc.) companies are now becoming the platform to HOST others' attention instead of being the ones who constantly feed information to the consumer. For example on CNN's iReport, you can go to the site to read the news but then if you so choose, be able to report news as well. Of course the topics are limited to what CNN will allow on iReport but it is a big step towards giving customers attention and not only limiting the information flow to a one-way street. Maybe in the long run, the winners will be the ones who are able to give the most attention and shed the best light on the customers?

Adaptation in the age of ADD

The most startling thing about this sessions' reading — chapter 1 from Davenport and Beck's "The Attention Economy" — was to realize that it had been published in 2001. In "digital" years, that might as well have been the dark ages: before ubiquitous cell phones and text messaging; before Facebook and the like; before other Web 2.0 applications that are highly attention-intensive—in short, before our digital lives really became crazy. It's remarkable to realize how taxing all of these daily, almost constant distractions must be on our brains ... but is all of this making us stupid (as Jacie brought up)?

Clearly, we've all become a little more ADD in the way we approach information: We skim, browse, surf, and otherwise gloss over wide expanses of data ... but, then, we have to out of sheer necessity. Perhaps this is rewiring our way of thinking, but it (meaning the digital realm, especially the Web) is also expanding our ability to create, collaborate, connect, explore, co-critique, and expand our understanding. As Jacie pointed out, by allowing us to "forget" certain things that we can always Google later on when we need that piece of information, this should free up more brain space for greater niche knowledge and deeper wells of creative thought. In this sense, as we increasingly learn to manage our everyday information overload, we (theoretically speaking) should be able to adapt such that we can parcel out our attention more effectively—in other words, we're learning how to give less attention to the useless spam (mostly because better filters have improved that dramatically since 2001) and, hypothetically then, we should have more time/attention for the work that matters. Again, we're talking in theory here, since I recognize that we're still so inundated with information that actually carving out quiet space for creative work is getting harder and harder to do.

So, bottom line: The "attention economy" hypothesis put forward here certainly has merit in today's environment, but it doesn't account for the likely improvement, over time, of individuals in the way they manage that scarce attention.

Ah, but at the end of the day, I didn't really get through this article in full ... I just couldn't give it my full attention. ;)

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 (?).

Making money on the Web

This really is the BIG QUESTION of Web economics: How do you make money? (or, to use Web 2.0 parlance, how do you "monetize"?)

A couple of thoughts came to mind as we read the piece "Cooking Pot Markets" piece by Ghosh. Consider this a stream of consciousness ....

One, as for journalism and online news, there might not be a business model. Period. It becomes free forever.

Two, I'm not sure that I totally agree with Ghosh's central argument: "money is not the prime motivator of most producers of the Internet's free goods, and neither is altruism." Oh, really? I think can think of some instances when the primary motivators are either of those two — more often money, but altruism as well. (Think of Yochai Benkler's notion of "sharing nicely.")

Third, much of the monetary value to be made via the Web comes offline ... as in the case of Jeff Jarvis, who leveraged his online blogging to enhance his offline opportunities to speak, write books, teach, and consult. I like how he puts it here in this column for The Guardian:

Some people think I'm nuts for blogging when I could be doing real work (as if writing newspaper columns were the only real work). They ask me how much money I make directly from my blog and the answer is: not much. But to me, the blog is worth a million dollars - or more - for it brings me value in many other ways. So I thought I'd give you an accounting of that worth.

Last year, Buzzmachine.com, which has been in business, loosely speaking, since 2001, made $9,315 (£4,655) from two blog ad networks, $1,866 from ads on my RSS feeds, and $2,674 from Google ads, for a total of $13,855. Though I've written many a blog post and column lamenting that there aren't better, richer ad networks to support grassroots media, when I add that up, I'd say it's not too shabby. Nonetheless, you'd still be forgiven for thinking I shouldn't have quit my day job.

When I did quit that day job - as president of an online division of Condé Nast's parent company, which I left in 2005 - I got my next job thanks to the blog. If I hadn't been pontificating about the state of the news in the internet era, I wouldn't have come to the attention of the City University of New York, which appointed me to the faculty of its journalism school - a job I love. But I must confess that my teaching post pays a fraction of my prior salary. So you may still think me a fool.

To make the money I don't make teaching, I consult and speak for various media companies and brands. The only reason I get those gigs is because companies read the ideas I discuss at Buzzmachine and ask me to come and repeat them in PowerPoint form and explore them with their staff. I've also been asked to teach executives how to blog (a class that should, by rights, take about two minutes). That work and the teaching get me to a nice income in six figures. So I'm not looking quite as idiotic now, I hope.

It was also because of the blog that I got this column. The MediaGuardian editors asked me to take some of the topics I write about online and turn them into columns; the newspaper is an aftermarket for the blog. It pays a bit, a few hundred dollars a column, but that's not why I do it. I enjoy the discipline of taking the lumpy clay of a blog post and moulding it into a column. I like discussing column ideas with my community before I write them. And I quite like having you readers as an audience. So please don't tell my editors that I like doing this so much I would do it for free.

I just got a book contract because of a notion that began in the blog and that I kneaded over and over for about a year. As I write What Would Google Do?, I continue to explore ideas on my blog, helping me to think them through. The US contract roughly doubled my consulting income last year; international contracts may add more.

If I add all that up over the past five years and the five to come, to me the blog is worth a few million (dollars, not pounds, sadly). But it's worth even more than that. Buzzmachine has taught me about the new architecture of media; I wouldn't have learned that without jumping into the new world myself. The blog has stoked my ego, getting me on TV and on conference stages to blather to audiences far and wide.

It has also checked my ego, as my readers never hesitate to challenge and correct me. It has forced me to be more open to new ideas. It has given me a second career playing with new toys; professionally, it keeps me young. Personally, it has made me countless new friends and reconnected me with old ones, owing to a blog's ability to give a person a strong identity in Google searches.

People ask how I have the time to blog on top of everything else. But the real question is, how could I not blog when it leads to so much more? Finally, for a proper accounting, I should also give you the other side of the ledger: the blog costs me $327 a year for hosting. So this is one web 2.0 venture that is profitable.

Blue Man Group

money and the web

Being on the Internet is not quite like being in love (though some would argue about that) - but it brings with it the same sheen of pricelessness. On the Internet, through much of its past, the bulk of its present and the best of its foreseeable future, prices often don't matter at all. People don't seem to want to pay - or charge - for the most popular goods and services that breed on the Internet. Not only is information usually free on the Net, it even wants to be free, so they say.

I found it really interesting to read this blurb, from 1998, with the ongoing net neutrality debate in mind. Soon, we may pay for internet access like we pay for cable TV, which would be drastically different from the picture of the internet that the author conceived of 10 years ago.

I recently found a couple short videos about the net neutrality issue, which I find entertaining even if they're admittedly perhaps not unbiased. They are entirely put together by Lauren Weinstein, who has been involved with the internet since ARPANET.
Network Neutrality in 30 Seconds - Part 1
Network Neutrality in 30 Seconds - Part 2