Anne Truitt Zelenka

I read Michael Goldhaber’s draft chapter on how attention works for his book on the economics of attention this morning. I have many thoughts after reading it, but no firm conclusions, so this post is of the thinking out loud type.

What’s the context? That clearly we need a post-industrial economics, something other than an economics of manufacturing and exchange of tangible goods. Is it an economics of information? An economics of abundance? An economics of attention?

Here are my first ideas of what the principles of attention from an economic perspective might be:

1. Attention is a scarce resource, but it’s not fixed in amount. That is, the total amount of attention can be increased (this is what personal organization schemes like Getting Things Done seek to achieve, also cultural phenomenons don’t just capture attention but probably increase the amount of it by motivating and exciting people) but the amount can’t be increased beyond some maximum. The total amount of attention in the world is not infinite.
2. Attention, insofar as it is economic, is not merely the mind directed at something. When I clean my house, for example, I note the dirt on the ground. I sweep it up. No economic transaction has taken place. For economic transactions to take place, more than one person must be involved. Economics is about exchange. So any definition of attention from an economic perspective will necessarily involve a social component. And an economics of attention is not about Buddhist attentiveness, which doesn’t have to involve more than one person.
3. Attention has decreasing marginal utility. More is better, but attention you get when you don’t have much is worth more than attention you get when you already have a lot. I’m not sure Goldhaber would agree with me on this… I read the chapter rather quickly, but he seemed to argue that people want as much attention as they can get and used celebrities as an example. However, since celebrities tend toward the narcissistic, I’m not sure they are good to use as typical economic actors in the attention economy.
4. Attention from one person isn’t necessarily substitutable for attention from another. It’s not fungible, if I’ve got the right word. If you combine this with principle #3, you might get decreasing marginal utility of attention from a particular person or a particular type of person.
5. Attention is intrinsically valuable, it doesn’t gain value as a medium of exchange. I like when my mom calls me up, not because I can bank that attention, but because it makes me feel good to have her thoughts turned toward me. As a caveat to that though, if I get enough attention from other people, I might be filled up enough to pass it along… a kind of attention multiplier like money multipliers when banks take deposits and make loans.

But what is attention, even assuming it follows those principles? Goldhaber suggests that attention is “aligning of the minds.” This captures the social component. Does it make sense? It’s certainly appealing in the context of mirror neurons (where Goldhaber firmly puts it).

My first question is about technology… any description of the new economic reality must take into account technology as a prototypical good for the post-industrial era. You could claim that offering technology is a way of bringing your customers into engagement with you, as Tim O’Reilly has done: “Don’t treat software as an artifact, but as a process of engagement with your users.” If the way that technology companies succeed is by somehow achieving some sort of alignment between the technology (as the company’s proxy) and the users, then that does–sort of–fit into Goldhaber’s model. That is a really different way of thinking about software, at least to me. We talk a bunch about technological ecosystems but is the basis for that some sort of shared attention? Establish shared attention, then the money flows. That makes me think of a family. We share attention with each other and we share money too, but secondarily, because of the shared attention to each other’s lives and problems and opportunities.

Think about music… I pay for and listen to music because it makes me feel a certain way, does this represent a time-shifted alignment of minds? Maybe it does. Different musical keys are known for evoking different emotions… different styles of singing bring forth different mental states. Do musicians, however unconsciously, seek to create the same mental states in their listeners as they themselves experience when playing the music?

And what about art? I like best to buy something from an artist that I find some personal resonance with. I have a triptych in my office by Cheryl Toh; it’s called When I Met You. My husband Rick and I met her at the Cherry Creek Arts Festival last summer. She had a booth right next to her husband’s; he’s also an artist. Cheryl told me it was about meeting her husband. I liked it for the energy. But I like it even better that Rick and I bought it together from her, while her husband looked on, and that she painted it thinking of her husband, and now my husband and I share the experience of it and the memory of buying it. The value in this piece of art, to me, lies in how multiple people shared the attention in its making, its sale, and now the experience of it daily.

There seems to be something to this idea of economic attention as alignment of minds or what I might call shared attention, shared appreciation. A bunch of questions flow out of that: what’s the relationship between shared attention and money? What kind of business models work in the economy of attention? What factors increase attention in an important way? What relationships hold between the industrial economy and the attention economy? Does the attention economy matter to pre-industrialized or industrializing countries?