Designing Organizations for an Information Rich World - Herbert Simon's Speech. A Brief History of the Corporation: 1600 to 2100. On 8 June, a Scottish banker named Alexander Fordyce shorted the collapsing Company’s shares in the London markets. But a momentary bounce-back in the stock ruined his plans, and he skipped town leaving £550,000 in debt. Much of this was owed to the Ayr Bank, which imploded. In less than three weeks, another 30 banks collapsed across Europe, bringing trade to a standstill. On July 15, the directors of the Company applied to the Bank of England for a £400,000 loan.
Two weeks later, they wanted another £300,000. By August, the directors wanted a £1 million bailout. The news began leaking out and seemingly contrite executives, running from angry shareholders, faced furious Parliament members. If this sounds eerily familiar, it shouldn’t. So it is a sort of grim privilege for the generations living today to watch the slow demise of such a spectacularly effective intellectual construct. Framing Modernity and Globalization I didn’t settle on these five lightly. Arthur C. Reach versus Power. The Attention Economy: Understanding the New Currency of Business - Professor Thomas H Davenport, John C. Beck. The Economics of Attention: Style and Substance in the Age of Information by Richard A. Lanham, an excerpt.
Discussion: The Economics of Attention. How (Not) to Study the Attention Economy. Richard A. Lanham’s The Economics of Attention: Style and Substance in the Age of Information has much to recommend it: a breezy, insouciant, generally enviable, often entertaining style of writing; some interesting and important ideas; some fascinating digressions; a close look at some post–modern visual artists and fields of graphic design and typography; a brilliant explanation of the value of rhetoric; a prescription for reviving and redirecting the study of the humanities in general; and more.
Given the emphasis on style, rhetoric and design, one might take the first word in the title, “economics” as meant only metaphorically, and thus see the whole work as simply a broad attempt at artistic and literary criticism. But Lanham seems to intend that the title be taken literally. It is not a promise he keeps. “OK. If you interpret nature as matter and energy, you create the industrial society within which we have grown accustomed to living.
The Attention Economy and the Net. Attention Economy: The Game. In my course Friend Request Denied: Social Networks and the Web I have my students play a game I developed to let them explore the dynamics of building a reputation online by giving and capturing attention. It’s also a fun way for students to get to know each other. I’m posting the game instructions and materials here (under a Creative Commons license) for anyone who wants to try it. If you make any improvements, please share! Attention Economy: The Game Ulises A. Mejias How do new bloggers gain recognition? This game is an accelerated simulation of the process of gaining attention online (acquiring more readers, friends, hits, etc.). Number of players: around 10-25 Time for activity: 45 minutes to 1.5 hours (depending on number of players) Background Attention is “the action that turns raw data into something humans can use” (Lanham, in Lankshear and Knobel, 2003, p. 111).
Game Set Up Goal: Collect the most attention. Players: Newbies: Individuals who just joined the online community. Advertising in the Cyberspace Era. Attention, Meaning, and Meaningfulness. The Attention Economy and the Net, V2. If the Web and the Net can be viewed as spaces in which we will increasingly live our lives, the economic laws we will live under have to be natural to this new space. These laws turn out to be quite different from what the old economics teaches, or what rubrics such as "the information age" suggest.
What counts most is what is most scarce now, namely attention. The attention economy brings with it its own kind of wealth, its own class divisions - stars vs. fans - and its own forms of property, all of which make it incompatible with the industrial-money-market based economy it bids fair to replace. Success will come to those who best accommodate to this new reality. Explanatory note: This article began as a draft of a conference[ * ] presentation, and has been left pretty much in that form. This is a conference on the "Economics of Digital Information. " My vantage point is quite different. Certainty, let me invoke two different analogies. This analogy is imperfect in one way though. Attention Trust. The Attention Trust = set of principles to govern the Attention Economy based on the self-ownership of the data we create, and specialized software to regulate their use.
URL = the key to facilitating the attention marketplace is in decoupling of attention capturing, attention storage and attention recording services "AttentionTrust was recently established to promote the principle that we as individuals should have the ability to control the data that we create. Specifically, AttentionTrust believes that we all have the right 1) to own at least a copy of our data, 2) to store that data where we want and move it when we want, 3) to exchange it for something of value to us, and 4) to know what others intend to do with our data, so that we can make informed decisions about who should have access to it. " set of principles that define the rules of the game, by outlining the basic consumer rights in the Attention Economy: The Attention Recorder. AttentionTrust.org: a Declaration of Gestural Independence. Last Friday, I led a workshop to build a web site for a new foundation that Steve Gillmor and Hank Barry and I have been thinking through called AttentionTrust.
Steve is an inveterate blogger and podcaster who has been on a crusade to inform the blogosphere about the value of attention data. Hank Barry took a sabbatical from his role as VC at Hummer Winblad and stepped in to run Napster a few years back and take on the RIAA, an opponent whose paperwork he is still digging himself out from under. I came to Attention because it simply felt right, like an equal rights argument at a time when all such arguments seem to have been resolved many years ago.
It is exciting to think about ways to get people to pay attention to their own attention, which means organic value that they rarely if ever recognize. By putting up the site in advance of much other than putting up the site, we wanted to spur an agile development process around a fundamentally good purpose. Definition of Attention. Return on Attention and Infomediaries. Attention is getting a lot of attention. Most recently, Robert Scoble from Microsoft blogged about an epiphany he had earlier this week during a visit to Silicon Valley.
He is beginning to see the importance of attention and how it will shape value creation on the Internet. Attention is hugely important. It is the asset that will determine who creates value and who destroys value in the years ahead. Among other things, it will transform the nature and power of brands, as I discussed recently here, here and here. But I worry that we are confusing attention with attention profiles – the historical record of where we have allocated our attention in the past. Attention refers to the choice we each make regarding where we will focus at any point in time. Why is our attention so valuable? But it does pose a challenge. Attention profiles have the potential (but only the potential – there are serious challenges in harnessing this potential) to increase our return on attention.
Understanding Attention Scarcity – Why The Attention Economy Belongs to Peers, Not Brands. The invisible hand of time: How attention scarcity creates innovation opportunity. Thinking in terms of time and attention will quickly start to change the way you think about products and services, customer behavior, even business models. This is the great frontier for innovation for the next decade, this author believes. Companies that master time and attention innovation will find lots of market traction. Readers will learn how to get that traction in this article. If a new product is launched and no one notices it, does it really exist? Marketers and executives have always known that the standard economic model of fully rational decision makers (sometimes playfully referred to as homo economicus), carefully considering alternatives before deciding on the best choice, doesn’t match reality very closely. Billions if not trillions of dollars are invested each year in the belief that through marketing we can at least affect, if not control, the choices and preferences of our customers.
If necessity is the mother of invention, scarcity is the mother of innovation. Attention Economy: All You Need To Know. The Attention Economy is a marketplace where consumers agree to receive services in exchange for their attention. Examples include personalized news, personalized search, alerts and recommendations to buy. Note that the Attention Economy is different from the tradional meaning of an economy, because it isn't about buying and selling - although ultimately those things may occur. News feeds illustrate the point well, since they ask for consumers attention in exchange for the opportunity to show them advertising. Search engines also show ads (asking for consumers attention) in exchange for helping users find answers online (a service provided for free in exchange for that attention). A key point is that The Attention Economy is about the consumer having choice - they get to choose where their attention is 'spent'. Read/WriteWeb has published 4 in-depth articles about the Attention Economy, all of them written by Alex Iskold.
The Attention Economy: An Overview. Written by Alex Iskold and edited by Richard MacManus It is no secret that we live in an information overload age. The explosion of new types of information online is a double-edged sword. We both enjoy and drown in news, blogs, podcasts, photos, videos and cool MySpace pages. And the problem is only going to get worse, as more and more people discover the new web. Consider the two charts below, illustrating the growth of the Blogosphere at large and also in number of posts published by tech news blog TechCrunch: Because of this information explosion, we no longer read - we skim. The news that used to last a day now lasts just a few hours, simply because we need to pay attention to the new news. Economics of Attention Things get more interesting when we realize that our attention crisis is not only our problem.
When information is abundant, the false positives are very costly - they are basically deal breakers. Attention Economy Concepts AttentionTrust Technology of Attention. The Implicit Web: Last.fm, Amazon, Google, Attention Trust. As we rush through life and a myriad of web pages, we leave traces. We don't have time to think deeply about any of this. The blogs that we visit, the music we listen to, the movies we watch; we take all of them for granted. Yet, all of the different kinds of information that we interact with defines us. In turn, we change the world by issuing a verdict of what we like and what we do not like.
Sometimes explicitly via bookmarking, rating and digging. But most often, implicitly. The concept of the Implicit Web has been around for some time. What is the Implicit Web? The basic concept of the Implicit Web is simple. Things we pay attention to What if there was a way to capture our choices automatically? The Mechanics of the Implicit Web The Implicit Web is powered by clicks. Typically, software that powers recommendation engines or search engines takes clicks, time and actions as inputs and feeds them into a sophisticated optimization algorithm. Last.fm - the Implicit Web at its best. Continuous Partial Attention: Software & Solutions. The ways in which we consume and pay attention to information are changing. The changes are not minor, they are big and profound. Right now, it impacts us all individually - but soon the change will be visible on a global scale.
We are splitting our attention over a rapidly growing body of online information. To cope with that we replaced reading with skimming and learned to work in an environment with constant interrupts. Today we have successfully replaced attention with what Linda Stone coined and Marc Orchant recently wrote about: Continuous Partial Attention. The Roots of Partial Attention There are two major axis that cause inattention - the amount of information and the interrupts. Consider one simple example - a Facebook profile. The second cause is the interrupts. Iteration - the New Way We Work We all hate the feeling of being woken up just when we are about to fall asleep. And this is not necessarily a bad thing! But there is actually a big downside. Conclusion. Towards the Attention Economy: Will Attention Silos Ever Open Up? We have written extensively at Read/WriteWeb about Attention and the Attention Economy.
As a concept attention makes sense to anyone who is online today. We know when we are paying attention and we know what we are paying attention to. The problem is that the information about our attention is not readily available to us afterwards. The premise of the Attention Economy is that people are in control of their attention information. This control lets them use the information to receive utility and services.
The reality is that our attention information is scattered all over the web, bits of it lying in different silos. Anytime we buy books, rent movies, click on pictures or listen to music the information is recorded and stored. The Basics of Attention As we interact with information we reveal our attention. For example, a list of books that you purchased on Amazon can be used by a service that filters new book releases for you. Attention Silos Consider a different industry - banking. Paying attention to the attention economy. Most of us are happily obsessed with the economy of money.
We earn it and we spend it and we generally pay attention to what things cost. Certainly, salespeople and marketers are truly focused on the price of things, on commissions and shelving allowances and net margin and the cost of goods sold. With all of these easily measured activity, it's easy to overlook the fast-growing and ever more important economy based around attention. "If I alert my entire customer base, how much will this cost me in permission? " "How much time do we save our customers with a better written manual? " "When we fail to ask for (and reward) the privilege of following up, are we wasting permission?
" "Does launching this product to an audience of strangers waste the attention we're going to have to buy? " Attention is a bit like real estate, in that they're not making any more of it. The Attention Economy. Forget money; recognition is the new motive force. We’re happy to be paid in attention, social recognition. Attention is currency — advertisers make it so — and thus garnering personal attention starts to feel more significant, for its own sake.
Hence reality-TV narcissism and public journaling and rampant exhibitionism in our culture. But it’s not just vanity; it’s a harkening back to a public sphere that preceded commercialism. This may be a brief moment; we should enjoy it while it lasts.Blogging is still a recent enough phenomenon that most people doing it are amateurs. The Human Feed: How Humans Filter Signal From Noise. The False Question Of Attention Economics. Shirky: Problem is filter failure, not info overload | The Open Road. Declaring bankruptcy in the attention economy. Culture of Fear + Attention Economy = ?!?! Signal P&G Attention Economy. A Short Manifesto on the Future of Attention. The Attention Economy. Ten strategies for survival in the attention economy. Attention, Media, Value and Economics. Speculative microeconomics for tomorrow's economy. Economics is dead. Long live economics! A Commentary on Michael Goldhaber's The Attention Economy. What's the Right Economics for Cyberspace?
Attention Shoppers! Goldhaber on the Attention Economy. The Attention Economy will change Everything. The value of openness in an attention economy. Art and the Attention Economy in Real Space and Cyberspace. The Dream Life of Money. Attention Economics and the Productivity Paradox. Sex and Power in the Attention Economy. Attention Economy and the Net - Part II. Blogging at Work and the Corporate Attention Economy. Income Inequality in the Attention Economy. A persistence paradox. Paying Attention - Multiple Articles. Paying Attention - A conference concerning the Attention Economy. The Economy of Attention. The Cinematic Mode of Production: Attention Economy And the Society of the ... - Jonathan Beller. The Attention Economy.