Attention Abundance Companion

Since my last post is really a question, let me provide some questions I would ask if it was the topic of an open conversation:

What are examples of giving attention transparently that save time?

Is the skill on the rise focus or flow?

How do we teach flow?

Which is of more value to vendors: transactions or engagement to co-produce and co-promote?

Which is of value to PR: exclusives or inclusives?

When you give attention to a co-worker, is the benefit usually short-term or long-term?

Which would your employer rather you give more of?

If attention isn't scarce in the attention economy, what is?

Will Twitter fail because of overload?  Why not? Social network as filter? Ability to downshift to asynchronous?

If social dynamics are positive in a community, does the role of community management shift to directing attention by fiat? Is that expensive?

How does memory change with abundant attention?

What corporation executes best at giving attention?

Is a shift from push to pull as the dominant model of attention management do we discover more or is it the proverbial echo-chamber?

If we shift from push models of attention management, to pull, are we more productive?

There, I've put you back in middle school with a lazy teacher.  That or a professor with the case method.

Comments

[Guillaume]

Talking about Attention, I would say that the way we deal with an increasing amount of information has to do with how our brain processes it. Now that I've done the meaningless intro, let's start:

Attention does not depend only on how much information we receive, but also on how we process it. On a topic I know nothing about, an increasing info level will get me lost. On the opposite side, on a topic I am familiar with, new informationwill trigger new connections and associations which will make the content more easy to deal with and more interesting for me too.

Attention is scarce when we have to deal with stuff that we do not like. I would hence argue that an increased amount of information on a topic we do care about could result in even more attention paid to it.

The next step has to do with how information comes to us. Thanks to blogs, wikis and RSS feeds we are able to subsribe to sources that are (at least supposedly) relevant to us. We discover them through a network of social ramifications, recommendations, comments etc.

This remark combined with the previous one would hence confirm the fact that far from being a scarce resource, attention when directed towards information coming from trusted sources could be more "productive" (I am looking for a better term) than attention directed towards, say, an ad.

To get more prosaic, think about the shiver you have when you are excited about something new, a great article for instance... This is what I am talking about.

Applied to the Twitter case, this would imply that Twitter will succeed as far as information coming through it remains relevant to its readers. Hence the potential need for a group mechanism associated with a level of priority put on new "Twitts" which would help Twitter grow...

[Jay Fienberg]

I'll add a question and a couple comments:

what is attention?

If attention is basically a shorthand term for time and/or effort (e.g., time to listen to something, or effort of focusing on something), then it's maybe cleaner to reframe this in terms of new types of work (time + effort) and any economies that might capitalize on this work.

So, say we have a new type of work in following Twitter (say, as compared with following blogs, say as compared with following the daily news according the print papers, etc.). What are the economies around that work, e.g.: who pays the expenses? who can make money on it?

I don't know if bringing "attention" into this just confuses any analysis (which seems possible using only traditional and social production models).

[Syven]

If gold is the measure and standard of the physical resource economy, attention is the measure and standard of the cerebral resource economy. Gold is a measure of external value and an economy where push is the principal learning vehicle, naturally gold fits a hierarchical model.

Attention is a measure of internal value and therefore pull becomes the principal learning vehicle because growing the value of the individual is more important than growing the value of the mass. One does not need a massive depth of brainware to calculate the distributed or collected value of material, we simply need bodies to support the mass and so attention is pushed at people.

Where attention is owned by the individual, the pull creates greater awareness as well as new modes of interaction and value, and this is the key as far as I am concerned, what I write here (right or wrong) must demonstrate that I am trying to extract value rather than simply PUSH VALUE. I therefore think out aloud but more importantly (by so doing) establish a new principle that I AM THE OWNER OF MY OWN ATTENTION. Once this inside-out view of attention is established, the value isn't mass communication but emergent connection - imagine what six billion minds can create when they individually own their own attention - compared to a push model where groupthink, archetypes, set patterns of thinking and reasoning and soundbites are the primary resource and value.

Just because I take charge of my attention and this attention is purely mine - the word MINE takes on a much more intelligent meaning. Attention then becomes mining as in mine (MY), not mining as mine (physical excavation). Mining therefore of information becomes a personal activity, the network and the resource models therefore need to be constructed in a way that encourages intelligent pull. That does not mean that push is obsolete - it means that we redefine pull from the view of attention not from the view of material. Attention is not gold, attention is an ore that processes personal intelligence.

In this form of attention, someone who is reading this is reading something that has been PUSHED out. PULLING in terms of attention rather than material is the cerebral act of THINKING. As I write this I am pulling, maybe not a great depth, but each line I write here is a shovel of thinking and processing as I think out aloud. I personally think that is the future of attention. Not the resource minded or militaristic "STAND TO ATTENTION" as a command, but attention as personal ownership. If one then pulls from a state of personal ownership, I am responsible for identifying my own waste and for my own extraction. The "INTELLIGENT MINE" therefore is the creation of intelligent mind and when attention is "mine", I believe it has the greatest capacity to raise the bar on thinking, simply if my rationale is right, that we are operating to our own strengths and our own needs and our own capacity to shape intelligent behaviour i.e. compassion, virtue, humility, integrity etc - which is therefore raising the bar on each unit of life rather than engage in a push mode where we tell others what they should focus on and what they should do.

I personally believe that organizational models like the ones Toyota (despite the fact that they have perfected use PULL)they are still shaped from the old style resourcing paradigm - but as information becomes an ocean of value - our individual ability to see what can be "mined" therefore makes attention personal strategy rather than a resource strategy. I admire Toyota most for their principles that do focus on the very attention (or personal ownership of attention) in terms of encouraging respect for the individual and continuous learning, but in my view Toyota merely sit at the beginnings of this ownership of attention - the human mind is simply readying itself for a time when human beings will process information in fundamentally different ways than we do now.

Some say that wars bring with them great transformations. I certainly hope that it does not require an earth-shattering upheaval before people discover more intelligent ways to see what emergent thinking and life can bring, for I am sure that attention is not about the old paradigm of harnessing the sheer volume of the global brain, but that the global brain is the sum of the intelligent interaction and combinations of emergence.

Nor is technology at a maturation point even if the culture of attention was so transformed. Such thinking is hypothetical at the mass level but its real at the individual level, because I am engaging it as I write this - futurists can have a field day entertaining others with their predictive prowess or even their prophesying but I am more concerned about who owns my attention, and I believe that I have the right to own my attention but also recognize that isn't a given in a world where attention is an external material called opinion or intellectual capital rather than an internal value called emergent discovery - and discovery is the ultimate PULL (even when it is gold, diamonds or oil in our common sense and more easily to relate physical resource paradigm).

M.