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The Attention Economy as the Natural Economy of Cyberspace

by Michael H. Goldhaber

CPSR News Volume 15, Number 4: Fall 1997

To begin with, there is something very peculiar about conventional economic thinking when applied to today's so-called information economy. Let's consider these five facts:

1. By a reasonable measure, information-related efforts now encompass well over half the GNP, and the percentage seems to be rising.
2. We all seem far busier on average than 30 or 40 years ago at the heyday of mass production, and getting busier still.
3. While tools like personal computers seem to enhance "personal productivity" tremendously, overall productivity as measured by conventional economics has grown more slowly in recent decades than it did years ago.
4. Further, if this gigantic information-related effort is supposed to improve life, that important does not show up in conventional measures of the standard of living, which have been flat, at best, for most of the populace for more than two decades now.
5. The existence of the Internet and the World-Wide creates great confusion as to how to apply old-fashioned notions of intellectual property.

This new system is often referred to as an "information economy." But that notion is problematic if we assume that economies center around the effort to obtain what is not only desirable, but scarce. Far from being scarce information is overwhelming us all, and it continues to increase exponentially.

What, then, besides information moves through this new domain? Obviously not material objects. The only real alternative is attention. Who would put information out on the net without hoping that someone somewhere would pay attention to it?

Attention is intrinsically scarce because it has to come from the minds of others. But unlike material goods or even information, there is hardly any limit to how much attention one might usefully want, up to that of everyone else on earth. Information technologies make a desire of this sort attainable, at least in principal, at a pace never before possible.

Historical figures like Confucius and Aristotle have gotten huge amounts of attention, but it almost all came well after they were dead, so it presumably didn't directly benefit them. Today, with speed-of-light transmission, attention can flow to you and be of value to you in many ways while you are very much alive. It comes in many forms: love, recognition, heeding, watching over, caring, obedience, thoughtfulness, praising, attending to one's desires, aiding, advising, critical appraisal, or assistance in developing new skills - just to name a few. If you have one form, you often have access to others, especially when you have a large audience.

There are also many ways to capture attention: by making public your thoughts, inventions, expressions, artistic creations, performances, achievements, pleas, self-revelations, and arresting appearances. Further, anyone who has attention can at least temporarily pass it on to you.

Cyberspace, in the form of the World Wide Web or the Internet, is well-suited for many of these modalities of paying attention or going after it. As cyberspace develops further, the possibilities will only grow. Attention, unlike money, for example, can flow freely through cyberspace, without complicated encoding, passwords, and so on.

Likewise, it makes sense to think of accumulated attention as a form of property, property that is stored in the minds of your beholders rather than kept in some specific locale, not requiring the sort of policing that intellectual property demands. To maximize the attention you get, you would want people to copy what you put out and to disseminate it as widely as possible. To preserve intellectual property, you wouldn't want this at all. In this sense, an economy based on attention seems natural to cyberspace.

The best way to preserve priority in terms of attention is to obtain as many witnesses to your ideas, expressions, and achievements as possible as early in the process as possible. Thus you would put out your thoughts in rough form as soon as you have them, and do all your modifications in the public eye if you could. Cyberspace would make this possible.

What of money? What of the material "necessities of life?" In the first place, the reason advanced societies such as ours have turned to a new kind of economic effort is that we at least on the average, have been able to saturate ourselves with useful goods.Productivity in manufacturing processes has grown to the point that ordinary goods have become superabundant, in effect. That is why we have become a nation of dieters, for instance.

Some are clearly left out, decidedly on the short end of the stick, but if you ask what it is that differentiates the well off from the poorly off, more and more the answer turns out to be facility at getting and keeping attention. If you are really good at that, you become a star. If you need a lot of attention, but have little luck or skill in obtaining it, then you are likely to be very poor, quite possibly among the homeless.

At present, then, money increasingly tracks attention. But the more attention you have, certainly in cyberspace, the less you need money to get whatever you might want. As the effort and attention devoted to making material things keeps dropping, it's easy to foresee a time when the tail will wag the dog, when what seems secondary according to the old way of thinking, namely attention, will become primary, and material goods will be understood in terms of an attention based system, rather than the reverse. Thus, since it will take some attention to supply anybody with any kind of good, one can view the whole process of doing that as a form of paying attention. With most people on earth connected through cyberspace, that can be more than a manner of speaking. Quite possibly, by then, money in any form will lose all importance as a measure of wealth or accounting, passing out of use altogether.

An alternative, though I suspect an unlikely one, is that the two separate economies, one based on money, one on attention, will continue to interpenetrate forever. One reason I doubt this outcome is that the two economies are incompatible. For one thing, contrary to what a cursory thought might suggest, money alone is never adequate to buy attention.

To see this, imagine hiring an audience to listen to you. No matter how much you pay, you would have to keep them interested as well, if their minds are not to wander. But if you can interest them enough, why pay them money to listen to you in the first place? The best money can offer, and then only when there are limited channels for reaching for attention, is a crack at an audience, never a guarantee of one.

Besides, the key to obtaining attention is standing out, being different. And everyone's attention is at least a little different from anyone else's, which is why attention from many different people at once can be so valuable. Thus, an attention economy depends on uniqueness: unique people, unique forms of expression, etc.

The characteristic required for a money system to work, however, is uniformity and interchangeability. If one bushel of wheat isn't equal to another for all practical purposes, then there can be no price per bushel. In a world of unique entities any definite amount of money is meaningless, because you have no way of knowing what it might buy if you had it.

Further, as I discussed above, attention as property is sharply at odds with the money-connected notions of intellectual property.

Another incompatibility lies in the domain of mores or ethos. For example,our notions of privacy stem from the money era. In a monetary transaction, you have to keep as much of your life as possible secret, since knowledge of it might reveal something about how much you would be willing to pay for something o or to sell get for it if you're selling it. By contrast, the attention economy encourages self expression to the utmost. The more you reveal about yourself, the more attention you are likely to get.

In fact, self-revelation in is part of the value of having attention. A good recent example is the late Princess Diana. Would she have been nearly so mourned if she hadn't revealed so much about herself, including an adulterous affair, bulimia, suicidal thoughts and a loveless marriage? Clearly, she valued disburdening herself to the world. The privacy she wanted was the right not to be bothered, that is not to have others such as paparazzi force her to pay attention to them; this is the new notion of privacy, completely opposite to the old version. Confusing one for the other doesn't help.

The attention economy then promises to be an era full of creativity, frankness, self- revelation. But it also promises to be intensely competitive,keeping everyone busier and busier chasing what is most intrinsically scarce--- namely, attention itself. Many will do quite handsomely, but numerous others will end up with far less attention than they need. While it is easy to imagine a government attempting to redistribute material wealth, so that no one is too poorly off, it is much harder to see how government can manage to redistribute attention. The best possible may be to assure access to the means for getting attention, which in effect would entail equal access to the net and tools for self-expression over it.

Computer professionals are close to the heart of this new economy. Shaping it for the best should be a priority.

For more see my website http://www.well.com/user/mgoldh/ or the net journal First Monda at: http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue2_4/goldhaber/index.html

Michael H. Goldhaber (mgoldh@well.com) is completing a book on the attention economy. Formerly a theoretical physicist, in 1968 he was among the founders of Scientists and Engineers for Social and Political Action (aka Science for the People) and later editor of Post-Industrial Issues. He is currently head of his own think tank, The Center for Technology and Democracy, and is a visting scholar at UC Berkeley's Institute for the Study of Social Change. His previous book was Reinventing Technology.

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