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by Josh Rai

CPSR News Volume 15, Number 4: Fall 1997

Michael Goldhaber, author and visiting scholar at U.C. Berkeley's Institute for the Study of Social Change, began the session by providing a glimpse into his theory of the "attention economy." Whether or not everyone acknowledges it, he argued, the world is shedding its money economy, and a new value system is coalescing around a commodity that is both scarce and highly sought today-attention. He illustrated how this value system already is espoused, if tacitly, on the World-Wide Web, where "star" sites are the ones with the most "fans" -measured crudely in click-through rates and hit counts. In a medium where the opportunities to generate information are boundless, the value of information per se is not easily assessed. Rather, value lies in the ability to hold an audience. To do so, in turn, requires relentless effort in the pursuit of originality, creative expression, and flexibility-qualities quite different, Goldhaber notes, from those fostered by the money-industrial economy, with its incentives to standardize and homogenize.

The discussion continued with Kevin Kelly, Executive Editor at Wired magazine, who voiced his concern about the loss of meaning and identity and the dissolution of traditional community groupings that can take place in a network economy, where everyone has easy access to everyone else. He expressed a certainty that technology would increase the world's standard of living, but wondered whether it would "make people happier." Kelly also touched on issues of privacy, noting the economic incentive that drives some private and corporate entities to find out what individuals do on line and to audit the transfer of information.

Hal Varian concluded the presentations by positioning his fellow panelists in opposing camps and offering a synthesis. In some cases, people demand attention, and in others, privacy. What a sound economy needs, therefore, is choice. Varian, U.C. Berkeley's Dean of the School of Information Management and Systems as well as a professor of economics and business, set the stage by drawing some differences between information and its material predecessors in the waning industrial economy. Information, while expensive to produce, is extremely cheap to reproduce, and in many cases retains its value for a long time. Moreover, it possesses the unique quality of having to be "consumed" before it can be evaluated. Varian proposed vasing the economy of the Internet on he calls a usage-based pricing scheme, which he believes could accurately reflect actual value in competitive, information-based markets. Just as airlines typically segment their markets according to people's ability to pay, even though they provide essentially similar services to the various segments, so should purveyors of information, Varian argued. An online stock-monitoring service, for instance, could offer different tiers of service distinguished by the currency of the information-one tier serving updates at twenty-minute intervals, another in realtime. There might be a great deal of common code in the software engines driving these two versions of service, but the tiered pricing would reflect factors that ordinarily go unmonitored at this level, such as network usage.

While some of the positions the speakers represented might have seemed well-intentioned, in a vacuum, the fact that they followed on the heels of the Access for All panel ignite some high-decibel debate. Indeed, the two panels addressed such different issues that reconciliation in the span of an afternoon would have been astounding. For example, Kevin Kelly's concern was not how or whether everyone will be connected, but that when they are, "it will be easy to make a buck, but difficult to make a difference." Kelly sees evidence for his assumption of universal access in Afghanistan, where he has witnessed noticeable improvements in living standards over just a handful of years. A question that may have crossed the minds of those on the preceding panel is why it is difficult to make the same claim for East Palo Alto or Oakland, though they are tucked in the midst of one of the greatest concentrations of wealth on the planet. It is precisely the premises left unexamined, in the time allotted, by the final panel that concern the Access for All crowd. Many people today view computers and the Internet not as the road to a quick buck or a forum in which to gain attention, but as just another symbol of exclusion.

Inclusiveness is CPSR's strength but also its most formidable challenge. As many members maintained on their way out of the auditorium, real progress requires that all voices be heard at the table. We need those voices to develop viable economic frameworks and vocabularies for ordering the new that opens before us. Moreover, it is vital to our collective interest that we not take for granted the extension of the old world's pathways into this new space - their freedom from potholes, their multiplicity, their very existence. The conference will have succeeded if it fosters connections between these two realms of activity.

Josh Rai
joah@babycenter.com
CPSR/Berkeley

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