The consequences stretch even further: the open-ended nature of the Internet makes it easy for us to find information sources which more or less match our predefined interests. While this is great, simultaneously it makes us tune out of different viewpoints, clicking away from news, opinions and perspectives that may not coincide with our own, or even oppose them upfront. Liberals will watch The Daily Show, conservatives The 1/2 Hour News Hour, both will mutually complain about the other one within their own forums but rarely resort to mutual exchange of opinions.

At the same time, people are more and more often getting their sources of information already digested and interpreted for them. Information overload means there's less time to look deeper into information sources, fact check or validate what's being said. We've got to evaluate the merit of its claims at face-value, which is often dangerous, and forces us to make decisiones without the minimum necessary information so as to make a good one rationally. The consequences of this are not only economical, but clearly political on a large scale.

Anyway, this all merits further discussion, but somewhat theoretically-minded thoughts like you've shown here are an important avenue for discussion. I must say I had to try real hard to break the habit and not skim through it. Cheers.

Maybe it's worth considering more 'bite size' articles? I found myself reading the first 2 paragraphs, the first graph, and then the first sentence of about 70% of the rest of the article :)

Perhaps context is the key? An academic paper outlining the cultural, social and economical consequences of information overloard may welcome lengthy and detailed development and analysis; a blog comment, on the other hand, should most likely be clear and to the point, deal with itself in a couple paragraphs tops.

You navigate to a news site and start reading the headlines. What is the likelihood that you leave if you see an irrelevant headline? High.

Guys, we try to compress articles, but with some of the bigger issues its hard to paint the broad picture with short posts. Using example from information theory - some things are not compressible :)

Alex

This is a really good point - showing you things based on things that you already like is dangerous because it kills novelty. A good recommendation engine, like Pandora, constantly introduces new things based on the things that you already saw.

The tricky part is measuring relevance. Once can hope that attention tools will recognize and through away completely irrelevant things, but also will maintain degree of novelty. But its a thin line to walk...

Alex

PS. I think you mean "explicit" when you wrote bookmarks.

Please write more on the subject.

Alex

I do believe essentially that we are a people on the go...there is no turning back. "Sunday morning" readers as I call them are a thing of the past.

Media houses must recognise that fact but also bear in mind people who are genuinely seeking research information.

This is totally a non-skimmable post, so apologies for that. Read on if you care about media and the attention economy.

Given that consumer attention is scarce, there will be a battle to capture it and sell it to advertisers.

In the old media, that battle was fought by content providers. CBS slugged it out with ABC and NBC to get us in front of the TV, and the ratings winner walked away with the spoils.

In the new media, that battle will be fought by attention aggregators.

The most successful attention aggregator to date is Google. Like NBC or any TV network, Google’s core business is to makes money by capturing consumer attention and then selling that attention to advertisers

Where Google differs is in its ability to deal with the fragmentation of consumer attention. When we are online, our attention is literally fragmented across billions of webpages. Yet Google can capture each individual micro-fragment of attention, and as if that was not enough, it can find precisely the advertiser who is willing to pay the most for that micro-fragment.

Where does this ability come from? Basically because we use Google to navigate the web. When you search, the search results page captures your micro-fragment of attention, and Google sells that micro-fragment of attention to an advertiser who has bought the key words you used in your search. Whats more, the advertiser only pays if you actually bother to click. In addition, when you arrive on a content page, Google is incredibly effective at placing an ad on that page that is likely to be highly relevant to you.

The question is whether Google will be as effective at mass-aggregation of our attention in the future as it is at the moment?

Two other contenders for the battle to mass-aggregate exist. The recommendation engine and the social network. The interesting development is that search engines have a real flaw when it comes to rich media environments.

When the web consists of lots of text files (the online equivalent of news and magazine pages), then search engines are great: it is what they were built for.

However, at some point not too far in the future, the web will offer additional billions of minutes of Television, Film, Music and other rich media, and our total balance of attention will shift away from ‘mainly text content and text services’ to a more balanced mix of text, audio and video. How much time will we spend online on audio and video? In the off-line world, we spend more than 5 times as much time consuming TV as we do reading.

This is where we get to the meat. If we spend relatively more time on the web consuming audio and video, we will spend more time navigating audio and video. And search engines have a real problem in this realm.

Why? This is over- simplifying but search engines search on words. A digital video file is a bunch of instructions for arranging pixels on a screen. Not that helpful for a search engine. User generated metadata (tags etc.) is a way of adding words to the video or audio so search engines can search on it, but this is unlikely to provide the answer for billions upon billions of minutes of clips.

Two other options for navigation exist.

One is to leverage human recommendation, for example in social networks. We would find media by relying on friends in our network – as they find stuff, they recommend it to us. Social networks are already becoming vehicles for launching new content.

The second option is automated recommendation, based on transactions. This is how you navigate Amazon or iTunes – people who bought this also like this. It is instructive how many people don’t use search engines once they get to large content collections like iTunes or Amazon.

Both these options have proven to be highly effective in offering good navigation. The existence of the long tail proves the point.

So, in summary, the attention economy marks a new stage of competition in the media world.

http://www.vecosys.com/2007/01/26/is-google-building-the-attention-economy/

Unfortunately it is very difficult to speed read from a computer screen. Web pages do not break into neat screen shots that can flash before a speed reader's eyes and a scrolling web page results in jumpy lines of text that can't be read with typical speed reading techniques.

I have high hopes for the various new digital book devices that have recently reached the market, but to my knowledge they do not contain a speed reading setting that flashes the screens of text at a predetermined rate.

If anybody is aware of a group that is addressing the issue of speed reading web available material, please point me in that direction - thanks.

There's a real opportunity for the browser to become a broker in the attention economy. They can start by showing me stats about my web browsing.

Am I spending double the amount of time on Yahoo Games rather than a site I use for work? Which sites do I use often but have not bookmarked? What time of day do I use the web the most?

With that type of information, I can smartly manage my attention. Once Google Reader offered the trends feature, I used that info to cut my feeds down from 400 to about 250 now.

There is also a real opportunity for a search engine to make the jump over GYM and offer "discovery" aka personalized results. If someone cracks the code and creates an engine with personalized results so accurate it feels as if the engine is reading your mind or anticipating your steps, then they have a winner.

To me, the attention economy described here is just a meta-economy and therefore simply postpones the problem of information overload. Currently, web 2.0 is taking over web 1.0 and soon a need for web 3.0 will emerge. Attention economy may help towards 3.0, but I'm afraid one cannot circumvent the laws of entropy and information simply by tricking, rearranging or reorganising information into successive meta-levels.

Evidence is emerging in 2.0: content sources that are not self-denying, that do not provide exceptions to the rules, no humor, no singularities are quickly reduced by the readers/consumers to 'background noise'.

I think a weak point in the description of the new economy is the modelling of the consumer, namely the hidden hypothesis that he is a constant. This is inaccurate. A reader who in the past was consuming the whole of e.g. a newspaper or a movie, has already changed and just skims through (or selects according to reviews, i.e. 2.0 level of information). I dare to predict that after 2.0 (or 3.0) his next transformations will escalate from distress and inability to choose where to draw his attention, to utter boredom and eventually to luddism or a total denial of the web as source of information or entertainment, *precisely because* everything will be 'relevant' by appearence, by nature, by authority or by law.

A totally relevant web or search result is similar to an academic textbook of science or mathematics - everybody hates them. Relevant and interesting are not the same thing. My philosophical thesis is that what makes something relevant and interesting is its difference (or even Derrida's 'differance') from its background. The perceptional equivalent is focusing on the "fly in the soup". In that sense, the most relevant search result is a *single* result, which at the same time makes the consumer most happy, demanding the least cognitive load. Having to choose between 2 or 3 alternatives always adds some spice, and therefore is acceptable if not enjoyable. But hundreds or thousands of google 'results' are definitely a no-no. A result is a result to a problem and so far we only see answers without necessarily being able to define the problems properly. The industry cannot create answers ad infinitum, hoping they will eventually match (or create) some of consumers' needs. It's a vicious circle.

Seekers of 3.0 perhaps should skip the attention economy and attempt something else, e.g. a relevance economy, or even a 'human person' economy, offering only a handful of alternatives or search results. Globalisation of economy no doubt has long strived for the same goal and has largely achieved it. The endless variety of products gradually converges into one OS, one iPod, twelve hollywood companies etc to rule them all.

Sooner or later this will lead to a big bang, because civilisation is an open universe. The web will oscillate fractally from order (everything 'relevant' according to attention economy) to chaos (present digg and youtube?), between information, disinformation, data and zeroes, just because this is the history of both collective civilisation and of individual human nature. In a systems theory approach, you cannot model humans, fuzzy uncertain systems, with linear economics. From a physics point of view, entropy increase and thermal death are certain.

It is very interesting to combine this article with the analysis of The Register regarding the costs of information search (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/02/12/company_data_storage/)

To sum up, we are approaching the day when the cost of *finding* i.e. creating results (or happiness!) will exceed the cost of searching for it. Isn't that a most liberating thought?

To sum up, we are approaching the day when the cost of *finding* i.e. creating results (or happiness!) will be *less* than the cost of searching for it. Isn't that a most liberating thought?

We are still waiting for the attention killer-app. The Firefox extension was great for recording data, but it has proved difficult to get people excited about installing something which has little out-of-the-box value. The most promising space now is in widgets; like MyBlogLog and the Lijit Wijit. (must pimp my own company!)

Perhaps it will take a "User's Union"?
http://www.wanderingstan.com/2006-10-19/a_union_of_users

-stan

Went few more minutes this time rolling on fast as it was a lengthy text from my standards. Finally, again I gave more attention on other readers chronological also interesting responses and read some of these which were also short !!

I suppose the idea of "personal" is going to change and become more important as "public" becomes overly crowded.

Even with this article we can see that there is a difference between news and analysis. We live in the world which increasingly revolves much more around news than around analysis. This is happening because the amount of information and amount of news is rising.

Yet, we also know that we need to pause and reflect on trends. The news are the points in the curve that shapes us in a much more profound way - the analysis curve. The trick is to figure out how to balance our time between living in the moment and reflecting back on the past days, weeks, months and years.

It seems that although we have been relying on ourselves to separate signals from noise in the past, we will need help of intelligent personalization technology going forward. We need filters. And if we can get software to filter information for us, then we can come back to doing what we are doing best - analysis.

Alex

This is a fantastic post! I have been wanting to write a post on the attention economy for sometime (on my blog), but honestly I'm glad you beat me to it. This post was great! And there is no way you should have shortened it.

I'd love to hear more about this on R/WW. I'm particularly interested in the economics of this. I know you briefly talked about search engines showing ads in return for answers.

However, I think there is more to it ... in 'The Search' John Battelle says:

‚ÄúIn essence, Google and its competitors have created the first application to leverage the Database of Intentions in a commercial manner: paid search.‚Ä?

I believe how they (Google & Other Search Engines) leverage (without violating privacy) a user's attention (eg search phrase) to serve relevant ads is an important model for other attention web services to think about.

- Sean

Cheers

Andrew

I like the idea of the AttentionTrust, but I'm not sold on the concept of crafting a single identity. I would be more interested in having multiple personality banks, which could be filtered to share only select info - and those filter settings could be saved to and accessed from a logical url path.

Great to see you here! Well, yes, this is the big problem. For the lack of better word, skimming is making us dumber and it is disturbing. A tough question is how do we avoid it? What do we do when faced with increasing amount of information?

Alex

http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue11_6/goldhaber/index.html

I'm also a researcher and working exactly on this notion of attention, but more specifically about the notion of social attention due to the development of this social aspect in our life (more collaborations, more communities, more social networks). The people who are interested by the notion of attention economy can read articles on my blog

http://nico.maisonneuve.free.fr/blog

Nicolas

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