Seth Goldstein

On Thursday, March 16 2006 I had a conversation with Michael Goldhaber in Oakland as a follow-up to his experience the week prior at ETech. He said that:

“Money is narrowband. Attention is broadband.”

For example, if you are a waitress you can choose to look at somebody solely in terms of their ability to pay the bill. But this would be ignoring a lot of other information about the person.

If you ask a successful hedge fund manager why he still trades, even after he may have made hundreds of millions of dollars, he will say that money is just a way to keep score. The real drive comes from the challenge to compete with other great minds.

Facebook, Myspace, Yahoo! and every other social media environment are all competing for the Attention of their users. One consistently hears about the “influence” that these captive demographics represent. The page views and advertising revenue that they generate reduce their complex value to simple units for keeping score.

The cost of these simple scores is that they quickly become fetishes and absolve their leaders from the responsibility of continued competition.

Financial institutions have no incentive to pay closer attention to the personal information of applicants, when a fico score is trusted by all institutions as a fair measure of credit-worthiness (even though it was never designed for this application). That many people are labeled sub-prime and forced to pay usurious rates is a necessary consequence of this habit.

But people are more than the historical algorithms that creditors have calculated for them.

Just as I am more than my ability to pay for my cheeseburger at the diner.

A few weeks back I had an opportunity to present at the OReilly ETech Attention Economy conference in San Diego. 

Jonas did a great job in capturing the presentation, and its various contexts, at http://etech.root.net.  Check it out.

Between the rest of the ETech conference, the subsequent PCForum conference on "Erosion of Power:  Users in Control" and then the Search SIG on Attention in Mountain View, it was a extremely rich couple of weeks for charting the evolution of Attention from the theoretical to the practical.  The decision of the Omidyar Network to support AttentionTrust was the perfect  conclusion.

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Last June I finished the final chapter of Media Futures, called "Food for Worms," which was focused on the therapeutic aspects of arbitrage.  There is a single line from that chapter that continues to resonate with me as a guide to understanding the evolution of media.  It goes something like this:

"Innovations in internet media are like handfuls of white flour dropped over the invisible outlines of consumer intention."

Intention is impossible to see directly, just like its parent Attention.  All one has access to is the residues of applications that try, in vain, to capture it.  But just because we can’t see it, or capture it, does not mean that it does not exist.  The Web 2.0 movement is the Manhattan Project of Attention Physics, the A-Bomb.  We are all throwing features, functionalities, metaphors and languages against these invisible currents to try to surface something more explicit, tangible and replicable.  But as much permanence as we want to project onto these experiments (the market cap of Google or the reach of MySpace, for example) they remain just that, experiments.

And so I have come to think that the solution we are all working towards is based on three variables:  attention, information and influence:

• In order to get attention, you need to give information.
• The more attention you want, the more information you need to give. 
• There is a finite supply of attention and people want to get as much of it as possible. 
• Your influence registers the amount of attention you have control over.
• To be influential is to give little information and control lots of attention. 

This Spring, instead of writing a collection of extended essays such as Media Futures, I plan on writing a series of shorter statements, observations and descriptions.  My hope is that they will reflect back on eachother in interesting ways, and together comprise enough white powder to reveal more of the essential substance of Attention. 

I think I am going to call this new series Social Media Investigations.