Seth Goldstein

This Thursday April 20th we are hosting a seminar with Michael Goldhaber, who I describe as the Einstein of Attention. Please let me know if you would like to attend:

• Date:  Thursday, April 20
• Time: 5-7p
• Place:  Root Markets, 601 West 26th, 15th Floor      

Fragments for thought:

"Money is narrowband.  Attention is broadband.  And the broadband is going to swamp the narrowband in that, if I’m a stranger in a place and I come alone and the only thing they know about me is how much money I have, that’s enough to sell me lunch.  But now we are getting towards a world where anybody can instantly be Googled.  You can find out, you can pay attention to who they actually are.  They become someone."  Michael Goldhaber, Interview, March 2006

"The result is that attention in the networked environment is more dependent on being interesting to an engaged group of people than it is in the mass-media environment, where moderate interest to large numbers weakly engaged viewers in preferable… it is more difficult to buy attention on the Internet than it is in mass media outlets, and harder still to use money to squelch an opposing view."  Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks, 2006

"Although the culture industry undeniably speculates on the conscious and unconscious state of the millions towards which it is directed, the masses are not primary, but secondary, they are an object of calculation; an appendage of the machinery… The more dehumanized its methods of operation and content, the more diligently and successfully the culture industry propogates supposedly great personalities and operates with heart-throbs… production regulates consumption in the process of mental life, just as it does in that of material life, especially where the former has so closely approximated the latter, as it has in the culture industry."  Theodor Adorno, Culture Industry Reconsidered, 1975

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