Seth Goldstein

GOLDHABER:  Well, intentions are not as scarce…

GOLDSTEIN:   They’re not scarce?

GOLDHABER:  I don’t think so.  People have a lot of intentions.  Whether they carry them out is a whole other question.  But anyway, attention is connected with intention.  The mirror neuron thing is connected to intentions also.  One of the things that was discovered for instance, was that you could tell whether somebody is picking up a glass to drink from it or in order to put it away.  Somehow the way they move is different, so you ascribe intentions to people in order to understand them.  That’s what you are constantly doing when you’re trying to make sense of what this sentence is about for example. 

GOLDSTEIN:   There are cognitive intentions, communication intentions, but there’s also intention in terms of "I’m paying attention to a lot of things and my intentions would allow somebody to anticipate where my attention is going."  Intentions sequence attention.  You can reconstruct the why.  Otherwise, how do you tell the story of what someone’s paying attention to if you don’t have access to some intentionality?

GOLDHABER:  Yes.  We are not really paying attention unless we’re paying attention via intentions.

GOLDSTEIN:   Even if they’re watching “American Idol,” even if they’re watching TV.

GOLDHABER:  I mean you still want to know why they’re watching it.  My girlfriend watches “American Idol,” and I keep trying to figure it out.

GOLDSTEIN:   Well, they’re anxious to know who’s going to win, right?   

GOLDHABER:  And to watch the performance.  People have different intentions.  For instance, I was convinced at first it was sadism, and I was just watching this guy Simon make people feel awful.  It took a while to become convinced that it wasn’t that.  So, you know, you try to figure that out.

(thread 7 of conversation with between seth goldstein and michael
goldhaber after oreilly’s attention economy conference, in march of
2006 in oakland)

GOLDSTEIN:   Does one accumulate a sort of wealth when one pays attention to something before others do?

GOLDHABER:  Well, it’s discovery, and then you’re in a position to get attention because you become known as the first to know.  Like when I read Tolkien in 1959.

GOLDSTEIN:   You accrued influence.

GOLDHABER:  Yes, I accrued influence from that.  When you are the first, consistently, you accumulate a great deal of influence.  That reminds me of another idea I had about looking at commercial things.  And it stuck me that if somebody’s going to pay $10,000 for a watch, let’s say, they will want a watch that other people will be impressed by.  How do they find that out?  Well one way is how many people have looked at the Web site of that watch.  They haven’t bought the watch; they don’t have the money to buy the watch necessarily…

GOLDSTEIN:   Envy…

GOLDHABER:  Envy…

GOLDSTEIN:   Aspiration…

GOLDHABER:  Yeah, but they’re impressed by the watch, they keep going back to it perhaps or something like that.  So just paying attention to that.  If there were a way just sort of…

GOLDSTEIN:   It’s like fashion.  Couture – they sell the couture dress off the runway for $20,000, and the normal version is $300.  They don’t expect to sell the $20,000 one.  It stands there as a spime.

GOLDHABER:  Right, right, right.  And if it gets a picture in the paper, then it’s worth a lot more probably than if nobody bothers to depict it so nobody knows what it looks like.  So again, I think that people might even be willing to pay for the knowledge of what gets a lot of attention.  If there were some way of tracking that so that you know that you’re buying that right watch even if nobody else has one. 

GOLDSTEIN:   Yes, and perhaps you specifically don’t want others to own that watch.  If you see people with the same one, it cheapens it.  Exclusivity.

GOLDHABER:  It might even be a way of raising the price,  like art.  If you buy a Cezanne, you have to pay a fortune, because everybody knows who Cezanne is.

GOLDSTEIN:   So does the economics of this would be along the lines of “I want to pay attention to something that nobody else is paying attention to, with the hope that subsequent people will end up paying attention to it.”

GOLDHABER:  Yes…

GOLDSTEIN:   I’m going to make an investment.

GOLDHABER:  In this case, it does involve money.  I actually want to have it.  I want to have this because I want the attention of everyone who’s envious of me or excited by it or impressed by it. 

GOLDSTEIN:  …the psychology of the collector. 

GOLDHABER:  I don’t understand why people pay $10,000 for watches, but people do. 

GOLDSTEIN:   Status symbols.

GOLDHABER:  Yeah, status, attention, whatever.  It’s not telling time, that’s for sure. 

GOLDSTEIN:   Well, EBay is a marketplace - different kind of attention marketplace - where you collect something that accrues in value because other people are paying attention to it and then you can sell it.  EBay is less about the Attention Economy and more about the Intention Economy.

(thread 6 of conversation with between seth goldstein and michael
goldhaber after oreilly’s attention economy conference, in march of
2006 in oakland)

GOLDSTEIN:   A lot of what I’ve been working on is the historical reconstruction of attention.  As in using technology to reconstruct what people have been paying attention to and playing it back to them, and allowing them to compare and contrast with other people.  What happens when you move the concept of attention forward, into the future. 

Let’s take a mortgage: I search for “refinance” on Google, and then I fill out a form.  What I am telling the form is, “here’s my information, here’s when I want to be contacted, Monday at 9:00.”  If the marketer behaves successfully, then I get a call at 9:00, because I’ve essentially promised to pay attention at 9:00. There’s a contract.  It’s the same when you are enquiring about purchasing a new car.  When are you looking to purchase: a week, a month, three months.

There’s so many atomic units vying for attention, you need to be much more forceful about deciding what you are going to pay attention to.  It has gotten to a point where you actually have to schedule your attention:  I’m going to pay attention to this person or this company at this time.  In a world of TIVO-enabled time shifting, the time requirements go away because it’s fungible, because you can record it and watch it later, but you still have to slot it in somewhere.  There’s a calculation you need to do.  Even though the episode of “24” from two weeks ago automatically got stored, you still have to pay attention to it to receive the benefit of the information.

GOLDHABER:  Right, but many times people never get around to that.

GOLDSTEIN:   True, but there’s always a logic which says “I’m not going to pay attention to this because I need to do this thing instead.”  Or, “I can look at this now because I have a window of time”…

GOLDHABER:  Once you have something on TIVO, your compulsion goes down a great deal compared with “I have to watch it tonight or I’ll never see it.” Once we start having all the programs on the Internet, people’s attitudes towards them are going to shift.  It’s sort of like, I bought this book, it’s on my shelf, and I don’t have to read it right now.  And the same thing keeps occurring.  On the other hand, if you’re reading War and Peace you already sort of know the ending and uh, but getting around to do something, the more it’s just there, it becomes harder.  Unless it’s actually enforced on you the way the education and the canon used to force people to read certain books. 

(thread 5 of conversation with between seth goldstein and michael
goldhaber after oreilly’s attention economy conference, in march of
2006 in oakland)