Seth Goldstein

GOLDSTEIN:   And where does technology come in?

GOLDHABER:  Technology gives us television; technology gives us the Internet as a second step, a very big second step where all of a sudden our potential for seeking attention becomes vastly large.  Our potential for seeking what I call illusory attention also becomes vastly large.  And so if I have a question, the Internet pretends to give me an answer to my question.  I read something that has the answer in it.  So all the technology, well, not all the technology, but a large amount of the technology that we talked about in the context of the ETech Conference has to do with abilities to focus your attention, to get more attention from other people. 

For example, your Vault application allows you to compare your DNA with somebody else’s in a sense.  And then you get attention from them, and they are already attuned to you presumably because you have similar tastes and interests, so you’re focusing attention on somebody who is more easily capable of giving you attention.  That’s sort of a metaphor for what you’re trying to do.

GOLDSTEIN:  It’s not that I’m watching a video.  It’s that I’m letting people watch me watch video.  What technology has done now is to democratize surveillance.

GOLDHABER:  Well, surveillance is…let me see, is surveillance attention?  Yes, it is to some extent.  When you’re looking at somebody, and you’re deciding whether that person looks as if their intention is to leave a bomb there, then you can say that I’m paying them some attention.  I’m trying to understand their intentions.  And you have to accord them some subjective capabilities.  Otherwise you can’t do that because you have to try to figure out what they’re thinking.

GOLDSTEIN:  The notion of surveillance, in general, is structured attention paying.  I believe that innovations in Internet media are like handfuls of white powder dropped over the invisible outlines of consumer intention.  It reminds me of one of those Abbott and Costello skits where they try and find the ghost.  And the only way to find the ghost is to drop a big bucket of paint, and you can only see the outline and okay, there’s the ghost.  You’ve done this with your writing; it’s sort of like you’re now putting on these attention glasses.  We can now see attention as a material substance.  What if attention were visible?  So that when you paid attention,  you emitted a blue light; and we could observe the world in the context of seeing who is paying attention to whom.  We just don’t have those tools.  But technology gets closer and closer…

GOLDHABER:  We have had some tools for a while like Nielson Ratings or simply a large auditorium filled with people.  That’s a very big clue as to who they’re paying attention to. 

GOLDHABER:  The Internet makes it less obvious what people are paying attention to, and you have to work at fine tuning, for example, the kind of thing that you’re doing and producing – this overall silhouette of someone’s attention.  Some of that is misleading in the sense that let’s say some friend of mine develops some illness, and I look up that illness.  That’s not one of my things I really pay attention to most of the time.  I’m paying attention to my friend, but it looks like the illness.  In other words, what comes across is not necessarily what is really going on. 

GOLDSTEIN:   How do you preserve context?

GOLDHABER:  That’s a very tricky thing, and it strikes me that the tool that you have needs to be shaped by the user in a certain way.  That is, if you want to use it in some way to connect to other people who are similar to you, what you have to do is first of all review where your time has gone and to some extent color it in some way of saying, “well red means this is what I’m most interested in, and this is what really grabs me.  And this other stuff is quite secondary, so I’ll give it a different color or something like that.”  In other words, you have to use it reflectively perhaps reflexively even.  It has to be very fine tuned, so looking at Google is virtually meaningless, right?  So looking at a movie theatre’s  Web site is also pretty meaningless, because it doesn’t tell you which movie you’re necessarily focused on.  So there are ways that one could color it in if one so chose. 

GOLDSTEIN:   So there’s a service called Crazy Egg that’s launching as a tool for web analytics.  It creates heat maps to tracks mouse gestures on the screen.  So, what you see is your Web site, and you see blocks of color for where most people’s attention is being focused. 

GOLDHABER:  Yeah, well that kind of thing.  It could even trace eye movements ultimately.  But, that would be indicative.  People could paint it in themselves.  They could say, if they’re interested in doing this, they would have no problem looking in detail at their mouse clicks and saying “this is highly satisfying to me.”  This is what I really want, and this is what I’m paying attention to.  Of course, people could lie also, but that would be interesting in some ways.  In other words, just taking a raw record is not so revealing.  It’s sort of like whatever that system was that determined that the TV was on a particular channel, but didn’t tell you that anyone was watching. 

(thread 4 of conversation with between seth goldstein and michael
goldhaber after oreilly’s attention economy conference, in march of
2006 in oakland)

GOLDSTEIN:   Is there a link between Attention Economy and attention deficit disorder?  For me, it’s personal.  My mom was very distracted, and I learned from an early age that it’s okay to read at the table.  It took a lot of work to get her attention.  I’m a good entrepreneur, in part, because I’m good at getting attention.  I wonder if I have an attention deficit disorder and a predisposition to multi-tasking because I was born with it; or if those qualities were developed by my circumstances.

GOLDHABER:  What you’re talking about is becoming more the case with a lot of kids, and a lot of people in general.  It’s hard to get attention.  On the other hand, you’re exposed at a very early age to TV, in which people are getting intense amounts of attention.  You’re paying a lot of attention, but you’re also aware that they have audiences who see the little children and see whoever.  Your parents have more and more competition for their own attention, and on the other hand, the children get more and more examples of attention-getting when they’re sort of supposedly off on their own, but really watching TV or doing something like that.  So, exactly the sort of training that you got I think is becoming more common, and I think it does lead to, you know, you go to school first of all, and there’s someone there who demands your attention, right? And at the same time you have been trained to try and seek your own attention, you know?

What is Attention Deficit Disorder?   I don’t know.  There’s obviously a biological difference because you’re acting different, and there’s always a biological difference when you’re acting different.  But the fact of the matter is that underlying that is, you want attention and you’re not getting it.  And so the deficit is partly the deficit that the teacher must need your attention, and you’re not paying it to him or her.  And so, I do think that in a way it is a learned thing, very much, and that it’s a product of the culture, and it developed.  We’re doing everything to keep on heightening these problems and to encourage people to compete very hard for attention, to really put more and more effort into figuring out ways of getting it, to be more and more out there and kind of…

GOLDSTEIN:   How does that relate to mirror neurons?

GOLDHABER:  Well, you know, one thought was after all the teacher’s doing things, the teacher’s active. You have to be able to focus on the teacher enough to figure out what those actions are and what they mean to some extent.  And if you’re doing that, you will presumably be having the mirror neurons higher when you get what the teacher’s doing and in other words you understand the intentionality behind the teacher’s actions.

GOLDSTEIN:  So, it’s only when I pay attention that I can learn because otherwise I’m not allowing the signal imprint on myself.  So, arguably then the ADD gets in the way of learning because it doesn’t allow you to pay attention long enough for (what you’re paying attention to0 to inform you. 

GOLDHABER:  Right, and it’s meaningless noise in effect until you can focus on it enough to see that the teacher is another person and that person is somehow like you and that you could become like that person too.  So it’s the kind of bonding that goes on when you pay attention that you’re turning your mind, you’re shaping your mind according to that other person.  Perhaps one could say that the child who doesn’t have enough attention at an early age and, so he or she jumps around constantly, has partly taken the wrong lesson from everything that he or she has learned from early life which is “I don’t have time to focus on anyone. And I don’t even completely recognize that that other person’s a person like me.  So I can’t focus on the other person because I’m totally occupied with trying to get attention for myself and I don’t see that coming from anyone directly.”

(thread 3 of conversation with between seth goldstein and michael
goldhaber after oreilly’s attention economy conference, in march of
2006 in oakland)

Seth: Let’s discuss the relationship of mirror neurons to the attention discourse.  The fact that monkeys copy each other is not so interesting, but the extrapolation of that to economic and socioeconomic discourses is pretty profound.

Goldhaber: You influence me to make it even more of a key element in the chapter that I’m writing on attention, if I ever get it finished. 

S: Your chapter on attention in the book about attention?

G: Yeah, in the book on the attention economy. 

S: Right, but there’s a chapter about attention?

G: Right, attention per se, so, I mean, it’s sort of there throughout the book, but felt I could try and distill it and focus on it…

S: Like the chapter about war in War and Peace.

G: Yes, something like that I suppose.  But, you know the economy part is probably important too, because it’s about how people act in response to everything.  So in a way maybe the attention chapter is the whole thing, but it doesn’t seem like that to me.

S: I’m reconciling the fact that you can never get enough attention, but there’s scarcity because somebody can just take all the attention. 

G: Well, that guy Simon Cowell or whatever his name is on ”American Idol” takes a lot and is keeping on grabbing more and more.  He’s starting a new program called “American Actor.”

S: And so is Berlusconi in Italy.

G: Yeah, well I do think that Berlusconi sort of owns it.  He also partly, I mean I do think that fewer and fewer people are monopolizing more and more attention.  Largely Osama bin Laden, George Bush, you know, all these people and their teams in a sense focus on their getting attention.  So what does that mean?  I do think that it leads to a lot of potential pathology in that the extra attention they get comes from somewhere.  Linda Stone was mentioning that in effect when she was saying that if you’re having lunch with someone, and Ray Ozzie calls up, you start paying attention to Ray Ozzie instead.  I mean, she didn’t put it in these terms, but in effect what she means is that there is a hierarchy of attention getting and we have better and better means of pulling it away.

S: Influence.  Certain people are more influential, and therefore influence is already…

G: The more attention someone gets, the more attention they can get is what happens, and…

S: But that’s up against the fact that you can’t just create it.

G: Right, and so that means somebody loses and, you know, I’ve spent a lot of time worrying about that…

S: ?

G: What terrorism is: is a very effective means to get attention even if you have to kill yourself doing it.

S: Terrorists capture the attention of the world through their spectacles. 

G: Yes. And, you know, I think what people typically do – there’s an old psychological term “Acting Out”.  That’s what you do when you don’t get enough attention.

S: Like kids do all the time – act out. 

G: Yes, I mean, after all kids are born into the world capable of doing nothing more than getting attention.  And they’re not terribly good at it.  Obviously, they have certain tricks: they can smile, they can cry, they can do a few things.  And, obviously, in some way, parents feel a biological compulsion to pay attention to the child, but…

S: You feel as a parent that you can never pay enough.

G: Exactly. 

S: You can spoil a kid.   And yet, they’re different.  So somehow you can never pay enough attention; it doesn’t mean, however, that all actions you do while paying attention are equally good.

G: Right.  The child doesn’t have meanings that it can associate with the ways it can get attention at first.  And so the parent has to try, the parent lives in a world of meaning and tries to convey attention often in terms of meaning.  The child cries.  What does this cry mean?  Does it mean – and you think of one of a very small selection of things as a primary sign of what it might mean.

S: It’s also some subset of looking for attention.

G: Right.  But the fact of the matter is that it may not be any one of those things.  We create the meanings; we impose the meanings that were to some degree on the child, the categories by which the child is capable of self-expression.  And that becomes the world into which the child develops and develops the ability to get more specific attention.  And it’s a very complicated process that goes on with the child.  And that process depends upon the total culture in a way that, now that we live in an attention culturet’s very different, it seems to me, from what it was in an older culture where we had rules like: children should been seen and not heard, a woman’s place is in the home…