Seth Goldstein

My encounter last month with Valleywag over avant garde playright and director Brecht resonated enough in the blogosphere so as to make this site the top result now for the query "seth brecht" or "brecht seth." And so thanks to some kind Attention alchemy, I have become an authority on the subject of Brecht (at least among Seths) in the eyes of the great Pagerank algorithm.

While this doesn’t belong up there with Soros’ "Real Time Experiment" in the Alchemy of Finance as an example of market manipulation, it  show how one can etch oneself into the way that Google resolves your queries- by using a popular blog to link to you in a certain context, and by routing many of its readers along for the collective experience of you.  Soros explains the reflexivity of markets: the way one perceives a market can in fact impact the behavior of the market.  He made billions off of this insight.  The reflexivity of Attention markets is similarly based on the premise that one’s perception of Attention influences its supply.

Before dismissing the sethbrecht as a random blog divet, maybe theater is a useful metaphor for understanding the evolution from API to Alchemy.  As you know, I have been trying to negotiate the transition for a number of months.  I was focused on tracing the pure conversion of our automatic data algorithms into Attention streams, but I was having a difficult time describing how our unique streams collide- other than simply calling it Alchemy.

A few months ago I asked Goldhaber how his book on Attention was coming along.  He perked up and said that he had a new title for it, All the world’s a stage: the emerging attention economy and how it distinctly differs from the economies of industry, markets and money that we are used to. Maybe this meant that understanding electronic Attention had something more fundamental to do with theater.  Since I studied dramatic literature in college, this was not so foreign to me.  The hallmark of modern theatre’s avant garde (Meyerhold, Pirandello, Brecht, et al) was the participation of the viewer in the mode of theatrical production. Take, for example, Brecht’s Lehrstucke (learning plays) from the 1920’s. According to Wikipedia,

Brecht described them (Lehrstucke) as "a collective political meeting" in which the audience is to participate actively. One sees in this model a rejection of the concept of the bureaucratic elite party where the politicians are to issue directives and control the behaviour of the masses…

We can look at this audience as active participant model as an early prototype for contemporary social media. In the theater of the avant garde, the writer, director and actors all attempted to directly engage the behavior of the audience.  Brecht’s infamous alienation effect was simply a feature set and interface that reminded the audience (aka user) that he was not to get lost in the experience of the media but instead needed to participate in changing it:

For this purpose, Brecht employed the use of techniques that remind the spectator that the play is a representation of reality and not reality itself, which he called the Verfremdungseffekt (translated as distancing effect, estrangement effect, or alienation effect). Such techniques included the direct address by actors to the audience, transposition of text to third person or past tense, speaking the stage direction out loud, exaggerated, unnatural stage lighting, the use of song, and explanatory placards. By highlighting the constructed nature of the theatrical event, Brecht hoped to communicate that the audience’s reality was, in fact a construction and, as such, was changeable.  from Wikipedia Entry on Brecht

This experience of being on stage, and using the stage as a means of changing user behavior, is something that is personal to me.  I remember when I was 14 years old performing on the stage at the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Mass.

It was a bitter February evening during the week and I was standing on the stage dressed like an Italian kid fresh off of Ellis Island, with stiff-heeled shoes, an annoying beret and lots of make-up.  The play was Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author, adapted by Robert Brustein. I was standing on stage behind my mother, played by sitcom Alice’s Linda Lavin, looking out at the audience, watching them watch me. On the stage behind me was most of the actual ART resident acting group, behaving as if they were in the midst of rehearsals for Gozzi’s King Stag, which was in fact being directed then by Andrei Serban. They started the performance all smiles and inside jokes until the door at the back of the theatre opened up and so appeared a family of actors, including me as the youngest son, searching for our author ("any author will do…") who might finish our play.

One of the best descriptions of pure theater that I have come across is by the famous Polish experimental director Jerzy Grotowski. More than anybody, Grotowski was the prototypical green, organic metaphysician of the stage.  He fled communist Poland after WWII, invigorated the downtown NY avant garde scene in the late 60’s, taught theory at UC Irvine in the 80’s, and ended up practicing what he preached on a remote Italian island before he died a few years ago.  In his classic text, Towards a Poor Theatre, from 1968, Grotowski writes:

By gradually eliminating whatever proved superfluous, we found that theatre can exist without make-up, without autonomic costume and scenography, without a separate performance area (stage), without lighting and sound effects, etc. It cannot exist without the spectator relationship of perceptual, direct, communion….

This "relationship of perceptual, direct, communion" is very close to what I am trying to express with the notion of the readerverse- a place or moment where the reader and writer are both fully engaged in the cooperative process of creating something original (ie Alchemy) by virtue of the  unique, real-time data streams that they surface to eachother.  For a while I struggled to come up with a real-world object that best emblematized the readerverse: a mirror? a shadow? a trail we leave behind? But now I am fairly sure that the readerverse is best expressed as a stage, where we create social media with a sequence of clicks and tags and queries.

And so here we are, beginning to realize that by virtue of paying Attention in the same electronic theatre, that we are creating some strange performance for eachother, by eachother, with eachother.  This is the primal social media expression, one that despite its rough amateur mechanics nevertheless promises a profound shift in the way media is created.  I defer to Steve Gillmor, whose silence about the imminent integration of the Gesture Bank and the AttentionTrust Extension, belies a remarkably prescient insight he had almost two years ago:

What does matter is a pool of attention metadata owned by the users. This open cloud of reputational presence and authority can be mined by each group of constituents. Users can barter their attention in return for access to full content, membership priviliges, and incentives for strategic content… And the media, which now includes publishers, analysts, researches, rating services, advertisers, sponsors, and underwriters, can use the data as a giant inference engine… With so much going for it, how and where is attention vulnerable? It’s vulnerable to being pigeonholed as an automated artificially intelligent approach to personalization. In my view… attention metadata is useful in service of the reputational filter of the people and ideas I and the people I track are interested in. This is not about merely reorganizing my feed data based on my patterns of acquisition, but the cumulative weighting of the minds and interests represented by those feeds and items.  Steve Gillmor, Waiting for Attention, March 2005

I always loved you

You always had a lot of style

I’d hate to see you on the pile
Of ‘nearly-made-it’ s

You’ve got the essence, dear

If I could have a second skin

I’d probably dress up in you

Belle & Sebastian, The Life Pursuit

Welcome to the readerverse. Just as pages and sites have their community in Ted Nelson’s concept of the docuverse, so users and visitors have theirs in the readerverse. It is a place where responses are generated as the primary activity. This occurs when we are reading, browsing, searching, scanning, tuning into, subscribing and, generally, using the Internet passively, automatically. The readerverse shadows the more explicit actions of writing, commenting, rating, taging and coding.

Via my various widget logs, I have been trying to illuminate my own readerverse.  I write things and then listen for the barely audible click steps that you make when you visit; the slight pinging sound you make when your reader checks my RSS feed.  With some of the emerging blog statistics and Attention tracking services that are emerging, the web is increasingly rendering as visible what we have come to think of as invisible.

One way of thinking about this in the real-world would be imagine what it would be like if your gaze left a mark? What if when you looked at somebody, instead of that being your private experience, that the person  immediately felt that she was being watched by you? How would that change the way we behave?

We feel free to watch certain things, listen to certain conversations, tune in to certain channels, without worrying about these Attention choices being exposed to others.

This is a fundamental media right: the preference we enjoy in knowing that our media choices (ie our decisions about what we choose to pay Attention to) are not only under our control but are private to us.

Bishop Berkeley asked whether the tree really falls if nobody is there to observe it.  This applies to the physics of Attention. If my gaze is imperceptible to those I am paying Attention to, then I remain the  sole source of information on my media consumption habits.

However, if my gaze has material properties that impact others, then there are by definition other sources of authority on my Attention data. 

Almost seventy years ago, Alan Turing,   the brilliant British computer scientist and war-time cryptographer, suggested that:

The behaviour of the computer at any moment is determined by the symbols which he is observing, and his "state of mind" at that moment.
Turing, On Computable Numbers, 1938

Now isn’t that interesting? A conception of computing, from 1938 no less, in which the computer’s behavior is driven by the Attention it is paying.  Putting this in the context of Goldhaber’s theory of the physics of Attention will lead us to important laws on how influence is created:

There is only so much attention (available from other humans), and many or most of us want more than we have.

In order to get attention one needs to express or do something — let us say, perform in some way. (This can be putting forth information, but that is not particularly what, e.g., a trapeze artist does.)

The more attention we get in comparison with the attention we pay in putting together our total performance, the greater our attention productivity.

The more attention we have, period, the more influential we are.

The more attention you get now, or have gotten in the past, the more attention you can get in the future. (Attention wealth is stored in the minds of the attention payers.)

Having others’ attention means you can rely on some attentiveness from them as well. Attentiveness is a willingness to satisfy your desires whatever they may be — as long as these desires do not go too much against what the attention payers (audients) would otherwise want.

Though all this has always been true, new attention technologies, and particularly the Internet, make all this work much more directly. They make it easy for more of us to seek attention, and if and when we get it, to have other desires satisfied as well.

Michael Goldhaber, February 2007

I have not written anything on this blog in over a month. It bothers
me not to write for such long periods of time, since I know that my
influence expands and contracts based on on how often I post.
Relationships require frequency of contact to flourish, whether they be
personal or business oriented; and the relationship between me as the
author and you as the reader is no different.

I am usually mindful of this. Like perhaps many bloggers, I start my
own web browsing experience with a number of tabs tuned into my stats
from Typepad, Feedburner, Measure Map and others. It is a form of self
identification, trying to understand who is paying Attention to me in
terms of how many people end up on my page and how they get here- was
it a reference to me from somebody else’s blog or was it a search
engine query that surfaced one of my prior posts above the algorithmic
fold?

In fact, I know relatively little about you. Maybe you subscribe to
me through my feedburner API, or else you might show a little cookie to
one of my widgets, but I still don’t really get a clear sense of who
you are in any personal, dynamic, emotional way. Email introductions
are more connected since you reveal yourself as an individual with your
own voice. Once in a while I might even run into you at a meeting in
person and you will tell me that you are a long-time reader of my blog.
These are some but not all of the various ways that you express your
presence to me as an active reader. By active I simply mean that you are
telling me directly that you are paying Attention to the information I
am producing.

The combination of ways that I experience your Attention has created a new upper register of consciousness.  It is filled with audients:
people like yourself who are tuning into my output and for whom I feel
a certain sense of responsibility. It is exceedingly hard to talk of
you as a coherent group. What do you who landed here from a Wikipedia article on Wall Street soft dollars have in common with you who saw a reference to me
in Fred Wilson’s blog, other than the fact that you are both reading
this page? So instead of thinking of you as a single figure in the
foreground, it is as if you are a constant murmer of feedback behind
me- watching me, no matter what I might be doing, but unavailable to me
no matter how much I might want to pay Attention to you.

The opportunity to understand the behavior of readers and feed this
back to publishers is driving significant product innovation. The most
recent example is MyBlogLog which was purchased by Yahoo! before it had
a chance to demonstrate its viability as a stand-alone product, much
less as a independent business. Lately, tools like this for
understanding the (implicit) Attention of readers are improving
even faster than those for expressing (explicit) personal information of publishers
such as blogging, tagging and rating services.

As I am able to access increasingly fine-grained information about
the nature of my audience, the way in which I express myself here on
these pages begins to reflect that understanding.  It is no longer
so simple as writing about something and then waiting for people to
show up who are interested in the subject of the post.  Now, many of you
often show up in advance, announcing your interests immediately.  If I
dont satisfy your expectations for certain insights while I have your
Attention, then I will lose it to others sources.  Without your Attention,
the writing likely stops.  And without the writing, so goes this blog
which is a big part of my online identity.

One way of putting it, then, is that the stability of my identity is tied to having access to your Attention statistics.