“The Attention Economy”
Seth Godin is onto something I’ve been obsessed with for a while: that attention is the currency of our age, as scarce relative to the demand for it as gold, striven for, competed for, craved. It’s worth more than money — money follows it far more than it follows money — and the result is that people will give their work away for free in a bid for attention.
Instead of “follow the money,” “follow the attention.” We all have a limited amount of it to donate or spend, and everybody’s clamoring for it, bidding for it, courting it.
If you could speed up the sounds of the trees in a climax forest fighting for light, it would sound like the trading floor on Wall Street.
It explains a lot. It explains who’s successful these days, and why. (In our world of cutting-edge media, just think of the birthday twins, Limbaugh and Althouse.) There’s an art to getting attention; you probably have to be willing to titillate, provoke, outrage, or wow — something to raise your profile above the din — but there’s a lot more to it than that. One you get attention, you have to hold on to it, or rather — you can’t hold onto it — reward it so hard it remembers to come back for more. You have to make that brain wet its pants with dopamine.
I’m not saying this is good or bad. Just sayin’.
There are also people whose art is to direct attention the way cops direct traffic. They shunt it, herd it, channel it the way a gifted border collie makes a herd of sheep split, group, and flow. They are the agents, promoters, conductors, impresarios, advertisers, PR people, coolhunters, the ones the rest of us rely on to direct our attention to the oases where it will be rewarded . . . from Oprah to Instapundit.
Down in the understory of the climax forest there’s a smaller-scale attention market going on, busy as a bazaar. Technologies like Twitter facilitate the flow and exchange of attention. Why else is there such a contest for the top spots in Trending Topics? It’s not fifteen minutes of fame, or the fifteen people you’re famous to. It’s hunting or harvesting your share of attention. And on this scale, subtler qualities come into play. You can call out to the fifteen or fifteen hundred people whose attention is snagged by wit or understatement, enigma or absurdity, and they will select themselves out of the crowd and home in on you, like salmon tasting just a few molecules of their birth stream in the ocean.
Seth Godin sounds as over the moon as Silicon Valley dot-com types did in the nineties. I have no idea how you can run an economy this way, You can’t buy milk with eyeballs. Yet we are all acting as if working for attention is even more important than working for money. It’s fascinating, and I’m grateful to Godin for putting his finger on it. He’s scratched my itch.
Ambiance 
wj said,
July 1, 2009 at 12:47 am
You are right that you can’t buy milk with eyeballs. At least, not directly (if you can get paid for advertising because you attract so many eyeballs, it may be a different matter).
But I wonder if the real story here is just that we have reached the point where lots and lots and lots of people don’t have to worry about how to buy milk. Because they’ve already achieved that level of economic comfort. At that point, one alternative (and we’ve all seen it, especially is CEOs) is to just keep trying to make more and more money — strictly to “score points”, not because you have anything you are really interested in spending it on.
The alternative, or at least one of them, is doing things in a bid for attention. True, you can’t spend attention, and more than you can spend money beyond a certain point. But in a number of respects, you get the same return for your effort. And you get to compete on a more level playing field.
Donna B. said,
July 1, 2009 at 2:23 am
It was when the internet provided me with adequate brain teasers and puzzles that I truly realized newspaper subscription was worthless.
This was several years after I realized the value of the information I was getting in the newspaper. They were reprinting information that I’d got as much as 10 years earlier in various science magazines.
There’s only so much one is willing to pay for puzzles, word scrambles, local marriages and deaths.
Call me an early unsubscriber, because I left the local newspaper behind 15 years ago.
amba12 said,
July 1, 2009 at 2:29 am
What’s the opposite of an early adopter? An early abandoner? You were a harbinger! The first swallow of springtime!
Ron said,
July 1, 2009 at 9:41 am
You can’t buy milk with eyeballs.
And the first thing I thought of was those small spheres of mozzarella in the liquid you can buy…
Ewwww! Mucho Gricias Analogy Queen for that image…
amba12 said,
July 1, 2009 at 11:18 am
It was late.
(Now, to keep this going, you’ve made me think of the fun-house thing we did as kids. You blindfold someone and put their hands in . . . in this case . . . peeled grapes in warm water. Tell ’em it’s eyeballs in blood.)