New Face of Blog
“There I Fixed It” is a hilarious blog, especially for men like me who inherited a world full of practical problems our grandfathers never dreamed of, along with a mere smidgen of our grandfathers’ skill with a tool box.
But look how it works: People send in their pictures and text. The blogger assembles it and presents it. What do you bet there will be a book out with the best of it, in time for Christmas, and someone will make a nice tidy pile of money without doing a whole lot of real work.
California Budget Balancing Act
California is facing a $24,000,000,000 budget deficit. The Los Angeles Times has a handy interactive applet that allows readers to try balancing it themselves. I managed to end up with a surplus of $1 billion without raising taxes or cutting any benefits for the poor. If my plan were enacted, however, many state workers would probably walk out. Then again, our unemployment rate is almost 12%, so replacing the malcontents may not be all that hard.
“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 