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NIN app and attention

Nine Inch Nails has released an iPhone app that lets users browse the website and send messages either to each other or globally. One can go to access.nin.com (Google Earth plugin will be required to view map) and watch the messages pop up on a global map more or less in real time.




I wonder what the map will look like during a tour - more densely blue populated wherever NIN is playing that night, I suppose. This app will also let fans connect to each other during or before a show, opening up all sorts of possibilities.

Can each blue point be read as a point of attention? If we look at the flow of dots over time, can it be said to be a flowing attention map centered around NIN? Each dot also contains information in the form of a message, potentially altering the type of attention. Even when users are talking to each other on this app, NIN remains the hub, garnering some (most?) of the attention even of a two-way conversation between third parties.

Twitter and the nature of attention

Not to go on and on about twitter, but it seems like everyone is worried about how and when they are going to make money.
Even Stephen Colbert asked Biz Stone about it on his show last week:

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Biz Stone
comedycentral.com
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Jon Fine posted an article on the Business Week site recently linking twitter to the attention economy and stating that attention is not worth anything anymore. He proposes that in the era of newspaper and television advertising, attention is easily measured by ratings and circulation, and since that is harder on the web and social networks like twitter, that attention has lost value:

The value of attention began eroding once web traffic entered into it, since the monetization of attention—audience—is so much harder online. Just ask your local newspaper, if you still have one, or the new York Times. So you have a steady slide downward in what people who produce what we call “content” can get from attention; a TV ratings point or circulation bump is worth way more than a web traffic bump. (This is especially true if the only monetization tools you have are the generic options, like Google AdSense or signing up with the ad networks that are broadly depressing the prices of online ad inventory.)

But hold on a second. Does this really mean that attention has lost value, or that we need different ways of measuring it? TV and newspapers are blunt instruments. An ad in one of these media guarantees nothing except the potential for people to see the ad. With media like twitter and other web content, the same potential is there, but in a more targeted way. Fine wants to equate twitter followers with attention in the same way that newspaper circulation gauges attention, and I'm not entirely sure it works in either case. The attention garnered in older media is just as illusory -- it's just that conventional wisdom has long held that circulation and ratings are metrics for attention, without much to prove it.

When thinking about attention, we need to start thinking about types and degrees of attention instead of just (potential) eyeballs. Consumers are savvy. People don't want to sift through ads to get to content. They don't want the hard sell. But they do want to know about things they might like. I don't have the answers for twitter or for internet marketers in general.

When you read the article, take a look at the comments, where there is some interesting analysis of twitter usage and other models of monetizing attention. Bob Stewart's comment is particularly interesting, as he talks about listening and the value of relationships.

Twitter's spontaneous intelligence?

Continuing with Daniel Levitin's The World in Six Songs, I'm inspired to dwell on a thought experiment about artificial intelligence. One could argue that our social networks are becoming shallower and more common. Blogging networks, then Myspace and Facebook, and now Twitter- the pattern is quicker communication with less depth. Does this necessarily mean less intelligence?

If one were to counter that popular theme, what would be the crux of the argument?

Daniel Levitin, TWISS, p. 269

"An individual ant, like an individual neuron, is just about as dumb as can be. Connect enough of them together properly, though, and voila! The system-as-a-whole demonstrates spontaneous intelligence."

Using Twitter's 140 character messages as analogous to neurons, can we imagine a Twitter cloud gaining intelligence?

Yes, it's sci-fi, but fun, nonetheless.

It's Twitter's World, we just post in it.

Teaching the Attention Economy pt 2

After reading Erik's recent post about the difficulty of getting students to fully grasp the concept of the Attention Economy, I came across a blog where an assistant professor at SUNY Oswego, Ulises Mejias, came up with a game to help facilitate understanding.

Ironically, the game is set up using handwritten dry-erase boards and strips of paper passed amongst students sitting in a circle, simulating online social networks and blogs.

Here are the rules to the game.

I'd be curious what other models we could come up with, if we put some time into it.

Evolutionary Psychology and the Musical Attention Economy

I recently read Daniel J. Levitin's latest book, The World in Six Songs, and as with everything I read these days, I'm finding ways to apply it to AE. I've worked in the music industry my entire career and have been amazed at how Attention is used and abused. Paris Hilton signing a recording contract? William Hung? William Shatner? (Shut up, Erik.) What is it that pisses people off so much about this? Is it merely the transition of Attention earned into a sellable song, an easy form of monetization? That's how I had thought about it until reading Levitin. Here's a quote from TWISS, p. 141:

"What you want for a communication medium is one in which honesty can be readily detected, what ethologists call an honest signal. For a number of reasons, it appears that it is more difficult to fake sincerity in music than in spoken language."

And there it, for me, at least. I prefer Bob Dylan, Conor Oberst, Paul Westerberg, and Amanda Palmer, people I've heard others complain about not being about to sing properly, a complaint most would agree applies to Hilton, Hung and Shatner, as well. But in the cases of Dylan, Oberst, Westerberg, and Palmer, they are sincere to a fault, and thus have legions of die-hard fans. They succeed despite limitations.

I know I'm not alone in this; most people's shit-detectors must be working pretty well.

Maybe this is merely another example of quality over quantity. Listening to popular lies is far less fulfilling than unpopular truisms. Any punk, metalhead, or rapper would probably tell you the same.

For further reading of Levitin's argument of how the musical brain created human nature:

Click here

Teaching the attention economy

Last year, I read with the students in my American Studies class Michael Goldhaber's article on the attention economy, with mixed results. They understood the concept at the broadest level, but were largely unable to wrap their heads around the finer points. We talked about celebrities and how Paris Hilton could conceivably never pay for anything because people want her attention and will give her things for it. We talked about reputation and respect. But when pushed to the limits, they couldn't get past either attention as another form of money or credit, or returning to a barter system.

We then read Cory Doctorow's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, which I think is a good treatment of an attention economy. The concept of Whuffie made more sense, but again, there was resistance, due to the fact that it is science fiction, and takes place in a post-scarcity world.

I think maybe that's one of the problems - scarcity. Goldhaber talks about attention as a scarce, and therefore valuable, resource. The problem is it can't replace material goods, especially scarce goods such as food. How can we imagine an attention economy that is not simply a credit/money replacement or a barter system? How do we get to the point where attention translates into food and shelter and luxury items and more attention, and do we want to get there?

Twittering attention

Twitter has been getting so much attention lately, and for good reason. A lot of people have been using it to try to get attention, while others are using it to make connections (not that these are mutually exclusive). For example, I was in Whistler, BC a few weeks ago, and I sent a few tweets about my experience skiing there, and withing a day I had three new followers, all of them marketers in the Whistler area.

For me, twitter is a good tool both for gaining attention and making connections, but what I find is that as my followers grow, it demands more and more of my attention. I have been thinking in terms of "attention bandwidth" lately, and how much to let in. I really do care about my personal friends and I don't mind hearing that they are "waiting in line at Starbucks" (as rob says) from time to time, but I can't afford to be inundated with this minutiae, especially when it extends to not just friends but acquaintances and business people. This is also true in other social networking realms like facebook, and in real life. How often to we avoid that person who talk on and on about every little thing she has been thinking about since we last saw her, with no attention to our time constraints or interest levels?

How do you manage your attention bandwidth, whether online or in person?

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