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?

follow attention economy at twitter.com/attentionecon
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