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:

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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.