Life is grand

No doubt you have heard of the “attention economy.” Some of you may even be involved in it; building attention profiling systems, paying your users for their attention data and so forth.

Cast your thoughts further though and read how an attention economy transcends money:

(In fact, already, the vast majority of people who use the Internet mostly seek only attention and not money; thus the proliferation of blogs, MySpace, Flikr, YouTube videos, comments, statements to listservs, etc. ) Thus, the Attention Economy is a completely different kind of economy, post-industrial, post-market and post-money.

from What “A New Kind of Economy” Means

Where most of the current players in the attention industry think of paying and being paid money for attention is the way, Michael H. Goldhaber says it goes beyond that. Paying money for attention data is the current economy.

It is an interesting thought though not without a whiff of fear (no money? You have got to be kidding) and a bit of the ridiculous (no money? You have got to be kidding.)

I wonder how it pertains to those who go, for instance, hiking for 6 months in the mountains. These folk are paying attention to the mountain, to nature, and by doing so survive, perhaps?

At its core is paying attention a survival mechanism? Whether that is survival on the internet, on a mountain, in a city or amongst a country community. I’d like to think so. That with attention money is no longer needed.

But I do worry though that attention simply replaces money and remains as perverted; attention to rock-stars and celebrities, attention to the rich and the attention seeking. Already we see on the supposedly infallible world wide web the irrational wealth of a-list bloggers. We pay them attention and they survive off that.

Perhaps as we move into the attention economy we redistribute our thoughts on what we desire and need.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 4th, 2007 at 1:11 pm and is filed under Attention, Post. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.