Welcome to the Attention Economy!

It's very interesting to see how the author of "Welcome to the Attention Economy" applies economic definitions to both information and attention. "Today, attention is the real currency of businesses and individuals," he says.

We've been discussing in class about the development of technology and how it has affected our lives, but I don't think anybody has mentioned (enough) how hard it is for us (human beings) to cope with what the advancements in technology have brought us. One thing it has certainly brought us is an exhaustive amount of information.

"Previous generations of citizens didn't have an attention problem, at least not compared to ours. They didn't have the Internet with its ever-increasing number of Web sites. At most, they had a few channels of broadcast television, a local newspaper, and a few magazines. ... The Sunday New York Times contains more factual information in one edition than in all the written material available to a reader in the fifteenth century. "

So it's like a cycle. The more technology we have, the more information (or access to it) we have. The more information we have, the bigger the demand for people's attention to receive and communicate that information becomes. "The technologies were used to communicate more information to more people, who then went on to create even more knowledge, which then had to be communicated to other people within the organization, thus creating the need for more bandwidth, and so on, and so on. This simultaneously virtuous and vicious cycle got us where we are today," the author says.

A couple of years ago I started complaining to my mom about my lack of memory. I wouldn't remember things I had recently done. I would watch a movie I had already seen and not remember the story nor the ending. I would read a book and, a few months later, not remember what had happened to the main character.

I went to our family doctor, who said I needed to pay more attention to things. But I wasn't happy with that "diagnostic." Some time later I decided to go to a neurologist (yeah, not remembering things really bothered me), who, after talking to me for some time, told me that we have a selective memory and there's only this much information it can absorb. "Can you imagine if we absorbed all the information we are exposed to everyday?" he asked. So I now assume there's nothing wrong with me, my memory, or my brain. I just select the kind of information I'll pay attention to. And after that conversation I had with the neurologist, I've been trying to pay more attention to what's really important to me, and not so much to the rest. It's a hard task, though, and I can't always accomplish it.

This is basically what the "Welcome to the Attention Economy" is about. "But remember that if attention goes one place, then it can't go another," the author warns. "As a consumer of information, I have to be very careful about my attention allocation," he adds.

It is really incredible how businesses can easily fail if its managers don't allocate their attention effectively in, say, communicating with employees and making the right decisions.

Now the main question is... will this ever get better? According to the author, no, it won't. "As the amount of information increases, the demand for attention increases."

What we have to do, he says, is "more focus on, and more rapid processing of, informational messages," like e-mail messages. Who hasn't ever deleted an important e-mail because of lack of attention? We have to be able to manage our attention and where it goes. But... how do we do that? Unfortunately, I was kind of disappointed that the author doesn't provide us with many answers regarding what people can do in order to become "diligent managers of attention." But at least now I can be even more aware than I was before reading this chapter. Perhaps I should read the whole book. : )