Attention Invesment

Your Attention, Pretty Please?

In March 2007, Alex Iskold wrote about the emergence of the “attention economy”, a marketplace “where consumers agree to receive services in exchange for their attention.” The always-on nature of digital media has increased the scarcity of human attention, and in turn has increased its value. To put it concretely: the more time a company can get you to spend on their website, the more ad revenue they can potentially earn or the higher the likelihood that you’ll purchase one of their products.

I mention the attention economy not to wax theoretic about it, but to share my personal struggle with choosing how to invest my attention. I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the purpose of all this technology reading and writing that I do. I enjoy thinking about the topics that I regularly cover. The evolution of web 2.0 and social network is fascinating to me, and it plays well to my geek tendencies. But my brain has been flirting recently with what bloggers have started to call “social media fatigue,” an exhaustion resulting from the overexposure to and overanalysis of those topics.

There’s Hope

However, my passion for social media was reinvigorated last week when I was directed to a web page where a friend was raising money to support her marathon run in honor of her college roommate’s struggle with cancer. I put the link up in my Gmail status and sent an email to some of my fellow classmates to let them know about it. Though I certainly can’t and wouldn’t claim to have made a huge impact, I think a few of the donors that day decided to act because of that simple message and link from a friend. By the end of the day, my friend had raised several hundred dollars, and as of today she has raised over $1,000 from over 25 donors.

Though the story is not unique or especially exciting, it brought home for me how much potential there is for social media. So much good can be done! And people create applications on Facebook that allow you to… throw sheep? Give each other cupcakes? Come on! Luckily, some people have caught on.

The Obama campaign has tapped into social networking and the “cognitive surplus” of the wired electorate not only to raise money, but also to organize a decentralized political canvassing machine that has thousands of people knocking on doors and making phone calls. Kiva turns web users into micro-lenders by connecting them with entrepreneurs in developing economies. Social Actions “helps individuals and organizations use social media to plan, implement, and support peer-to-peer social change campaigns so that grassroots solutions to local and global problems can flourish.” These are but a few examples of how a well-implemented social networking strategy can enact positive change.

The Echo Chamber

Steve Hodson wrote an excellent post last night that called out the tech blogosphere for what it (largely) is: a self-perpetuating eddy on the side of a much more important river, muddied by ego and privilege. Big words like “revolutionary,” “game changing,” and “unprecedented” make strings of code sound like columns of soldiers on the march to battle. I am as guilty as the next social media fanatic of too often populating the tech echo chamber with even more useless resonance.

I do not disparage the importance of blogs about the politics, business, and theories of the Internet. That content is valuable and important. But when bloggers and their readers become so wrapped up in the study of these new tools that they lose sight of the greater potential of those tools, then something is dreadfully wrong.

Attention Has More Potential Value Than We Often Realize

It is certainly important that we pursue our interests, and that we “spend” a good amount of our attention on them. But, as with any currency, it’s important to think about not only spending it on what we desire, but to think about investing it so that value beyond its intrinsic worth can be created. I spend too much time reading and writing about social media, when I could invest my time by learning about how social media can help do good in the world.

Images used under Creative Commons licenses courtesy of Flickr users veo and nicdalic.