The attention economy and the net

First Monday

Volumn 2, Issue 4, 1997, Pages

  Goldhaber, Michael H ^a,b,c  

^a Institute for Policy Studies Washington DC   (United States)

^b Cent for Democracy and Technology   (United States)

^c UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

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EID: 0346715726     PISSN: 13960466     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.5210/fm.v2i4.519     Document Type: Article

References (13)

1. To be more exact, in Western Europe as whole, feudalism as an economic system reached its high point around the eleventh or twelfth century (i.e. between 1000 and 1200). After that the market economy began its slow rise. But the outward forms and ways of thinking long remained feudal, certainly in the Iberian peninsula whence the first explorers came. In the Americas, where feudal systems hadn't previously existed, they were unable to compete with the new economic ways that most of the settlers brought with them. As is most obvious in the case of the Puritan colonists in New England, many of these settlers quite consciously had come to escape the old forms of rule. The "Puritan Ethic" they brought with them was much more suitable to a capitalistic, market economy than to feudalism. The great text that argues the last point (though ignoring earlier economic history) is Max Weber, 1958. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. New York: Scribner.
2. Just as settlers in the Americas fashioned the geography they found to fit their purposes and values, so cyberspace is being shaped largely by those who want a space for their own new purposes. As I suggest elsewhere (Michael Goldhaber, 1986. Reinventing Technology. New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul) technology (such as that which goes into cyberspace) is shaped by the values of those who create it and it then helps promote those values, in the main, as it allows certain actions and not others. In the case of the kinds of technology (such as software) that make up cyberspace, the users play a very large role in deciding in what directions the technology as a whole will advance, and their underlying purposes and values are more in the direction of the new economy I will outline than the old.
3. Despite its seeming generality, the following definition, (Paul Samuelson, 1973. Economics. New York: McGraw-Hill, p. 3) as read by millions of students of basic economics, shows why this new thinking must be very basic: Economics is the study of how men and society end up choosing, with or without the use of money, to employ scarce productive resources that could have alternate uses, to produce various commodities and distribute them for consumption, now or in the future among various people and groups in society. It analyzes the costs and benefits of improving patterns of resource allocation. As will become evident, "employing scarce productive resources," "produc[ing] various commodities and distributing them for consumption" and "improving patterns of resource allocation" are simply not relevant for what I will argue is unfolding. Nor is this a particularly perspicacious way of examining older economies, .e.g. feudalism.
4. On attention's scarcity and its economic importance, see also Michael H. Goldhaber, 1989. "Equality and Education in America Now," In: Education and the American Dream, H. Holtz, I. Marcus, J. Dougherty, J. Michaels, and R. Peduzzi (eds.), Granby, Mass.: Bergin & Garvey, Chapter 6, pp. 70-76;
5. Michael H. Goldhaber, 1992. "The Attention Society," Release 1.0, ( 26 March), No. 3, E. Dyson (ed.), New York, EDventure Holdings, pp. 1-20;
6. Michael H. Goldhaber, 1992. "Attention: The System of Post Industrialism?" Z papers, Vol. 1, No. 2 (April-June);
7. Michael H. Goldhaber, 1996-97, Web site: http://www.well.com/user/mgoldh/ I still remember the thunderclap of insight that attention, not information is the key to the new system, a thought that struck me in 1984. While the details I present about the new economy stem from my own explorations, the fact that the following people, among others, have independently arrived at similar conclusions about the economic centrality of attention scarcity adds weight to the argument.
8. See, for example, Richard Lanham, 1994. "The Economics of Attention," Proceedings of 124th Annual Meeting, Association of Research Librarians, Austin, Texas, http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/ARL/Proceedings/124/ ps2econ.html
9. W. Thorngate, 1988. "On Paying Attention." In: Recent Trends in Theoretical Psychology, W. Baker, L. Mos, H. VanRappard, and H. Stam (eds.), New York: Springer-Verlag, (pp. 247-264),
10. W. Thorngate, 1990. "The Economy of Attention and the Development of Psychology," Canadian Psychology/Psychologie Canadienne, Vol. 31, pp. 262-271.
11. The rhetorician Kenneth Burke (in his 1931 book Counter-Statement, New York: Harcourt, Brace, p. 157) describes literary form in a very similar manner: "Form in literature is an arousing and fulfilling of desires."
12. Controversy continues to swirl around this point. It is argued at length by Thomas K. Landauer ( in his 1995 book The Trouble with Computers, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press) among others.
13. Erik Brynjolfsson and Lorin Hitt (1995, "Information Technology as a Factor of Production: The Role of Differences Among Firms," Econ. Innov. New Techn., Vol. 3, pp. 183-199) present data revealing an overall positive correlation between total amounts of spending on information technology and total output for Fortune 500 companies. However, they do not show an increase in labor productivity per se, as is commonly presumed to be the case. What is indisputable is in the two decades since the introduction of the personal computer and related technologies, national measured productivity growth was lower than in the two decades following World War II, when such technology was either non-existent or much more limited. That is totally the opposite from what intuitive estimates of the value of these technologies would suggest and what has repeatedly been predicted.