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Goldhaber, Michael; Attention Economy ; Wired Magazine; 1998

Attention is the hard currency of cyberspace. As the net becomes an increasingly strong presence in the overalleconomy, the ow of attention will not only anticipate the ow of money, but eventually replace it altogether. In thefuture, ads will exist only to attract and direct attention, because money will be obsolete. Attention can groundan economy because it is a fundamental human desire and is intrinsically, unavoidably scarce (the total amountper capita is strictly limited). As opposed to electronic money, which requires a complex set of codes, passwords,

rewalls, etc., attention requires no encryption. It ows naturally across the Web. Further, with attention comescontrol over the the thoughts and actions of those who pay it. And an attention economy can be r ich and complex,because attention comes in many forms: love, recognition, heeding, obedience, thoughtfulness, etc. (an armysargeant ordering troops doesnt want the kind of attention madonna seeks). There are also many ways to captureattention: via thoughts, inventions, self-revelations, expressions, performances, etc. Each time someone focusesdirectly or indirectly on anybody else, that can be thought of as a transaction in this new economy. Already today,if there is nothing very special about your work, no matter how hard you apply yourself you wont get noticed,and that increasingly means you wont get paid much either. The star system we are accostumed to in sports,entertainment, and the arts has already migrated to the professions. CEOs are stars now. Thats how they are

paid, hired, utilized, and dismissed. they operate within their companies more as attention-getting motivators thanbosses. The same goes for rainmaking legal partners, high-powered lobbyists, and academics. More and morethey are treated as celebrities. When they leave, they leave like stars, taking their entourages in tow.

In this new system, how will attention get you, say, an automobile? Well, the car is no longer assembled from partson one long assembly line; rather, sub-assemblies are often put together in different locations rst. At every stage,more and more tasks are automated; that means more of the attention required to make a car occurs upstream aspart of design and production planning. With most people involved in the entire process connected to each otherand to the rest of the world through cyberspace, it is not dif cult to foresee a time when corporations will prettymuch disappear, and when it will make a lot more sense to speak of a complex car-making community, made upmostly of entourages surrounding thousands of stars and microstars. The majority of these would belong to othercommunties as well. Thus, many people in the broad car community will also share membership in some of thesame communities of attention as anyone who might want a car. As long as the person in question gets enoughattention, she would almost certainly be able to draw enough from overlaps between her primary communities and

the car community to arrange to be put into the drivers seat she craves. Assuming automation keeps cutting thetotal amount of actual attention needed to make each individual car, less and less stardom will be required to endup with one.

One must realize that, at the height of the feudal order in Europe, everyone took for granted that tilling the soilwould always be primary, and that wealth and property would always depend on possessing the right bloodlinesto own title to land (which could never be sold). It was unimaginable to either serfs or nobles that nobility and tit leswould cease to be a means of wealth. They were all that counted then. Yet, as the industrial economy developed,food production became just another industry, and not even a highly important one. Bloodlines lost signi canceas well, except for pedigreed dogs and racehorses. Something that had hardly existed- money- became the basisof a new economy. And, incidentally, the most gorgeous armor, the most magni cent knightly tournaments, andthe greatest interest in noble lineage all took place just as feudalism was on its way out. To thrive in the comingcentury, you will have to look beyond money in any form and build a stock of attention for yourself as best youcan. The most gorgeous castles of capitalism, the most colorful ceremonies of payment and receivables, the mostelaborate rituals around money and investments are now at their height, just as the era of the money economyexpires.

We all know that we change when we are being observed. Behavior is transformed completely when observationis acknowledged. From the teenage football player at a game who performs heroically while sensing the gaze ofhis girlfriend from the sidelines, to the politician who measures and calculates every word since millions of invisibleeyes are watching. Even when we observe, that observation is modi ed by others. In an experiment performedby psychologist David McClelland at Harvard, it was shown that observers of Mother Theresas charitable actions(through lm) experienced increases in their IgA (Immunoglobin A) antibodies, even when expressing negativefeelings or disbelief towards her and her work. McClelland believes, thus, that unconscious beliefs-thoughts affectour physical selves more strongly than do the conscious levels. It is possible, then, that, through observation, ourphysiology can be affected without our knowledge of it. How much greater is the effect when we ourselves arebeing observed? If we think deeply, we might remember looks which maintain us, and looks which changed ourlives. Jose Gordon, IPN, November-December 1997