Lecture 6: Give me your attention! ...If you still own it.

 Attention. It is a basic human need, to receive attention and, naturally, to give attention. This of course comes hand in hand with distraction; when giving attention to something, you are getting distracted from something else.  Linda Stone (Jenkins, 2010) notes this as “continual partial attention,” where we are never completely focused on just one thing. The notion of attention and distraction is highly important in media – you could spend long hours researching and creating a perfect advertisement, but to no avail if no one gives it attention. As such, today’s economy encompasses more than just the material resources but also the collection, arrangement and distribution of material life, that is, the materiality of our experience. Essentially, we’re in a world where we and media strive to organise and control experiences such as our real-time attention, perceptions, sensations and thoughts. Consequently, what we look at, listen to, touch, leads to the way we think and ultimately act. This in turn affects the social environment in the way we relate to each other, and the political sphere through change in thought and thus required development in law and governance. Attention has now become a source of power, and a kind of currency, with the exponential increase in information accessibility and compilation, and thus competition for attention. Today’s media seeks to explore where people place their attention, so as to manipulate it back to them and hence increase circulation.

The modern material life economy is not only about who owns your attention but also the new possibilities for sharing subjects for others’ attention – to seek other’s attention for yourself. Goldhaber (1997) supports that we people use the Internet to gain praise and, thus, attention, from our peers. These peer recommendations “make it possible to find fresh and useful signals amid the overwhelming noise of the Internet,” seen through the rise and confidence of information from social networking platforms (Rheingold, 2009). The Internet has accordingly become a channel for the free exchange of ideas to build collective experience (Kinsley, 2010), which brings forth the idea of the Internet as commons.

Commons are, fundamentally, shared property between a society with shared responsibility for maintenance, like a public park. Enter the notion of ideas and thought as commons – as these translate to information that can be vital to the development of society. There’s an ongoing debate about whether publishing should have open access, namely copyright and patents. We can see the results of the new concept of ‘intellectual property’ that sparks massive law suits (Apple vs Samsung anyone?). The political sector has decided, albeit that ideas are free, to temporarily allow authors the right to make money from their creations as a vote of motivation. Enough so that the information can be sophisticated when it reaches the stage of entering into the public domain. It will be interesting to watch the progress of information, attention, and the commons, as technology inspires the convolution of information. Perhaps we could reach the ideal of “open architecture (Kahn and Cerf, 2004),” whereby media converges and all information is open? I think not – humans have a need for power, and information is power we will not want to easily share. Yet, nothing is predictable! I hope I’ve been able to catch your attention for the duration of this post! Or at least partial attention…I can settle for that in our technological context.

References:

Goldhaber, M. H., 1997, “Attention Shoppers!’” Wired, date accessed 17/04/2013 <http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/5.12/es_attention.html>

Jenkins, H., 2010, “Multitasking and Continuous Partial Attention: An Interview with Linda Stone (Part One),” Confession of an ACA-Fan, date accessed 17/04/2013 <http://henryjenkins.org/2010/11/multitasking_and_continuous_pa.html>

Kahn, R. and Cerf, V., 2004, “Terranova,” Network Culture, Pluto Press, London: Ann Arbor, MI, p. 55

Kinsley, S., 2010, “The Technics of Attention”, Paying Attention, date accessed 17/04/2013 <http://payingattention.org/2010/10/12/the-technics-of-attention/>

Rheingold, H., 2012, “Attention”, Prezi presentation, July 24, date accessed 17/04/2013 <http://prezi.com/dwbns6kt3fza/attention/>