Michael H. Goldhaber

Crash-free No Longer

In a recent post, I discussed the current problems re sub-prime mortgages and the credit crunch in connection with ignorance in high finance and in general. The complex entities that are investment banks, which were supposedly highly knowledgeable as organizations, actually were quite in the dark, quite ignorant in fact, when it came to the mortgage problems. I argued that someone has to be knowledgeable and interested for a problem to be understood — some specific person, that is. An organization that has no one paying attention can’t function in a knowing way, in other words, and as we move further towards an attention economy, there are additional reasons to stay ignorant of what is not essential to grab an audience at the moment. As I was thinking about those issues, it occurred to me that there seemingly was a clear counter-example, namely the complex organization that is responsible for the fact that there have been no major US airline crashes since 2001.

Now, airline crashes are prevented by a combination of knowledge of what keeps planes airworthy and prevents collisions, and this knowledge as embedded in a mixture of physical  instruments, physical mechanisms and careful adherence to complex inspection and control protocols that make sure the instruments and mechanisms  are in good working order and are used correctly. But this too does not happen without there being dedicated people who pay attention to keeping all these protocols actually functioning. In the piece I was drafting, I was going to write that if no crashes occur over a long enough period, inevitably attention will shift and the the protocols will stop being followed so assiduously, so that eventually further air crashes will  occur, even though we now apparently know extremely well how to prevent them. We will lose that knowledge as active knowledge  over the course of time, because we just won’t think we need to know it if we never have crashes to remind us.

Well, it now turns out that in fact this disintegration had already begun. Luckily enough, there was enough redundancy left  in the inspection system — apparently, in this case Congressional oversight— for someone to notice that the chief federal agency in charge of airline safety had stopped doing its job. In fact, the successful period of no crashes was already the result of past momentum, not current care.  It could be that the alarm caused by the recent revelations will keep someone connected with the system making sure for awhile that it holds together, but for how long? Currently, American Airlines is in financial trouble and passengers are very annoyed because many flights have had to be canceled while forgotten inspections are finally performed. How many times would this have to happen, before passengers would insist that inspections are not really necessary? The inspectors in this way might eventually be forced to be more lax until an actual crash occurs. You cannot have knowledge without attention, but the need for attention also promotes ignorance, as I showed earlier.

Pfffffffft

Meanwhile, what of the financial system? Could it be that the “masters of the universe” who run it are so ignorant of the actual workings of what they do that a much more complete meltdown than has already taken place is possible? (After I drafted this very post, I learned today that George Soros has just come out with a book proclaiming the breaking of a super-bubble in the money economy.)  Why the possible meltdown? What would the ramifications be? As with the Enron collapse, and as with the recent sub prime debacle, the people running things seemed awfully smart and knowledgeable until it turned out they had vastly overestimated their own knowledge, or at least convinced others to overestimate it. That can happen, perhaps, to the whole current financial system. What has happened is that just as the Internet in the broadest sense permits all sorts of new social inventions with unpredictable effects, such as Facebook, it also permits a wide variety of new financial inventions,  which in reality do nothing but allow money to be moved around in new ways, and perhaps merely create new, purely numerical wealth, wealth that can certainly be turned into goods, but which stems really from nothing other than mathematical legerdemain with various complex financial instruments.

If we look at the apparent growth of the US economy since 2001, it is quite possible that most of the so-called additions to  GDP were actually only growth in the “products” of financial firms, as measured by their overall earnings. In this case no real extra anything — except numbers — was actually created. Furthermore,  these numbers only have value to the extent that the “instruments” behind them remain sufficiently credible to enough players. In other words, financial performance can be viewed, increasingly, as indeed a performance, a form of theater, which works only while there is a sufficient “suspension of disbelief” while the audience is transfixed and mesmerized. If and when that stops, the air can just go  “pfffft” out of the balloon, in much the same way as it did for Enron.

Nowhere Safe to Park?

The new rich, the old rich, plus things like university endowments and standard pension funds —  and other forms of insurance for that matter, all have to “park” their monetary wealth somewhere. Mattresses are decidedly out of fashion, since they don’t keep up with inflation. Of late, the parking lot of choice has been more and more in these new financial forms — hedge funds, buyout firms, or other exotic schemes. The alternative is mostly more traditional forms such as corporate stocks, mutual funds, bonds or even government-backed bonds. None of these is actually secure, at present. Nor, by the way, are even the more old fashioned holdings such as gold. (Gold retains its worth only if the industrial world swallows it fast enough, which requires a high level of industrial production.) Because finance is now such a large part of everything, all these supposedly reliable old-fashioned forms of wealth can fall if the financial sector falls far enough. Hedge funds and buyout firms very much need leverage in the form of extensive borrowing, but if there is no assurance suddenly that they can pay back, the value of these funds can quickly disappear. But if that happens, ordinary stocks, also based on confidence in future performance are much more vulnerable now than in the past. Very few firms simply are made up of solid assets such as factories that have fairly definite break-up values. Instead most firms today rely on the promise of innovation yet to come to retain their current value. (For all stocks, there is a ratio of price of the stock to current earnings that is often of the order of 20 to 1. That means that for an average  investor just to break even, the stock will have to pay out the same earnings for twenty years, or alternatively the profits will have to grow over a shorter time frame. In today’s world, twenty years is a very long time horizon. Meanwhile while shorter-term growth is always risky to assume, and especially so in a downturn of any duration.)

Also, current stock valuations are very tied into the workings of the financial sector these days. For instance, bankers are constantly flying first class around the world. If banks slow down, so do airlines, and numerous other related industries. Because we no longer have a (money-based)  economy that primarily produces things, and still less, fairly necessary things, a large part of it can become completely unstuck quite fast.
Since the US government, at least, has been run on substantial borrowing even during a supposed growth period, while facing increased payouts for social services such as medicare and social security even if it does nothing. So its indebtedness may become too great to pay off. There goes the reliability seemingly safe investments such as treasury bonds. Pension funds, increasingly necessary for an aging population, since they have to rely on funds parked somewhere, yielding some  not-too-small rate of return, may not be able to hold up either. That would mean a disastrous meltdown that would strorngly affect amlost everyone in the US.

Glooom, Doom,and the Bloom of the Real Attention Economy?  Away from Money?

Now, maybe these visions of “doom and gloom” are unwarranted. Quite possibly  the whole system will easily stave off collapse. For instance, it could be that the tremendous flexibility of Internet connection will allow credit crunches to be overcome with new kinds of assurances and money routed in new ways. It is possible that alternative currencies, informally constructed, will be able to replace the dollar. And so on. It is even more possible that the collapse will not so deeply effect the euro or the renminbi, etc. But given the still pivotal role of the US, it is also possible that the doom and gloom would spread across the globe. If so, we will suddenly begin to find ourselves in a new world. It could be that what emerges from the mess will be a much fuller Attention Economy with money playing a much less key role, and eventually virtually no role at all. That , while definitely no utopia, may be the best that one could reasonably hope for.

Here, I am of course speaking of the real Attention Economy, or Attention System, Epoch, Society or World which I have been discussing in the is blog and elsewhere for years   —  and not the advertising-based  much less important system that other people who use this term have come to mean. This real Attention Economy already is quite important, as I have tried to show earlier, when I pointed out that attention “transactions” are already far more common and influential for most people in the advanced countries than are money transactions. The standard economics profession as well as most people who focus on business have remained utterly blind to this fact. But the real Attention Economy, based of course on the scarcity and desirability —for persons— of the attention that can only come from other human beings, is entirely differently structured and organized than is the monetary, industrial-based or capitalist economy. That is why this new system  ultimately does not run on money in any form.

In the next installment, I will explain in detail why the (real) Attention Economy probably can only grow at the expense of the standard forms of the money-industrial system, and why both probably cannot co-exist for too long. This is another reason we may be headed there now. If it is coming, thought must go now into how to mitigate its bad features, while still benefitting from its good ones.

The high excitement among Democrats in the US about the Clinton-Obama race; the expectations on all sides of change in Cuba following Fidel Castro’s retirement; the sudden resignation of Governor Spitzer in New York and the change in the political climate there that is expected to follow. What do these have in common?

I want to point to the fact that the identity of the one, single, top leader still seems to have enormous influence on the direction of almost every political or other unit. (The others include corporations, gangs, universities, symphony orchestras…..) I suspect that Castro, for instance, stayed in power for nearly half a century precisely because he realized that his thoughts and will were necessary to keep Cuba on the course he wanted for it. His assumption —conscious or not — was, I think, that no set of guiding principles nor a common understanding among a large, intergenerational group of like-minded people could be trusted to keep Cuba on his preferred course. He was certainly being egocentric, but I think he was right about this point. At every level — from national to corporate etc. — when the top leader changes, things really do move noticeably in a new direction. It is just as true for capitalist democracies as it is for would-be Communist dictatorships or fascist ones either, or even monarchies.

NOT JUST “LARGER FORCES”
In a way, all this is a bit surprising, considering the common contemporary belief that larger forces — such as “the market” or more complex economic, cultural or social evolution or “organizational learning” pretty much determine the direction of history. I share such beliefs to a considerable extent, and yet it has long been evident to me that the person “in charge” plays an outsize role. What I want to explore here is why this should be.

P2P
(I have another reason for thinking about leadership, which I will amplify in a later post: recent discussions with Michel Bauwens. He has formulated some important ideas about p2p (peer-to-peer) communities and their possibly huge role in a better future. On its face, p2p communities suggest leaderless ones. How well can such groupings really work? What are their benefits and what are their limitations? About that, more later, but back now to the question of why nations, etc., almost always seem to have single, dominant leaders. )

FRANCISCO FRANCO THE FALANGIST

Let me offer another example: Spain around the time (1975) when the fascist dictator Franco, the Caudillo, was dying. He spent the last year or so of his near 40-year reign very ill, basically on his deathbed. By then he was much hated; the Spanish people longed for change. But he had to die, not just get weak, for that to happen. No one at all close to power dared go against him until he literally stopped breathing. Once that happened, his anointed successor, Prince Juan Carlos, who then became King according to Franco’s wishes, immediately set about becoming not an absolute but a constitutional monarch, which was not in accord with Franco’s plans. The country began a wave of liberalization which has not ended. Franco’s old deputies, though at first still highly placed, could not prevent this. Now the current government of Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero plans to uproot the last monuments to the Caudillo. That was obviously not Franco’s plan.

In functioning electoral democracies, change comes more frequently. Usually each head of state (or head of government — the correct title when there is a figurehead monarch or President who does not “govern”) is in office for under a decade, and usually has to face the voters after four or five years, if not sooner. Even then, the leader, as long as he or she stays in power, does determine certain essential aspects of the country’s overall direction. Within limits, to be sure. No leader can fully affect what the rest of the world does. No leader can suddenly rid a system or state of corruption or turn apathetic civil servants into strongly dedicated ones. No leader completely controls economic conditions nor technical or artistic creativity. No leader can control the weather. In a democracy, too the leader is restrained somewhat by the courts and the legislature. And so on.

LEADERSHIP WITH AS MANY HOLES AS A…
But still, how does a leader lead? Why do we give one person that immense power? What would happen if we didn’t rely on such leaders? We could do without them, it seems. Switzerland does. It essentially has no head of state or government and hasn’t for centuries.

You might argue that Switzerland is a pretty conservative place, quite afraid of change. It didn’t fully grant women the vote until 1990; it only guarantees primary education to its children. When Hitler ruled Germany, Switzerland to its shame locked out Jewish refugees and even asked Hitler to put a J on Jew’s passports to make that lockout easier. It’s history of creativity is not very impressive, with few great artists in any field, for example. But three different language groups and several Christian denominations, along with a smattering of other religions seem to live in fair harmony. It has avoided external war for almost two centuries now, and internal war since 1848. Its (money) economy ranks very high in the world, with per capita GDP well ahead of any large countries such as the US. It now guarantees a very wide range of human rights. And, the trains run on time, without the necessity of any Mussolini.

The world possibly would work better if divided into a thousand leaderless Switzerlands. So why do we have leaders? Why, when we do have them; are they more than figureheads? Why can some of them, such as Franco, Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, or George W. Bush retain so much influence and the power to shape destinies even when they have become very unpopular? How can they retain such power, at times, even when barely alive, as Franco did? How might the nature of such leadership evolve, and where is it headed in the attention era?

SWEET SOUNDS
Consider a rather different example of leadership — the symphony conductor. The musicians in the orchestra quite often have the musical score right in front of them, so why can’t they just read it? (Even that begs a question: How would they decide what to play without a director? But surely they could devise a means of choosing, say by having the members of the orchestra take turns choosing the pieces for each concert. )

As everyone who likes symphonic music knows, the conductor plays a vital role because there are many subtle decisions to be made about exact tempos, pauses, and how loud or soft each group of players should be playing. The written score doesn’t exactly specify these things, and someone must judge them. Not merely someone, in fact. If the performance is to have overall coherence, that is if it is to be possible for the audience to align their minds [a concept I explain here] to the music, they can only each do this if the music itself, as played, is done according to the mind of one person. No two conductors will make exactly the same decisions, just as no two musicians would. Any good conductor will develop an set of underlying ideas and feeling about each piece to be performed, and the audience can then align with those. But since each audience member has one mind, if say every bar of music were conducted by a different person, what the hearer would hear would be very hard to pay attention to. We as attention payers can align with a single mind, but much less well with a multitude of minds each contributing at the same time. Each conductor of a particular orchestra will develop a different following among the public, a different group of people who can easily align with her and want to do so. (Also, the conductor generally decides what pieces will be played as well as how. Audiences identify with a conductor’s taste more easily than with all the varying tastes of the orchestra members, and intensify their fandom accordingly.)

That’s why we have conductors. Full-size orchestras who try to work without a conductor tend to lose their audiences. A symphony orchestra has tried, at least once, the Symphony of the Air, which originally had been the NBC Symphony under the great Arturo Toscanini, after he died. Smaller ensembles of various kinds, incidentally, can work without conductors, provided they have similar sensibilities and work together so long that they pretty much are all aligned with each other, as say string quartets. In jazz, a small group of players can satisfactorily take turns improvising. Even then they will not improvise at random but on the basis of a previously existing piece of music — usually by one single individual composer — which appeals to all of them. And in fact, even for very small jazz groups, there is often one who is thought of as the leader.

NOT QUITE SUCH SWEET MUSIC
What does this have to do with a nation, a city, or even a corporation? After all, none of these have to be as coordinated as an orchestra is in performing, where the conductor matters from second to second. No nation is engaged primarily in unified expression; none is seeking to satisfy a common audience. Still, I think, the key to the need for leadership is given by the extent nations or their governments or companies do resemble orchestras. Do they have to (or want to) present a common face to the world? Do they have to (or want to) react decisively and coherently to events, internal or external? Do the citizens need or want at times to be pulled together in subtle ways?

The world is full of situations in which it at least seems decisions of all sorts must be made. The Swiss mostly evade this by carefully following past precedent, avoiding getting involved in external treaties, and at times, following what seem to be good advances in other countries. The Swiss may engage in a little yodeling, but as a country they do not much play to an an audience who would have to align to their expressions. If they did that they might need a leader who had a somewhat coherent policy, even if not the full-fledged control over the public that a symphony conductor has over his musicians.

So if —a big if — a country wants to engage in the world in a more intense way it does need a single mind behind it. This can evince itself in wars, sabre-rattling, colonizing, foreign aid initiatives, moves for peace, for disarmament, offers of new kinds of trade or trade treaties, proposed new immigration rules, making changes in the currency, new doctrines, seeking to be the venue for some international event, pontificating, etc. But all of these with a somewhat unified mindset. We might say that the country only exists as such to the extent that there is or can be though to be such a single mind. Otherwise it is just a random group of communities who happen to live within certain geographical boundaries. In today’s media-saturated world, a president or head of state who moves before the cameras gets attention, and the country as a whole then is more or less captive to that person’s actions and expressions, as for instance Bush, Chavez of Venezuela, Sarkozy of France, and much the same for most of the over two hundred countries in the world.

The single leader can also work internally, shaping the citizens’ sense of how they all fit together or should. The larger the country, it seems, the more a single leader, even an unpopular one, is necessary for this sense of coherence or unity. A majority may want to “throw the rascal out” but usually can only conceive of this in terms of putting someone else in the single office, someone with a distinctly idifferent personality and different promise.

Let me add that Switzerland is not the only example outside music of operating without one dominant leader. So did Revolutionary France under the Directorate, which lasted for just few years until taken over by Napoleon. Medium size and small law firms and very small collectives do not have single, dominant leaders, and possibly a few larger such partnerships exist. And of course, there are any number of more amorphous communities without definite leaders. But it evidently isn’t so easy unless aims and desires change.

Many and many a year ago….
In the distant past, even a few thousand years ago, kingdoms such as ancient Egypt were held together by images placed all over the country reminding people of the leader. Where there was writing, proclamations by this leader were sent throughout the kingdom and read aloud, or at times posted in public places. By the time of the Roman Empire, the emperor’s likeness was sculpted very realistically and placed prominently throughout the Empire; coins with similar images were minted and circulated. Similar kinds of things happened in other empires throughout the world. In the Middle Ages, in Europe, monarchs tended to move through their kingdoms demonstrating their existence even to the illiterate.

AND THEN…. TV AND THE WEB
Today, of course, video images of the leader are seen everywhere , with new ones circulated more than daily. Candidates for the highest office become highly visible as well. As we see in the current race for the US Democratic Presidential nomination, very large groups of what we might as well call fans eagerly cohere to each side; the candidates have achieved even more than rock-star status. With the web, the fans can encourage each other to align more closely with their preferred candidate.

We don’t for the most part vote for polices, but for personality. In terms of specific policies, neither candidate is too precise about what she or he will do, neither is the Republican opponent. Yet we fully expect that things will be different depending on who wins. And, it would seem, the more difference a large number of us expect, the more difference there can be.

As with any star to whom we pay attention, we somewhat align our minds with those of the leader, whomever it is. In so doing we become different people than we were under the previous leader, though of course not all of us align to the same extent, and some tend to align against rather than with this leader.

A BRIEF ASIDE
“Aligning against” is a two -step process. If someone says to you “2 + 2 = 5” to be paying attention you have to form this thought in your own mind, but then you instantly compare it to what you are sure of, namely that 2 +2 = 4, and so reject the thought. If the same person keeps saying things which you find yourself rejecting, you may well begin more or less automatically to reject anything connected to that person even if it might otherwise seem innocuous in itself. You then view whatever that person says or does as false, duplicitous, hateful, stupid or some combination of these. Hitler was responsible for his hateful anti-Semitic policies; he also was the instigator of the original Volkswagen. In rejection of Hitler, many Jews would never buy this car.

The more a leader is “in your face” as is made possible by today’s media, the more sharply we must react to avoid aligning our thoughts and actions with his or hers. That helps lead to today’s political polarization. Such polarization becomes even stronger at a distance. “Inside the Beltway,” a variety of politicians engage in day to day business with one another, more or less as equals, not as stars. From a distance, attention is focused on just a few of them, and humanizing contacts are not present, so any antagonism will build and build. Today this is aided by the Internet, as I suggested already. Fans of one politician or another can support their champion and malign the other and his or her fans. Then, even those on the inside find they must play to that antagonism to keep the allegiance of their followers. If we do become fans of someone, or loyalty becomes more and more intense, unless we feel somehow betrayed.

KEEPING THE FOCUS
However, to keep the focus and the loyalty, the political leader, or any other kind of leader, must keep doing or saying new things to hold active attention. Someone like the President of the United States has a huge press corps following him (so far, it’s a him) around; this press corps get attention when the President does, so they try to make even his most insignificant statement seem important. But this overemphasis on trivia can go only so far. The President to maintain leadership, must exercise it by more vigorous assertions and actions. The same is true for leaders of other countries, and for all other kinds of entities. At the same time, it is increasingly true that a leader must demonstrate a very distinct and outsize personality, a personality always on view as this leader constantly seeks and achieves the limelight with new actions, statements and policies.

As long as this leader is not in a coma and shows any signs of life, or, in a democracy. as long as the term of office has not ended, the leader retains a built in audience for any whisper of a remark. People who have been paying attention, will align to who the leader was at his or her height, rather than to the present decrepit reality, or even the supposed lame duck status.

THE PRIMROSE PATH TO….
All this assertion and activity can be dangerous. Is it worth maintaining coherence as a nation if that results in a collection of more and more assertive personalities on the world stage? On the other hand, without a single leader, how can a nation (or company or university or museum or even web community, or whatever) make substantive changes if necessary? How can new creative solutions to the world’s problems come into existence without single minds, single leaders somehow propelling them? Or would we be better off with less creativity, less leadership, less change? These are the questions that the world is increasingly, if unknowingly, forced to confront.

If we could do without leaders, prospective leaders cannot do without our wanting them. So they have a growing vested interest in exaggerating the kinds of situations and problems that would require a leader’s response. What would it take for us to just stop paying attention? For that to be effective, would almost everyone have to stop? Could we do that without strong leadership? Or could we perhaps build enough peer-to-peer communities that we don’t have time to listen or obey the would-be leaders’ clarion calls?

Lately, much has been written about the “dilemma” of too much e-mail. See Zeldes et al., or Krill for instance) Some write on this from the perspective of firms. They suggest that “knowledge workers” are spending too much time on e-mail, time when they could be being “productive.” The writers claim that we must deal with the “problem” of “information overload” or “infomania” as if this were something new, and as if there were a possible global “solution” to this “problem.”

I suppose the authors of these arguments would add instant and text messaging, messages over social networks such as Facebook or in Second Life, various forms of teleconferencing, and so on. I’ll just call all this e-mail for short. Also, I’m not concerned with spam here, but with e-mail that somehow seems worthwhile to the recipients. This supposed e-mail problem cannot be looked at in the ahistorical way the writers suppose, but must be seen in the context of changing economic systems. It is that context I will focus on here.

The “Prudent King” Beats Us to It
Information overload as a phenomenon is of course nothing new; the term was in use long before e-mails were ubiquitous, starting easily 30 years ago. Well over 500 years ago, although no one had heard of the term “information overload,” King Philip II of Spain along with many of his aides, were inundated with handwritten reports, requests, queries, etc. They kept this “prudent king” busy from morning to night for over 40 years. King Philip thus mostly held together a huge empire, but what made him the ruler was precisely that numerous people sought attention from him and in so doing, necessarily gave him attention in return.

Today, one of the main reasons people read their e-mail is undoubtedly because it gives them the sense of being at the center of attention — in effect the centers of of their own little personal empires. After all, each e-mail received demonstrates that someone thinks they are important enough to try to get their attention, at least apparently by paying them attention in return. E-mail appears to be addressed personally to the recipient, and often is. The very fact you have received it means someone seems to have been thinking of you. If you fail to respond, you run the risk of falling off the radar. If you make it impossible for anyone to send you e-mail, you lose a sense of your own importance in the outer world.

A Fan’s Notes

Or think of e-mail as like “fan mail.” A star can measure her worth by the amount of this she gets. She may choose to reply formulaically, but if she can stand the effort of replying —at least minimally — in person, she is likely to tighten her connection with fans. In terms of e-mails, each person becomes a minor “star,” who who would suffer a small defeat were she to disappoint one of her fans. Equally bad is to disappoint part of her apparent audience collectively, say the members of some formal or informal listserv [by an informal listeserv, I just mean a group of people who are cc’d together quite often by any one of them] or a social networks such as a grouping within Facebook. To ignore what such groups send out or never to take active part in their interchanges risks losing one’s role as a focus in that community.

This talk of stars and fans might hints that something new is happening. What? One major difference between King Philip’s day and now is simply technological. In the sixteenth century, sending messages over many miles was an arduous process from beginning to end — arduous in the hand writing, sealing, finding a messenger to to take it in general the direction of the king, and then often waiting many months for the message to reach the King’s palace, where it might languish for more months before being answered.

Technology has certainly advanced since then, and even since the more widespread notice of information overload thirty odd years ago. Before personal computers were widespread, sending a written or typed message was much more complex than e-mail is, and often required some sort of use of a stenographer, secretary, personal assistant or typing pool to be at all efficient. This meant that relatively few were in the position of originating letters. With e-mail has come a great democratization, but that just means far more e-mails can be sent and therefore received.

When you receive an e-mail, furthermore, it is extremely easy to open. Neither you nor anyone else has to pick up, sort, and distribute the mail. No one has to open each envelope individually or unfold and mark the letter within as received. It arrives with an automatic date and time stamp. All this encourages the flow of ever more e-mail.

Beyond the Obvious

However, change at a deeper level is also taking place. The number of people who now work or spend time in settings where they easily can send and receive e-mails has grown fantastically. Compared to King Philip’s era or even to thirty years ago, a far higher percentage of the world’s people do not have to engage in actual physical labor, such as farming (or tending flocks) rowing the galleys, carrying things and people on their own shoulders or backs or in their saddle bags, making things, being part of armies, etc.

Philip II ruled early in the development of market-based industrialization. Today industrialization is fading out in terms of the hold it has over people’s actual lives and focus. In the twenty-first century a whole new kind of economy — the Attention System (or the Attention Economy as I define it, not as in Davenport and Beck or others who think it only deals with advertising or simply the paying but not the desire for or receiving of attention) — has now come to the fore. An increasingly large — even if not formally or consciously recognized — preoccupation is the securing, individually, of the scarce attention of the rest of the world — or whatever part of this attention one can snag.

The aim in this new economy is not to be productive from the viewpoint of the firm in which one formally happens to work, which is tied to the old economy. Regardless of where one works, what is of increasing importance is the attention one receives, wherever it comes from, via networking of whatever sort. Companies can only hold themselves together if their leaders (formal or informal) can genuinely hold a great deal of the attention of both their wider audiences and of their own workers. But they cannot hope to succeed in this just by shutting off outside connections, especially today, for with the wide variety of means to to stay connected to whomever one wants — Blackberries, iPhones, browser connected e-mails (Yahoo! or Google, for instance) and the many social networks — even an employee locked into a company has plenty of ways of reaching and being reached by those outside it.

Worth Stressing?
This does not mean that the new economy is somehow stress free or devoid of competition. Quite the contrary, in fact. The total attention the world can offer is limited; thus the competition for it keeps getting hotter, once it becomes seen as desirable in any form. E-mail’s ease means that is going to continue to be relied on, and by more and more senders, many of whom will continue to seek to make their messages as irresistible as possible. The senders do want attention after all.

By age three or four, most children have learned to modulate their efforts to get attention depending on their own sense of urgency and the circumstances. One learns, for instance, not to scream at full volume at all times. Adults dealing with e-mail have mostly developed a keen if not always conscious sense of how to get attention for themselves, through their ideas, jokes passed along, pointers to others deserving of attention etc. They and their recipients will continue to refine these abilities, some with greater success than others. That is about the best we can hope for.

Each person must develop her individual ways of dealing with the overload and handling the stress. Whoever is less easily stressed or finds inner resources that allow better coping will likely do best. The limitations of e-mail mean that cultivating real relationships in person will continue to be highly necessary for some time, and finding the right individual balance among the complex of relationships, real and virtual, will be essential.

Don’t Drink the Kool-Aid

But no general contrivance to reduce e-mails (always excepting true spam) can work, whether for a firm, some other kind of association, or for the world at large. Any such attempt ignores the very value of e-mail receiving as well as sending for the individual. It ignores the rise of the Attention System (Attention Economy). Whatever contrivance is tried will surely lead to work-arounds, usually rendering the contrivance null and void in short order. If work-arounds are impossible, loyalty to whatever entity has adopted the contrivance will plummet, so its adoption will prove counterproductive. (I would guess most smart leaders intuitively grasp this anyway, so they are unlikely to adopt such contrivances in the first place. )

A Burden We’d Better Bear
Information overload really means not enough attention to satisfy everyone’s desire for it. This can only end if almost everyone agrees not to compete for attention — or if the entire technosphere breaks down in some general calamity. A peace treaty of the first sort seems far, far away. Let’s hope we escape a calamity as well. If so, then information overload or infomania will be with us for a long, long time.

This is supposed to be the era of knowledge. Yet I think we should be increasingly worried that it is in fact even more the era of ignorance. The two are in some ways complementary. An expert has long been known, at least by cynics, as someone who “knows more and more about less and less.” That means that even experts — as well as the rest of us — also know less and less about more and more. And more gets missed by even experts. We might view expanding knowledge as a yeasty sort of bread — the faster it expands, the bigger the holes all through it. Meanwhile, there are new reasons that cause people to adopt ignorance as a stance, as all right, as even desirable. Many people have noticed this, but it seems to me some of the root causes and the nature of the new ignorance escape them, just as some elements still escape me.

Still, despite my own ignorance of the topic, this this is my contribution to the study of ignorance, a study I think we should all take more seriously.

So, welcome to Ignorance Studies 101.

First, ignorance comes in more than one flavor.

Ignorance type A = not knowing what no one else knows either, also known as “Society-Wide Ignorance.” As overall societal knowledge grows and grows, igA obviously decreases.

However, that leads to a growth in Ignorance type B, not knowing what some other people do know. If experts each “know more and more about less and less,” a corollary is that they also know less and less about more and more of what is known. Non-experts also each find igB growing.

But both types of ignorance can be further sub-divided into: Ignorance about things humans cannot affect (call this “Nature”); and Ignorance about things that we can, including things that humans ourselves create (call this the “Human World”). Of course, as knowledge of Nature grows, so does our often unknowing ability to affect it, increasing Human-world ignorance in a sometimes dangerous way. (Think global warming.)

Ignorance about ignorance grows too: Ignorance about what is known (by society, in other words by someone somewhere) — and ignorance about who knows or does not know what. Finally, comes ignorance about whom and how to ask about what one does not know. You can’t even begin to ask if you don’t know you don’t know, but even if you do know you are ignorant, that may not help you much.

What about Google and Wikipedia?

Wait! Don’t Google and Wikipedia and the web in general immeasurably increase each person’s effective knowledge and so decrease effective ignorance? I certainly use both of these frequently and think they are each a real step forward. Still, knowledge is not simply an assemblage of information; it must be rooted in an understanding of connections, limitations, context, and so on. If you could study all of Google, or even follow a line of links from each and every web page that surfaces from a particular query, or could study all of Wikipedia, then you would surely have knowledge, indeed almost all knowledge on a great many subjects. but this is clearly beyond anyone’s ability. So you would have to select on the basis of prior knowledge, and the incompleteness and holes in that knowledge are precisely why neither of these tools can be assumed to provide you with effective knowledge, or effective lack of ignorance. Instead, the best they can do is little more than make us more aware of the very breadth and depth of of our ignorance. As they enlarge every day, our ignorance only grows.

Attention, Knowledge and Ignorance

If I’m right, our actions are increasingly governed by the scarcity of attention that we can pay and even more by the scarcity of the attention we can get from others. That is the Attention System, or what I meant originally when I introduced the so much misunderstood term “Attention Economy.” Living in this system greatly affects and is affected by what we know or don’t as well as what find it valuable to know or to skip.
One key axiom of attention is that to pay it to someone, you must align your mind to hers. The more you know what she knows, at least what she knows that is relevant to her right now, the better you can pay attention. If, for example, you don’t even know what language she is speaking you will have a very hard time paying attention.
The first corollary: If you want attention, don’t assume much specialized knowledge. In other words: assume ignorance on the part of your listener, viewer or reader, and don’t challenge that ignorance too much. Example: the US media, but also most media throughout the world. This also explains much about politicians, business people etc.

The second corollary: don’t bother learning what won’t get you attention, because you have to pay a lot of attention to do that.
This second corollary explains a lot:
• The ignorance about many things (history, geography, science, politics) of American high school students, (along with countless other students around the world);
• The narrow focus of many business people, entertainers, scholars and other experts, etc;
• The appeal of religious fundamentalism, at least in part.
• The fact that the pursuit of knowledge itself is increasingly subject to what the philosopher or historian of science Thomas Kuhn called “paradigm shifts.”

Once Upon a Paradigm

In a paradigm shift, knowledge gets a new basis, with some brand-new central ideas, and in the process, old knowledge can safely be ignored as no longer relevant. I think it works like this. As a field grows, so much knowledge accumulates in it, that only narrow specialists can really familiarize themselves with it. Then, new people find it much easier to start over with an almost clean slate, which they can if there are hints of another paradigm around.The new one explains certain phenomena while allowing a completely new set of knowledge to be developed. “Early adopters” of this new knowledge are at a special advantage.They can reach a relatively large audience without themselves necessarily having to know much.

Paradigm shifts of this sort are not limited to science. The same causes make advantageous to be a fan of or participant in a new sport, a new music genre, or a new kind of art. You don’t have to be familiar with all the nuances established over many years. Similar reasons led to young people eagerly adopting new technologies, new kinds of web links (such as Facebook or MySpace or Second Life) new computers, new operating systems, programs, new video games, etc..

Through this process, the attentional value of having old knowledge rapidly decreases. This would be fine if the new knowledge always included or trumped the old, and if there were not whole areas left out as “progress” increases.

What a Tangled Web..

We are all now intertwined in a global society, six billion strong. As the universe of knowledge relevant in some way to each of our lives keeps expanding, the share of it we individually have any mastery over keeps dropping. In terms of attention, the accelerated demands on our attention outrace our individual supply at ever-greater speeds. We do not know enough to form reasonable judgements about many matters that will affect us quite a bit, nor do we know sufficiently well how our actions affect the world. We are often less and less capable of knowing that we do not know, or even knowing whom to ask about who would know about a host of issues. So we punt. With ignorance and half understanding, a certain carelessness is the inevitable outcome.

We can see the effects of that all around us. Take the growing technosphere in which our lives are ever-further embedded. We assume, for instance, that someone at the phone company or the cable company or the computer company or the software company or even the open-source community is “minding the store,” but often it turns out that as tasks have been sub-divided and farmed out, even simple possibilities have not been considered, or whoever was supposed to know about a certain issue has been downsized, fired, retired or forgotten. Systems simply do not work, or work increasingly badly. The managers of such businesses do not know much about the desires, limitations, habits and customs of their customers. The eagerly install such things as voice-activated automated phone systems, which add to the complexities of correcting or even finding out about how to solve common or unusual problems. And life is full of unusual problems.

Here in Northern California, we have perhaps the world’s largest congeries of technical expertise, but it is not large enough so that the companies trying to save a buck will be able to hire technically competent and knowledgeable people to do things like keep Internet or cable or even electric services going seamlessly. Perhaps even if they paid fairly well, no one would find it of interest to do seemingly mundane maintenance when that same person could be involved creating something completely new that potentially could be of interest or even value to millions.

Or take the money economy in its most direct form — the world of high finance. Very clever people invented things like mortgage bundling, which led to the bundling of sub-prime loans in ways that most actors assumed to be pretty fail-safe, at least in the short time horizon on which investment bankers now work. Theoretically, rating agencies were supposed to evaluate the the risks associated with such loans, but they simply did not understand them well enough, it seems. Rating financial risk may be one of those rather uninteresting areas, most of the time, anyway. No one gets a lot of attention for such activity, unless she offers a completely unexpected rating. If there had been no rating agencies, the bankers who took on the loans might have felt they had to be a bit more cautious, but as it was, it was easy to pay minimal attention, since it was easy to take for granted that the rating agencies knew what they were doing. No one was rating the raters. Similarly, it now seems, many other kinds of loans, such as industrial bonds and “commercial paper” may have been incorrectly rated as to risk.

Banks have suddenly realized that they are in the dark as to the risk environment, so they are newly frightened about extending loans even to other big banks. This re-creates the same sort of problem that occurred at the time of the Great Depression, even though the amount of knowledge of the financial (money-based) economic systems is supposedly so much greater.

Not Ads but Adages

Politicians are another class of people who seemingly know less and less about more and more. They rely on experts to fill them in on how to handle all sorts of areas, but these experts in turn may not really be terribly knowledgeable, nor do they necessarily understand the complex interconnections necessary to make their advice any good. Whether the subject is education, healthcare, international relations, security from terrorism, control of media, the environment or economics, politicians of all stripes seemingly adopt a few rather dogmatic ideas as a way to get by. The citizenry who elect them are even more reliant on mere adages to understand what is going on. Or they rely on the politicians to find out what they themselves have given up trying to understand. But politicians dare not go against those who do believe in certain adages, whether it is “the free market is always best” or “we need protection from foreigners stealing our jobs” (or both) or “Islamo-fascists are out to get us” or “Israel is the biggest violator of human rights, ” or “it’s cold this winter, so global warming is a false alarm,” or “we need population control in Africa to slow down global warming” among equally many other views based mostly on over-simplified ignorance. Awareness of ignorance itself breeds paranoia, such as the conspiracy theories floating around 9/11, or the view that those who warn about global warming are secretly trying to impose socialism on everyone.

These simplified adages function as paradigms, even though there is often very little behind them, and they can often be very easily be replaced, with new paradigms — that is, nice fresh adages. When a politician such as Barack Obama excites voters with talk of hope and change, he succeeds largely through his lack of being specific. If he tried to spell out detailed policies, many of his listeners would not be able to continue to pay attention, though some others might be able to follow him and perhaps like what they hear.

Deeper

A deeper problem is that no politician really is willing to recognize that a deep change is under way. They may pay too much lip service and attention to the bromides of conventional economists to see that we are entering a whole new era, in which the very meaning, for instance, of continued economic success is thrown into question.

But no Air Crashes

We should expect that the varying degrees of ignorance I have been discussing will eventually cause more and more severe human and natural world problems, if we do not find some way to keep growing ignorance somehow at bay. How might we do all this? One example that comes to mind is an area where the technosphere seems to be excelling of late, rather than breaking down. It is the system that prevents air crashes. The example may be instructive. To be continued…..

Like millions of other Americans, I watched Hillary Clinton’s “meltdown,” as the media called it, as an Internet video on Monday January 7, the day before the New Hampshire primary. I am on record as opposing Hillary, for a number of reasons, including dislike of many of her stands such as her belligerent votes on Iraq and Iran, never apologizing for  the Iraq vote, dismay at her connection to the Democratic Leadership Council, and revulsion at the whole notion of perpetuating political “dynasties” (Bush, Clinton, Bush, Clinton). Edwards, not Clinton, has been the candidate I most supported and still support, long shot though he now is. Yet I found myself emotionally touched by seeing Clinton “well up” and by hearing the quaver in her voice.

Even as I felt that, I also was thinking that what she was emotional about was not so much her long commitment to serving the country — millions of people have made that commitment, after all — but rather that her campaign might be faltering, her ambitions of being President might come to naught.
The point is that in paying attention to her, I viscerally felt the emotion she was projecting—regardless of whether she was sincere in projecting it, and regardless of my own reservations about her and what she stands for.  I was, in the terms in which I have explained the act of attention paying, deeply aligned with her. As such I wanted what I took it that she wanted, which was for her to emerge victorious in the NH vote. When she did the next day, I was very pleased. My impression is that many other people reacted much as I did. When you align with someone, you want what they want, even if there may be other reasons you don’t want to go along with what have become your own emotions.

With videos on the Internet enabling more of us to to view particularly emotional moments related to political candidates and others,  we must expect that  the emotional connections that result will play an even larger role than they have in the past, when it comes to deciding whom to vote for. This is not necessarily going to make us eager to support candidates we disagree with too much on other terms, but it will influence us to put relatively small differences aside. We will put less emphasis on the candidate’s “record, “ and more on what they say and how they say it. In 2004 Kerry overemphasized his record in Vietnam, leaving himself open to being “Swift-boated.” With past records less important, outside groups’ abilities ot vilify a candidate n the basis of the pst should play less of a role. That is to the good. What is less attractive is the chance that pure acting skill will allow a candidate to distort who he is and what he is for. George Bush , in my view successfully did this in 2000, with his “compassionate conservative” and “I’m a uniter, not a divider’ lines. These went right along with his “just plain folks” demeanor.

Fortunately, perhaps, in a long campaign, a candidate will have a hard hiding more unpleasant sides, if these exist. They will be circulated on YouTube and be seen by many.  Is it conceivable that eventually highly genuine people with real emotions will turn out to be the new star candidates? If so, will that be good?

In a recent post, Gwen Bell cites my work as a partial basis for her thoughts about “personal branding.” She has some sensible suggestions, but I think the idea of personal branding — common though it is — gets things backwards.

1. Meet the Smith Brothers, Trade and Mark

Of course, most of us know or would recognize hundreds or even thousands of brands: Heinz Ketchup, Toyota Prius, Apple iPod, AT&T, Hilton Hotels, Pepsi, Dr. Martens boots, Republic of Tea, Tamagotchi  “pet” and on and on.  But what is a brand? Why do they relate differently to persons than persons do to each other? Two aspects of brands are important.

The first is their linguistic role. Superficially, a brand name is an example of a “proper noun,” similar to a the name of a place or person. As it happens, I just returned from Spain. The word “Spain” is a proper noun or name, signifying a particular place, a particular country, and a particular society, all at once, and all with the same complex history. But Spain, at least in this sense, is not a brand similar to those I mentioned above. There is only one Spain, while there are many, many identical bottles of Heinz Ketchup on tables throughout the world, just as there are many, many Toyota Priuses on the roads, and millions of iPods plugged into people’s ears, etc.

Linguistically then, a brand (name) is more like an ordinary noun. It differs from a common noun, such as “table,” “cow,” or “strawberry,”  in that it is supposed to refer only to a line of pretty much identical products that all are associated with a particular company. Heinz Ketchup, Toyota Prius, and iPod, for instance, are to be kept separate in our thoughts from similar, more generic ones such as no-name ketchup (or catsup), just any hybrid-drive car, or any old MP3 player. But you or I or any person is as singular and unique as Spain. There is only one of you, not many identical versions Even if your name happens to be as commonplace as “John Smith,” you are a particular John Smith, found only in one place at one time, specific in yourself, and except perhaps for relatively rare cases of identity theft, in no danger of not being specific. (Common “identity theft” does not steal anything more than financial identity; it does nothing to the individuality of your thoughts, feelings, personal relationships, physical movements, expressions, etc.) You are already much more individual than a brand would make you.

(Philosophers sometimes say that common nouns have a definition or sense, whereas proper names only refer to or label individuals. For instance, your name singles you out, but does not define you — except perhaps by implying you are human being. Here again, brands are intermediate between definable things such as cars, and mere labels.)

2. Which Smith Brother, again?

The second point is that regular brands — far from being something that individuals need to emulate — are actually reminders of the singular persons or personalities who originated or stand behind the branded products or services.  Microsoft has thus far equalled Bill Gates as the driving force. It’s possible that it will come to mean Steve Ballmer as well or instead, but that remains to be seen. Apple represents Steve Jobs; Ford once represented Henry Ford; Kodak represented George Eastman, who invented the notion of easy photography; etc. The founder or re-founder’s personality sometimes continues to inform and shape the company in question long after she or he is gone. In the terms I have offered before, your attention  passes through the brand (or the branded object)  to the prime person or persons behind it. It is the same as how your attention right now goes through the words you see on the screen to me.

As the influence of the prime personality or personalities fades over time, the brand itself almost always tends towards the generic. It eventually becomes meaningless, except in those cases where it clearly comes to represent a new personality, who gives it new singleness of meaning. The process of dry photo-reproduction by electrostatic means was invented by Chester Carlson and introduced to the world under the Xerox brand. But soon enough, the word “xeroxing” just came to mean generic dry photo-copying, using any machine that could do it. Xerox, Inc., had to go to ludicrous lengths to “defend” its brand, but it still cannot prevent ordinary people from using the verb, “to xerox” in a generic sense, with no regard for what company produced the machine being used. The company has had a hard time finding a strong personality to give new meaning to the brand.  When you use a copier without thinking of the brand, whatever attetnio you pay to it May go without your knowledge to Chester Carlson, but  not via the Xerox brand particularly, that is it goes to no instigator in the Xerox company or any other.

Without such new personalities, the best a company can do is to stick rigorously to the initial impetus of the founder, say in the case of an unchanging product, like Tabasco sauce.  But even this is going to be a matter of interpretation, especially if there is to be any further innovation at all; someone has to at least be the “high priest” who interprets the founder’s or founders’ intent in new circumstances; so that personality will then be who is behind the name. This will be true, of course, even when most customers have never heard of this leader, just as they may never have heard of the original founder by name.

3. Why Pablo Picasso is Not a Brand

Of course, in being the brainchild of relatively few distinct personalities that still influence the “culture,” corporations are from alone. The US still is partly shaped by the visions of the likes of Jefferson and Hamilton, and, more distantly, Locke and Montesquieu, though the details have certainly changed. The Roman Catholic Church to some degree still represents the historical Jesus and some of his early interpreters.
On a still more personal basis, the great artistic, musical, literary and architectural creators are still represented by their works, and to some degree by the styles they introduced. In Spain, I went to see Picasso’s famous Painting Guernica.  It used to be in New York, but now you have to go to Madrid to see it, because it is unique, and totally unlike  Heinz’s Ketchup in being so.  A Rembrandt is a Rembrandt; a J. S. Bach cantata is clearly Bach; Hamlet is a Shakespeare play.  Much the same goes for philosophical, political  and even scientific innovators. Also for actors, singers, and other performers, especially since around 1900,  when it become possible to record their work.

The point is that by being who they are, taking their own expressive and creative impulses and thoughts seriously, all these people do not need to pay any attention to the concept of branding. They are themselves, and they reveal themselves in everything they do. As selves, they all evolved throughout their entire creative lives. A late Rembrandt or Picasso painting or drawing has some connection with earlier ones by the same artist, but also substantial differences that can only be connected by studying the works in chronological relationship. The late Wittgenstein takes off from the earlier one but is profoundly different as well. Much the same holds for more recent or living creators in whatever medium, even minor ones.   Being true to one’s evolving inner sense of what is right and important and what comes forth now — this minute —  is what one has to keep at, not some superficial characteristics.

4. Moving the Goalposts

Gwen Bell says that a blogger, be distinctive needs to be clear about “goals. In  what sense she does not make clear,: ultimate goals or the immediate creation at hand? I think goal setting is mostly a misleading concept taken over from crude business how-to texts.  A significant creator pours all of who she is into the work, and the goal of the moment can be as specific as finding the right word to use in a sentence or poem, the right gesture in acting a role, or can be much more long-range, but the goal emerges from the intensity of what one is about and who one is, not the other way round. As a portraitist, the artist Giacometti had the goal of actually capturing the face of the sitter as he saw it, but he was really never satisfied with his attempts. The intensity of his striving is what counted for him. Goals constantly change as one proceeds, just as in creating anything one continually redefines oneself.  (A corporation can have goals only to the degree that its few real leaders do, and they too are less in need of defining these than in maintaining personal intensity and expression.)

The vast majority of would-be artists, novelists, actors, essayists, columnists, journalists, political leaders, etc., get much less attention than they might like. There simply is not enough attention from other people to go around. No matter how they try to conform to some model of good blogging behavior, such as Bell’s, most bloggers will face the same problem (of not enough attention to go around).  Being successful as a blogger or at any other form of attention getting is primarily a question of luck, and after that, I think,  of being as fully yourself at the moment as you can be. Even this rule is not any guarantee of success, and breaking the rules, whatever they are, is often a good way to stand out.

5. Look Before you Leap — or Don’t

Bell mentions thinking carefully about what you are doing. That may work. (It certainly appeals to me, except I already do too much of it.) But being very spontaneous and not thinking consciously at all might work better, for some. Personal branding, though,  is a red herring, not worth worrying over. Don’t give it another though. (Except, perhaps, the one that follows….)

6. Addendum: Subtleties about Copies:
One possible response to the above would be to point out that while each creative person may be a unique individual, nonetheless, just as there are many identical but distinct Toyota Priuses on the road, defined or guaranteed as such by their brand, so the particular creative works of a person — a novel,say,  might exist in many many, identical but distinct copies. Why then should we distinguish between the author’s “personal brand”  and something like a car brand?

You could even say a blog exists in many copies, on the computer screen of every different person who web surfs to it. You want to read only “a John Grisham,”  let’s say, just as you may want to drive only a Prius.  But when you get to the bookstore, it turns out that all the John Grisham’s they have you have already read. You do not mean by that that you have read the exact copy that is on the bookstore’s shelf. To have read the book is not to have read the specific copy. The book exists more basically as an idea, separate from its physical manifestation. So in a very real sense, each novel is as unique as its author, in a way that each car of a particular brand and model is not. A painting or sculpture or building has a physical manifestation, of course, meaning it can only be experienced in a particular place at any one time, and that it is not the same as copies of it.  You cannot confuse having Picasso’s Guernica in your living room with having a reproduction of it, though you would be unlikely to think you drive a reproduction of the Prius instead of the real thing.

The idea of the Prius  is of course just as singular, just as much the creation of a single person or small group of people as a blog entry or a novel or a movie  or a painting is.  But a Prius, like most branded objects is a product of the industrial system, valuable not just for its idea, but for its utility in transporting you — in reality and not just in imagination — from point A to point B. It required many, many people’s efforts to make each individual one, whereas the human effort needed to create a copy of a blog entry on your screen is very very small. Blogs, like other works of mental value, are part of the attention system, not the industrial one. That is why personal branding does not make sense.

0. Preface

In this and the next few installments, I will be addressing a number of connected ideas: the changing role in our lives of material things; the changing nature of firms; the rise of what I shall term hyper-creativity; how it interacts with slower moving institutions such as government; some examples; and the connection of all these with advertising.  All these are involved in the change from what I will now call the “Money-Thing Epoch” to what I will call the “Attention Epoch.” The terms in quotes are my latest attempts to find suitably apt and evocative terms to replace my earlier coinage: the Money-Market-Industrial Economy on one hand and the Attention Economy on the other.  

1. Who’s Riding Now?

According to  a poem by Ralph Waldo Emerson,  the “sage of Concord” (Massachusetts) and  the pre-eminent nineteenth-century  transcendentalist, “Things are in the saddle, and ride Mankind.”  Nowadays, as I’ve said, American and other advanced societies are passing beyond the Thing Epoch to enter the Attention Epoch, in which relations between minds tend to dominate, and the scarcity and desire for attention are what mainly structure our relations with each other. That doesn’t mean that we suddenly do without things, of course, but rather that their main function changes. Emerson’s observation does not hold any longer in the way he probably meant it. Where once the main value of a human-produced thing was utility, convenience or comfort, now it is its role as an attention focuser or intermediary.

Once you have first paid attention to someone you can then pay further attention merely by recalling that experience to mind. Mostly, that recalling will be triggered by some jog to your attention, as, for example, some situation that reminds you of some aspect of the earlier experience. Often, and perhaps reassuringly, that will be through objects you surround yourself with.

People put photos of close friends and relations — or pets or celebrities — on their desks and around their houses for this reason. But reminders of past attention paid certainly need not be images of the person in question. They can be anything that even slightly triggers recall. Any gift that you keep around can remind you of the gift-giver and turn attention in her direction. Sometimes this can be very subtle, even unconscious. The object need not be material, it could be a tune or an idea, a quote, almost anything. Still, material objects, just because they occupy the space in which we live our lives, are particularly likely to engage our senses and thus serve as reminders. As if they were windows, we pay attention through such objects to the people that seem to us to be behind them.

2. Through the Thing to the Mind Behind

Take the case of this blog, for instance (though it is only a material presence for you while you tune it in on your computer,   unless you happen to have printed out this entry). It’s pretty obvious that you are paying attention to me through it, or, in the terms I commonly use, you are temporarily aligning your mind to mine. If you happen to see the name of this blog on a list you keep, that might remind you to check it, and in even considering doing so, you might very, very briefly return to alignment with me. The same would take place if you had a book written by me and happened to see it in your house.  If you had read only a bit of it, you might be reminded by seeing it to read more. Whether you open it to read on or not, seeing the object in this case clearly would remind you of prior attention to me, and that recall would be an additional act of attention.

Whereas a book or written work quite obviously connects you to the mind of the writer, whose name you can easily discover by examining the book, in the case of many other objects, there is a distinct mind behind it, even if that is all you know. Say you have —  and like having — a Rabbit corkscrew. If so, you are somewhat aligned with the mind of the ingenious person who thought about and found a neat way to solve the minor problem of how to uncork a wine bottle smoothly, elegantly and nearly effortlessly. In having the object, sometimes using it, possibly showing it off to your guests, perhaps prizing it for its esthetic qualities, you are drawing attention to the connection between its unknown inventor and you, and both can gain. (A guest sufficiently impressed might obtain her own, and then bring you to mind a little along with the unknown designer whenever she thinks of or sees the corkscrew. Even if she never buys one or even intends to, every time she opens a wine bottle or sees her own corkscrew, she might  recall yours and you, as well as the Rabbit instigator.) It would probably be difficult to have an iPhone, and not be aware of the connection to Steve Jobs. In a slightly more complex chain, seeing, driving, or riding in a Prius might help focus your attention not only on its unknown design leader but on Al Gore.

3. Mmm-mm Good

Infants start out life generally connecting the objects around them to their parents, and in many cases find an object such as a blanket or pacifier the presence of which seems to include a parent’s attention. Similarly, food represents a parent’s loving attention, at least when it is liked. The whole category known as “comfort food” like macaroni and cheese owes its comforting status to its resemblance to what was provided by a loving caretaker in childhood. If you never were given mac and cheese in your early years, you are unlikely to find it particularly comforting now. (Remarkably, a study of medical students has shown that these college graduates are more likely to trust a drug salesman who plies them with foods like pizza than one who does not. Perhaps more teachers should feed their students if they want them paying attention. That should include medical school professors explaining why drug salesmen have ulterior motives,  in my view.)

In the case of a parent and child, the attention tied with the food passes both ways. The parent is certainly showing attention to the child in feeding her, especially when feeding her what she likes. When you buy macaroni and cheese in a store, most of the attention you might feel coming to you is illusory; the chef who possibly provided the recipe probably doesn’t know of your existence, and if the store is a supermarket probably nobody will be paying much actual attention to you. What you get instead is the illusion of attention coming your way. Very often today, material objects tend to serve as repositories for this kind of illusory attention.

4. Star-infested Underwear and Prada Bags

Children a little older, if they watch children’s TV, want items associated with the apparent stars of these programs, such as Elmo or Sponge-Bob Squarepants. Adults do much the same thing, in a slightly more sophisticated way.  We associate food or songs or even furniture to the original times we paid attention to this particular item or sort of item, and thus to whoever first fed it to is or sang it or showed it to us, or perhaps simply was whom we thought we were paying attention to when we first noticed the item. (For instance, it might have been in an ad associated with a particular TV show, possibly starring a favorite actor, or simply a show we love that came from the mind of a certain producer, whether we know her name  or not.) In the case of food, it can be a chef or cookbook writer or star on the food channel who gets our attention as we eat or even cook.

4. The Future of the Present

As I mentioned earlier, many items that are purchased in America today are bought as gifts. In fact, our lavish level of gift-giving, including not only Christmas and birthdays but all sorts of occasions including weddings, baby showers, Bar Mitzvahs and the equivalent, account for perhaps nearly half of all sales in American retailing. Some of the items are purely functional, of course, and some of the gifts are more or less exchanges between equals or merely what seems to be required.  Yet, even then, the giving is intended as an act of mutual attention. The recipient is supposed to feel that Uncle Clarence, having paid attention to her, thus aligned with her mind, is aware of her needs and wants. Once the gift is given, Uncle Clarence need think of it no more, but as long as it stays out of a dark closet somewhere, the niece so gifted will be paying attention to Clarence whenever she notices or even thinks of  the object in question.

5. Object Lessons

We have been thinking mainly of material objects, but the word “object” is commonly used in two other, more specialized senses.  Many followers of the psychoanalytic tradition speak of “introjected objects,” meaning persons one had paid enough attention to that they are in some sense present in one’s mind at all times. In the terms I prefer, that means that one can easily , and often even unconsciously align or reshape one’s mind  in the image of that personage’s. Psychoanalysts tend to think of “significant others” and especially parents and primary caretakers as the main sources of such objects, but anyone one pays enough attention to will be internalized as well. Meanwhile, in computer programming, there is the quite different notion of semi-independent objects that  in some way can be approached as units “inside” computers. These objets can be connected bits of code that  perform a certain function, or, very often, things such as images that would appear on the computer screen.

While there is no necessary connection between these different usages, my point is that there very well could be, and, if you consider something like a blog or a YouTube video to be an “object,” the connection can be strong.  I suggest that an almost inevitable future direction of computing and the  Internet will be  to make virtual objects that are more like material objects in that one frequently encounters or glances at  or feels as if one is touching them even while doing something quite different. This would make them like objects you have in your home, very much as if they were physically present. They would also be likely to evoke memories of attention paid in specific ways to specific people in the past, and incline you to pay more attention to those same people.

6.  Virtual Things

Simple versions of this already exist: the lists of “buddies” available for instant messaging, or the links to individuals one knows or feels as if one does on the social-networking sites such as MySpace or Facebook. But computer operating systems could go much further, incorporating something rather more like Second Life, or any computer game in which three-dimensional objects of all  sorts seem to exist in a 3-D space you can move through. Such virtual things could remind you of specific “objects (people) to whom one has given one’s attention, and that in some way demand more, just as a half-finished book lying beside your bed might beckon.  It might be a moving image of Beethoven or Bruce Springsteen, invoking memories of their music and maybe a desire to hear more, which might be accomplished , in part by clicking on these images. An image of an Eames chair might connect you with all about Charles and Ray Eames, so the virtual space you inhabit through your computer would radically revise the details of how you pay attention. The virtual world would be a sort of pictorial encyclopedia organized around what you had paid attention to before, but always opening up new avenues as well.

Today, already, many of us  walk around listening to iPods or talking on iPhones or sending and receiving Blackberry messages. So inthe not-too-distant future, we will be even further immersed in the enhanced virtual world, perhaps with virtual objects appearing next to “real” ones through the computerized spectacles we will wear.   Purely attetnional objects then will increasingly replace material things.

As readers of this blog already know, I first came up with the phrase “Attention Economy” to describe the entirely new kind of economic system that I see as increasingly dominating our lives. It is an economy in the sense that it involves allocating of what is most scarce and precious in the present period, namely the attention that can come to each of us  from other human beings. As you also know, ever since Thomas H. Davenport and John C. Beck appropriated my term for their own, different purpose in their book with my title,  my usage has gotten lost in the more unreflective usage they proposed. They do not mean a new kind of economy, basically, but really refer still to the economy based on money, the market etc. This is utterly mistaken. More and more of the activity in which we engage involves paying, passing along, receiving or seeking attention. Even the money economy is ever more tightly an appendage to such efforts, and not anymore a free-standing economy in its own right. (Even D & B’s usage has been further down-graded to refer mostly to the collection of so-called “attention-data” via the Internet, for the purpose mostly, of advertising, a misusage that nonetheless led me to the investigations that will be forthcoming on this blog shortly. )

Overall, the book Davenport and Beck put together with my title has been very hard for me to read, though lately I have gone through it. As it happens, the very makeup of their book reveals they have barely a clue about attention, not to mention writing. (See my draft chapter on attention for a better understanding. An additional annoyance I feel is that book editors inanely tell me that there is already a book “on my subject,” namely D & B.)

The design (of D & B’s book )includes as many distractions as possible on every page, leading to hundreds of reasons to stop reading. Further, like most books with two or more authors, there is no single mind behind it with which the reader can hope to align. Rather, it reads as a middling sort of high-school textbook, put together by a committee and with no real goal other than making the publisher, and perhaps the authors, some money (though D & B are probably smart enough to realize that they want attention as well). As to the contents, the authors occasionally make quite astute comments,  but  their level of self-reflection is amazingly low, while the amount of nonsense they include is quite high.

The book has no overall point or even a consistent point of view.  Unlike even a better-quality high-school text, D & B’s  does not call upon the reader ever to think critically or reflectively or ever to have to struggle to get a key concept.  Any time a flaccid half-thought can be introduced, they put it in, as they bounce around nearly randomly from topic to topic. They never consider just why attention or its economics should be of particular importance now, partly because they seemingly have no concept of history or historical changes, of the kinds of changing motivations that arise at different times or even of the desirability of attention and why that should be.

D&B are both apparently psychologists, and there is of course  a huge but problematic psychological literature on the subject  of attention. (One reason it is problematic: psychologists, in doing experiments on how people or even animals pay attention rarely consider that the experimental subjects’ attention may mostly be focused on they themselves as experimenters. The subject, especially any human one, continually understands she should be doing what the experimenters ask, and that is the primary attention focus. )

D & B  introduce and misuse Abraham Maslow’s 1970’s “hierarchy of needs,” which, taken literally, is nonsense anyway,  just made up without any attempt to verify that needs actually occur in such a hierarchy, or in the order he proposed. It in fact conflicts with much that psychologists and ethologists (students of animal behavior) had already discovered when Maslow wrote.  According to Maslow, the need for food is more fundamental than the need for attention; this is a reductive falsehood. Virtually every mammalian infant has parental attention as at least as primary a need as food; anorexia is only one sign that attention-seeking can come even before physical survival. The historical fact that the Thing Epoch came before the Attention Epoch is a matter of historical and perhaps technical contingency, not biological fact. Of course, D & B don’t have nay particular point to make in introducing Maslow’s thought, other, perhaps, than to impress the gullible reader that they are saying something weighty.

At several points, D & B imply that attention may simply be bought for money, though in other places they make fairly clear that they do not themselves believe this foolishness. They do not ever seem to offer the simple truth that all that can be bought is some chance to get and hold attention, which then depends entirely on the abilities of the would-be attention-getter to connect with the audience; nor do they have a coherent theory as to how the latter might happen.

Perhaps I should not be surprised at D&B’s low-brow approach. Their book is after all intended to be read by business people. The average business person probably coasted through high school without being much interested in any complex thought that did not have to do with making money. The current occupant of the White House was in fact touted as the first President with an M.B.A. (from Harvard Business School, incidentally, the very same school whose Press published D&B).  By now almost everyone can see what a disaster that has been. Despite the aura surrounding this degree,  the number of best leaders in any field — including even business itself — who hold it as their actual  pinnacle of formal education is not high.

I would guess that most business people simply flip through D&B’s book, get the idea that, as they put it “paying attention to attention” is somehow important and probably leave it  at that.  Then, every time this reader notices the book, she gives a tiny bit of extra thought to attention, which is an example of how objects do focus attention. My next blog entry, in fact, will discuss just how material things — of all sorts, but especially  human-made ones — now have as their primary role just such attention focussing role. D&B’s book may not really be worth reading — if indeed it can be read — but it does serve as a model of how a certain part of the actual Attention Economy, while a mystery to them,  operates.

Here’s some Q &A from the Encyclopedia Britannica online:

Quick Facts about Bellow, Saul
Biography
Q: Who is the author of “The Adventures of Augie March”?
A: Saul Bellow is the author of “The Adventures of Augie March”

Q: Who is the author of “Dangling Man”?
A: Saul Bellow is the author of “Dangling Man”

Q: Who is the author of “The Victim”?
A: Saul Bellow is the author of “The Victim”

….
Quick Facts about Plath, Sylvia
Biography
Q: Who is the author of “The Bell Jar”?
Sylvia Plath is the author of “The Bell Jar”
…
Q: Who is the author of “Ariel”?
A: Sylvia Plath is the author of “Ariel”
…..

Q: Who is the author of “The Collected Poems”?
A: Sylvia Plath is the author of “The Collected Poems”

Does the Britannica believe that anyone of any age would be interested in this nonsense? It certainly makes one wonder why Andrew Keen, in his the cult of the amateur: how today’s internet is killing our culture, is quite exercised that the “professional” Brittannica may be replaced by the “amateur” Wikipedia. (In passing, Keen exults that one college’s history department banned references to Wikipedia in papers, but most college teachers would look askance at citations of any encyclopedia, I think. I certainly would.)  But the online version of the Britannica is guilty of a number of quite amateurish moves, the above idiotic Q & A being just some.

Keen does not appear to have made any actual comparisons of the Britannica and Wikipedia, perhaps relying on publicity handouts from the former. He mentions for instance that Albert Einstein, Madame Curie and George Bernard Shaw all once wrote for the Britannica. He neglects to point out that all these authors have been dead for at least half a century. He further ignores the fact that Britannica has been significantly dumbed down since those days. One can, indeed still read Albert Einstein’s article on “Spacetime,” but rather than being part of the current edition, it is described as from “classic Britannica.” It is prefaced