attention, media, value and economics

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is not there yet. The question we should ask ourselves is: "What is a reasonable project for an

economy of cyberspace?" Well, reasonable here means first that it will have to be consistent

with the substance of operations, the concrete steps of producing, distributing, accessing,

perceiving contents. This is the missing layer in both Goldhaber's and Ghosh's positions: there

is a technical mediation, a medium by which attention can be searched for and can manifest

itself. The nature of this medium is a key input to understand how some form of value can

emerge from the Web for instance [ 2 ] .

Medium: the missing layer

In another paper [ 3 ], I defined a medium as the "successful association between ways of

producing documents (including "live" documents) and situations for their perception

(technical apparatus such as a stereo, environments such as the movie theatre, functions such

as the fast forward on a tape player, human perceptive habits and culture)." In a longer text, I

would have added the distribution, content categorisation and retrieval mechanisms, and the

funding, clearance and transactions mechanisms, etc. These last aspects are still unstable or

unknown for an immature medium such as the World Wide Web [ 4 ] , but we know already

more or less what is its technical substance. It is claimed in the following that this technical

substance very much determines what type of valuing processes can be applied to it.

The Web as a medium and as a meta-medium

The substance of the Web can be characterised by four properties, related to the underlying

protocols and standards HTML and HTTP:

the fact that the user pro-actively accesses contents through a shared networked

infrastructure,

the fact that information is structured in relatively small chunks (measured in perception

time and space not necessarily in data) between which one navigates through links,

the fact that this information is basically page structured illustrated text, with illustrations

ranging from typography, layout, still images to animation, and indexing and retrieval

being based on structured text processing, and

the fact that there is no large complexity barrier to the production / posting of contents,

resulting in something like a continuum between attention grabbing and attention giving

instead of the clear cut line of some other media.

Of course, about every reader is going to challenge this list. Did I stop reading and using the

Web before everyone started speaking about push technologies, broadcasting on the Web,

Java and applets? Wrong. I maintain that if one takes an anthropological view on the Web, and

takes field notes about what Web surfers actually do, perceive and manipulate, what one will

see will fall under the above categories. Of course, Web surfers painfully access some

time-based media contents or larger pieces of contents, but they switch to other medium

perception modes to perceive them, including printing Goldhaber's text to read it and scribble

notes on it. In some cases, Web surfers will even switch to ordering and paying for physical

goods, delivered by a completely different infrastructure.

What this means is that the Web is at the same time a medium in its own right and a

meta-medium: an access mode and promotional layer for other media and exchange

processes. These two aspects cannot be separated: the possibility to have live links to pieces

of contents in other media is an essential component of the attractiveness of the Web as a

medium.

Manifestations of attention

When an anthropologist monitors me surfing the Web, how do I manifest my attention to some

Aigrain http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/arti

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particular piece of contents, and by extension to the people who produced and posted it? First

of all, I manifest, during navigation (including the use of a search engine), my preference for

this particular piece of contents, based on how it is made visible to me when I choose a link

leading to it preferably to other accessible links. Even more, I use some of my time perceiving

it within the particular constraints of the Web medium, and eventually I initiate actions such as

saving it, printing it, sending an e-mail to an author or Webmaster, or forwarding the link to

friends.

Preference

Preference, attention time, and initiated actions are three manifestations of attention that have

been very well described by Goldhaber, but he does not elaborate on the consequences for the

emergence of value. Possibility to manifest preference is a prerequisite of the emergence of

economical value, it indicates that something like a market can be organised. It also indicates

that how this market is organised is an essential issue, and that control of information access

presentation (from which preference can be expressed) by some particular interests can lead

to major distortions. If essential to the emergence of value, preference is not directly

translatable in value: it leads to other manifestations of attention.

Time

Attention time is obviously one way of valuing attention on the Web. The only reasonably

sustainable economies of similar media (online services with pro-active access) are attention

time-based. There is nonetheless a great reluctance of many to use time as a source for the

valuing process in a future Web economy. This reluctance is partly based on a confusion and

partly points to a major problem.

Confusion exists between what is acceptable as a valuing process for perception time and what

is acceptable for initiated actions. When some piece of digital information is copied, the copier

acquires something whose potential value bears little relation to the time spent copying it. This

dis-equilibrium has caused its share of problems but this has nothing to do with the

foundations of the Web economy itself. Copyright and author rights management can address

this issue as long as we get a clear foundation for value in each medium [ 5 ] .

There is another factor leading many to reject perception time as a foundation for valuing

attention.It is clear that the rapid spread of the Web has been made possible by the zero

marginal cost of the use (and some time the end-user cost as a whole [ 6 ] ) of the Web itself.

When one focuses on the meta-medium layer of the Web (as in most debates on electronic

commerce), one is tempted to consider the Web as a whole as a global utility, and to look

essentially for indirect valuing mechanisms. The most naive version of this view states that the

Web does not need any infrastructure [ 7 ] . Other recognise the existence and the further

need for a complex infrastructure, of which the network itself is only a very small part [ 8 ] ,

but would like to maintain its free marginal cost, for instance by funding it by advertising or by

making all or part of it a public utility.

If we were able to separate the meta-medium part of the Web of its medium part, this could

be quite fine, and we could focus on further investigating the benefits and drawbacks of the

various indirect funding mechanisms. But if it is also applied to the media themselves (because

one cannot separate them from the meta-medium), it could be the worse mistake since the

birth of the television economy. As was demonstrated by Goldhaber [ 9 ] and by myself [ 10 ]

, it would restrict the attention economy to a very small part of the global economy, by

constraining its growth to the availability of a resource which cannot grow faster than the

global economy.

Transition

The real problem is the transition to a number of new attention economies. There will be many

media competing for our attention, not one single universal medium, and the properties of

these media will lead to different foundations for the valuing of attention, and different

possible strategies for the transition to this new form of value.


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Forms of attention

Just as there are many media, there are many forms of attention. Listening to the radio is

something I do mostly when cooking, when eating breakfast, when driving my car. In these

instances, the radio gets only part of my attention, and it gets a kind of attention which is

maybe not easy to make value of except in an indirect way. By listening to the radio, I may

discover some new music (new to me, that is) which I may want to purchase. I am happy

paying the annual licence fee which makes radio possible. Sometimes at night, I listen to a

concert broadcast. I just sit down and listen. The music gets a very large part of my attention.

But still it is a kind of attention which would not be easy to make direct value of. Let us

consider how this is done in our embryonic attention economy. There is an incredible contrast

between the 0.05 ECU / hour (and zero marginal price) I pay for listening to radio (appliance

excluded), and the 20 ECU / hour I willingly pay to listen to a concert performance. Goldhaber

would analyse this difference as resulting from the difference in intensity of illusory attention I

get.

Attention, ownership and action

But let's look at it closer. There is also an incredible difference between the cost I pay for

listening to radio and the 1.2 ECU / average hour I pay for listening to CDs. And here intensity

of illusory attention cannot explain it. The explanation lies in two other notions which are key

in my opinion to the successful valuing of attention: ownership and action. Ownership is

important in its own right but even more so because it sets the basis for action. Goldhaber has

pointed out that if I have your attention, I can direct your attention to someone else. But we

should also look at it from the other side. If I give Goldhaber attention, I might be able to get

attention from others. The primary way of doing this is just to set a link to Goldhaber's site on

my home page, but this is very primitive and somewhat noise producing. But I can also write areview of Goldhaber's forthcoming book and post it on a site such as Amazon.com. Or can I

can, as I am doing it now, develop a piece of intellectual work building on Goldhaber's ideas.

The possibility of getting attention because one has given attention is the process which can

make the attention economy happen, and on which its sustainable growth can be based. This

possibility is intimately linked to the possibility of action originating in attention. When I invite

friends to my home, after dinner we may sit in the living-room listening to music from a

compact disc. I will choose this CD using two types of attention, the one I gave before to

music, and the one I am giving to my friends to anticipate their preferences or to induce a

pleasurable surprise. This is why I pay much more for a CD than for listening to the radio:

because owning the CD opens the possibility for me to initiate actions at a chosen time. The

operators of the Nordic Downloadable Music Site understand this factor; their slogan is:

"downloadable digital copies of songs which you can download once and own forever [ 11 ] ."

Setting the ground for action

I choose the example of recorded music because this is one case in which, apart from a limited

number of professional environments, very little apparent connection exists between attention

giving and actions to obtain attention. The growth of the attention economy will be possible

only on the basis of perception and creation tools and infrastructure, that allow for the

seamless integration between giving attention and creating artefacts which deserve it [ 12 ] .

Creating these tools and a sufficiently widespread literacy [ 13 ] in each medium will be a long

process, due to many difficulties, the most important of which being the contradiction between

the time needed to elaborate anything worthy of attention and the time intensity pressure on


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Title by Author.

First Monday , Volume 2, Number 9 - 1 September 1997

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attention, media, value and economics

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