Literacy Work in the Reign of Human Capital by Watkins Evan;

Author:Watkins, Evan;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fordham University Press

CHAPTER 3

Star Power

At the beginning of the 1990s Google had not yet made a fortune in the attention market (and had not yet confounded common business sense) by giving away services for which other enterprises charged a considerable amount. The infamous attention-tracking ads of remarketing initiatives were still a ways into the future. Throughout the decade, however, there were abundant Internet examples that seemed to demonstrate the importance of attention as a primary and still underexploited resource available to those best able to track attention and measure its flows. Within this attention-centered business logic, the initial mistake made by theorists of an information society such as Yochai Benkler is a failure to locate the significant variable of scarcity. If indeed resources become valuable when they are scarce, then surely there is something very odd about the constant reiteration that we live in an information economy. So far from being scarce in the economic meaning of the term, information seems plentiful and proliferating all the time, to the point that nobody can really begin to process all of what is already out there. And that, of course, is the point. Information is valuable only when it can be put to use, and it cannot be put to use unless someone pays attention to it. According to this logic, it makes a lot more sense to think of current circumstances as an attention economy than as an information economy. In comparison to information, which seems plentiful and cheap, attention seems scarce and therefore valuable.

In The Attention Economy: Understanding the New Currency of Business, published in 2001, business writers and consultants Thomas Davenport and John Beck echo neoclassical orthodoxy in their emphasis on scarcity: “Economies based on any scarce good have certain recognizable characteristics. For example, every economy has markets in which its key goods are bought and sold. No, there’s no New York Attention Exchange, but markets for attention do exist both inside and outside organizations. Both on the Internet and in more traditional media like television, viewer attention is exchanged for money thousands of times a day. Anyone who wants to sell something or persuade someone to do something has to invest in the attention markets” (9). Their claim is that attention has always been a decisively important element of market exchanges. It’s just that now it has visibly emerged as a marketable currency in its own right.

The significant conceptual innovation that brings the idea of an attention economy into this business focus requires a reversal of the mushy epistemology of commonsense empiricism in the United States. Rather than thinking of attention as simply something that goes on “in here,” in your own head, you must learn to treat attention as if, like any other resource (minerals, water, information), it is also available “out there.” Obviously everyone must allow for the special conditions of attention as a resource. It is not exactly possible to stake out a territory in the same sense as with, say, valuable mineral deposits. Nevertheless, while attention

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