P2P Book of the Week: All the World a Stage: The Emerging Attention Economy, Why It’s Coming, Its Deep Difference from the Familiar Market-Money-Industrial Economy, and What the Changes Mean For Our Lives, by Michael H. Goldhaber

Michael Goldhaber is releasing this new book on his blog, and we invite you to pay some of your attention to it, noteworthy and relevant to our P2P themes as it is. His focus and central theme is “attention”, looked at in provocative new ways given the world in which we now live. Before I lose yours, however, I’ll let Mr. Goldhaber speak for himself, in this first excerpt from his book, which he has been kind enough to send us. (Three more exerpts follow this week.)

I live in the hills of Oakland, California. In my wanderings, I often sight a doe deer with two fawns moving through the trees and underbrush. Making frequent eye contact, the mother looks back and waits for her fawns, making sure they are headed in the right direction before she moves forward. Meanwhile, the fawns sense their mother’s concern or patience or anxiety. They see what she browses on and what she avoids, and they eventually follow suit, generally learning how to be in the world by trying to be like her, as assured by the constant interchange.

The deer are exchanging something, something that passes from the fawns to the doe, and also from the doe to the fawns. This something is neither thing, commodity, substance, action, nor behavior. Most simply put, it is attention. The example affords us a chance to look at attention from a slightly unusual perspective. Attention is not just an event occurring in one isolated brain; rather it primarily passes between two beings — two minds, if you will.

A human baby begins life utterly helpless; about all it is capable of doing for itself directly is getting attention, whether by crying or smiling or cooing, or just by looking cute. Only through thus holding the attention of others is a baby able to survive. When she cries, her parents are left with trying to put a meaning on that crying, often by running through a small list of what they can imagine might be going on for her: hunger, wet diapers, needing to be burped or hugged, sleepiness, pain or illness, and little more at first. Over time, responding that way, they shape their baby’s mind, and are rewarded by the sense that they are thus involved in the shaping of a new human as much as by the baby’s smiles and coos upon recognizing them. The baby clearly feels rewarded when she gets her parents’ attention, and, growing older, clearly relishes having whatever control can be gotten over the parents’ minds, and thus their actions. Still later, most children relish getting the attention of other adults and of their peers.

……

Having your attention at this moment means that right now as you read I have some degree of control over your mind, which means, in a certain sense my mind has expanded into your body and that of any other readers. Why, indeed, would I write if I didn’t want others to think my thoughts, and thus to expand my own mind’s sway? In principle, you might be reading this after my death; if so, I can envisage my mind briefly returning to life in yours — a whiff at least of immortality, and an alluring prospect. If I’m still alive as you read this, there are all sorts of ways I might relish having your attention and benefit from it. These ways enlarge every day under present circumstances.

While scarcity limits the amount of attention available, nothing limits the amount that one can desire. You can only eat so much food or engage in so many changes of clothing in a lifetime, but there is nothing bodily to prevent you from taking in the full attention of the largest audience you can possibly get. Of course, for most people throughout history, that largest conceivable audience would have been far, far smaller than today’s global one — at least a couple of billion strong— that would-be attention getters now might go after.

We can label as a star whoever has the attention of large audiences — say far more individual attention than she can normally ever hope to repay. Likewise, those of us in the vast majority, who are on the attention-paying end, whose attention accounts never quite balance because we pay out more attention than we get, let’s label as fans. (This extends the notion of stars and fans outside the realms of entertainment and sports to every conceivable field in which garnering large amounts of attention might be possible. Still, whatever the field, the analogy to the more familiar sorts of stars and fans is not much of a stretch.)

We have turned some sort of corner, and that demands a clear explanation. Standard economists loosely try by alluding to the rise of the “service sector,” but this is pretty much circular reasoning, since services are defined as any kind of work that doesn’t connect directly to material goods production of some kind — which takes us right back to where we started. Saying we have turned to services doesn’t explain why we should have made that turn, nor what motivates us now.

Other explanations, which also amount to little more than labels, seem equally lame. There is the “information economy”, the “knowledge economy,” and, vaguest of all, the “post-industrial” economy. As these terms tend to be used, they still take for granted that the underlying economy is still exactly that of money-market-industrialism. What was the cause of the huge rise in demand for information, knowledge or simply being post-industrial? Since information, for example, is hardly in short supply, it makes little sense to suppose that what primarily might drive us is its scarcity. (Let me add that, in the years since I first introduced the term “attention economy,” a number of people have adopted the term while also taking for granted that the same underlying economy as we were used to was still operating, thus completely missing my main point.)

So why do so many people seemingly work so hard, and what are they doing? This is easy to answer if we begin to consider that maybe they are involved in a growing attention economy. Given that attention is scarce, as the competition to get some rises, the effort involved in seeking attention has to grow too, to the point that it takes up all available time.

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