@seth

GOLDSTEIN:   A lot of what I’ve been working on is the historical reconstruction of attention.  As in using technology to reconstruct what people have been paying attention to and playing it back to them, and allowing them to compare and contrast with other people.  What happens when you move the concept of attention forward, into the future. 

Let’s take a mortgage: I search for “refinance” on Google, and then I fill out a form.  What I am telling the form is, “here’s my information, here’s when I want to be contacted, Monday at 9:00.”  If the marketer behaves successfully, then I get a call at 9:00, because I’ve essentially promised to pay attention at 9:00. There’s a contract.  It’s the same when you are enquiring about purchasing a new car.  When are you looking to purchase: a week, a month, three months.

There’s so many atomic units vying for attention, you need to be much more forceful about deciding what you are going to pay attention to.  It has gotten to a point where you actually have to schedule your attention:  I’m going to pay attention to this person or this company at this time.  In a world of TIVO-enabled time shifting, the time requirements go away because it’s fungible, because you can record it and watch it later, but you still have to slot it in somewhere.  There’s a calculation you need to do.  Even though the episode of “24” from two weeks ago automatically got stored, you still have to pay attention to it to receive the benefit of the information.

GOLDHABER:  Right, but many times people never get around to that.

GOLDSTEIN:   True, but there’s always a logic which says “I’m not going to pay attention to this because I need to do this thing instead.”  Or, “I can look at this now because I have a window of time”…

GOLDHABER:  Once you have something on TIVO, your compulsion goes down a great deal compared with “I have to watch it tonight or I’ll never see it.” Once we start having all the programs on the Internet, people’s attitudes towards them are going to shift.  It’s sort of like, I bought this book, it’s on my shelf, and I don’t have to read it right now.  And the same thing keeps occurring.  On the other hand, if you’re reading War and Peace you already sort of know the ending and uh, but getting around to do something, the more it’s just there, it becomes harder.  Unless it’s actually enforced on you the way the education and the canon used to force people to read certain books. 

(thread 5 of conversation with between seth goldstein and michael
goldhaber after oreilly’s attention economy conference, in march of
2006 in oakland)

GOLDSTEIN:   And where does technology come in?

GOLDHABER:  Technology gives us television; technology gives us the Internet as a second step, a very big second step where all of a sudden our potential for seeking attention becomes vastly large.  Our potential for seeking what I call illusory attention also becomes vastly large.  And so if I have a question, the Internet pretends to give me an answer to my question.  I read something that has the answer in it.  So all the technology, well, not all the technology, but a large amount of the technology that we talked about in the context of the ETech Conference has to do with abilities to focus your attention, to get more attention from other people. 

For example, your Vault application allows you to compare your DNA with somebody else’s in a sense.  And then you get attention from them, and they are already attuned to you presumably because you have similar tastes and interests, so you’re focusing attention on somebody who is more easily capable of giving you attention.  That’s sort of a metaphor for what you’re trying to do.

GOLDSTEIN:  It’s not that I’m watching a video.  It’s that I’m letting people watch me watch video.  What technology has done now is to democratize surveillance.

GOLDHABER:  Well, surveillance is…let me see, is surveillance attention?  Yes, it is to some extent.  When you’re looking at somebody, and you’re deciding whether that person looks as if their intention is to leave a bomb there, then you can say that I’m paying them some attention.  I’m trying to understand their intentions.  And you have to accord them some subjective capabilities.  Otherwise you can’t do that because you have to try to figure out what they’re thinking.

GOLDSTEIN:  The notion of surveillance, in general, is structured attention paying.  I believe that innovations in Internet media are like handfuls of white powder dropped over the invisible outlines of consumer intention.  It reminds me of one of those Abbott and Costello skits where they try and find the ghost.  And the only way to find the ghost is to drop a big bucket of paint, and you can only see the outline and okay, there’s the ghost.  You’ve done this with your writing; it’s sort of like you’re now putting on these attention glasses.  We can now see attention as a material substance.  What if attention were visible?  So that when you paid attention,  you emitted a blue light; and we could observe the world in the context of seeing who is paying attention to whom.  We just don’t have those tools.  But technology gets closer and closer…

GOLDHABER:  We have had some tools for a while like Nielson Ratings or simply a large auditorium filled with people.  That’s a very big clue as to who they’re paying attention to. 

GOLDHABER:  The Internet makes it less obvious what people are paying attention to, and you have to work at fine tuning, for example, the kind of thing that you’re doing and producing – this overall silhouette of someone’s attention.  Some of that is misleading in the sense that let’s say some friend of mine develops some illness, and I look up that illness.  That’s not one of my things I really pay attention to most of the time.  I’m paying attention to my friend, but it looks like the illness.  In other words, what comes across is not necessarily what is really going on. 

GOLDSTEIN:   How do you preserve context?

GOLDHABER:  That’s a very tricky thing, and it strikes me that the tool that you have needs to be shaped by the user in a certain way.  That is, if you want to use it in some way to connect to other people who are similar to you, what you have to do is first of all review where your time has gone and to some extent color it in some way of saying, “well red means this is what I’m most interested in, and this is what really grabs me.  And this other stuff is quite secondary, so I’ll give it a different color or something like that.”  In other words, you have to use it reflectively perhaps reflexively even.  It has to be very fine tuned, so looking at Google is virtually meaningless, right?  So looking at a movie theatre’s  Web site is also pretty meaningless, because it doesn’t tell you which movie you’re necessarily focused on.  So there are ways that one could color it in if one so chose. 

GOLDSTEIN:   So there’s a service called Crazy Egg that’s launching as a tool for web analytics.  It creates heat maps to tracks mouse gestures on the screen.  So, what you see is your Web site, and you see blocks of color for where most people’s attention is being focused. 

GOLDHABER:  Yeah, well that kind of thing.  It could even trace eye movements ultimately.  But, that would be indicative.  People could paint it in themselves.  They could say, if they’re interested in doing this, they would have no problem looking in detail at their mouse clicks and saying “this is highly satisfying to me.”  This is what I really want, and this is what I’m paying attention to.  Of course, people could lie also, but that would be interesting in some ways.  In other words, just taking a raw record is not so revealing.  It’s sort of like whatever that system was that determined that the TV was on a particular channel, but didn’t tell you that anyone was watching. 

(thread 4 of conversation with between seth goldstein and michael
goldhaber after oreilly’s attention economy conference, in march of
2006 in oakland)

GOLDSTEIN:   And where does technology come in?

GOLDHABER:  Technology gives us television; technology gives us the Internet as a second step, a very big second step where all of a sudden our potential for seeking attention becomes vastly large.  Our potential for seeking what I call illusory attention also becomes vastly large.  And so if I have a question, the Internet pretends to give me an answer to my question.  I read something that has the answer in it.  So all the technology, well, not all the technology, but a large amount of the technology that we talked about in the context of the ETech Conference has to do with abilities to focus your attention, to get more attention from other people. 

For example, your Vault application allows you to compare your DNA with somebody else’s in a sense.  And then you get attention from them, and they are already attuned to you presumably because you have similar tastes and interests, so you’re focusing attention on somebody who is more easily capable of giving you attention.  That’s sort of a metaphor for what you’re trying to do.

GOLDSTEIN:  It’s not that I’m watching a video.  It’s that I’m letting people watch me watch video.  What technology has done now is to democratize surveillance.

GOLDHABER:  Well, surveillance is…let me see, is surveillance attention?  Yes, it is to some extent.  When you’re looking at somebody, and you’re deciding whether that person looks as if their intention is to leave a bomb there, then you can say that I’m paying them some attention.  I’m trying to understand their intentions.  And you have to accord them some subjective capabilities.  Otherwise you can’t do that because you have to try to figure out what they’re thinking.

GOLDSTEIN:  The notion of surveillance, in general, is structured attention paying.  I believe that innovations in Internet media are like handfuls of white powder dropped over the invisible outlines of consumer intention.  It reminds me of one of those Abbott and Costello skits where they try and find the ghost.  And the only way to find the ghost is to drop a big bucket of paint, and you can only see the outline and okay, there’s the ghost.  You’ve done this with your writing; it’s sort of like you’re now putting on these attention glasses.  We can now see attention as a material substance.  What if attention were visible?  So that when you paid attention,  you emitted a blue light; and we could observe the world in the context of seeing who is paying attention to whom.  We just don’t have those tools.  But technology gets closer and closer…

GOLDHABER:  We have had some tools for a while like Nielson Ratings or simply a large auditorium filled with people.  That’s a very big clue as to who they’re paying attention to. 

GOLDHABER:  The Internet makes it less obvious what people are paying attention to, and you have to work at fine tuning, for example, the kind of thing that you’re doing and producing – this overall silhouette of someone’s attention.  Some of that is misleading in the sense that let’s say some friend of mine develops some illness, and I look up that illness.  That’s not one of my things I really pay attention to most of the time.  I’m paying attention to my friend, but it looks like the illness.  In other words, what comes across is not necessarily what is really going on. 

GOLDSTEIN:   How do you preserve context?

GOLDHABER:  That’s a very tricky thing, and it strikes me that the tool that you have needs to be shaped by the user in a certain way.  That is, if you want to use it in some way to connect to other people who are similar to you, what you have to do is first of all review where your time has gone and to some extent color it in some way of saying, “well red means this is what I’m most interested in, and this is what really grabs me.  And this other stuff is quite secondary, so I’ll give it a different color or something like that.”  In other words, you have to use it reflectively perhaps reflexively even.  It has to be very fine tuned, so looking at Google is virtually meaningless, right?  So looking at a movie theatre’s  Web site is also pretty meaningless, because it doesn’t tell you which movie you’re necessarily focused on.  So there are ways that one could color it in if one so chose. 

GOLDSTEIN:   So there’s a service called Crazy Egg that’s launching as a tool for web analytics.  It creates heat maps to tracks mouse gestures on the screen.  So, what you see is your Web site, and you see blocks of color for where most people’s attention is being focused. 

GOLDHABER:  Yeah, well that kind of thing.  It could even trace eye movements ultimately.  But, that would be indicative.  People could paint it in themselves.  They could say, if they’re interested in doing this, they would have no problem looking in detail at their mouse clicks and saying “this is highly satisfying to me.”  This is what I really want, and this is what I’m paying attention to.  Of course, people could lie also, but that would be interesting in some ways.  In other words, just taking a raw record is not so revealing.  It’s sort of like whatever that system was that determined that the TV was on a particular channel, but didn’t tell you that anyone was watching. 

(thread 4 of conversation with between seth goldstein and michael
goldhaber after oreilly’s attention economy conference, in march of
2006 in oakland)

GOLDSTEIN:   Is there a link between Attention Economy and attention deficit disorder?  For me, it’s personal.  My mom was very distracted, and I learned from an early age that it’s okay to read at the table.  It took a lot of work to get her attention.  I’m a good entrepreneur, in part, because I’m good at getting attention.  I wonder if I have an attention deficit disorder and a predisposition to multi-tasking because I was born with it; or if those qualities were developed by my circumstances.

GOLDHABER:  What you’re talking about is becoming more the case with a lot of kids, and a lot of people in general.  It’s hard to get attention.  On the other hand, you’re exposed at a very early age to TV, in which people are getting intense amounts of attention.  You’re paying a lot of attention, but you’re also aware that they have audiences who see the little children and see whoever.  Your parents have more and more competition for their own attention, and on the other hand, the children get more and more examples of attention-getting when they’re sort of supposedly off on their own, but really watching TV or doing something like that.  So, exactly the sort of training that you got I think is becoming more common, and I think it does lead to, you know, you go to school first of all, and there’s someone there who demands your attention, right? And at the same time you have been trained to try and seek your own attention, you know?

What is Attention Deficit Disorder?   I don’t know.  There’s obviously a biological difference because you’re acting different, and there’s always a biological difference when you’re acting different.  But the fact of the matter is that underlying that is, you want attention and you’re not getting it.  And so the deficit is partly the deficit that the teacher must need your attention, and you’re not paying it to him or her.  And so, I do think that in a way it is a learned thing, very much, and that it’s a product of the culture, and it developed.  We’re doing everything to keep on heightening these problems and to encourage people to compete very hard for attention, to really put more and more effort into figuring out ways of getting it, to be more and more out there and kind of…

GOLDSTEIN:   How does that relate to mirror neurons?

GOLDHABER:  Well, you know, one thought was after all the teacher’s doing things, the teacher’s active. You have to be able to focus on the teacher enough to figure out what those actions are and what they mean to some extent.  And if you’re doing that, you will presumably be having the mirror neurons higher when you get what the teacher’s doing and in other words you understand the intentionality behind the teacher’s actions.

GOLDSTEIN:  So, it’s only when I pay attention that I can learn because otherwise I’m not allowing the signal imprint on myself.  So, arguably then the ADD gets in the way of learning because it doesn’t allow you to pay attention long enough for (what you’re paying attention to0 to inform you. 

GOLDHABER:  Right, and it’s meaningless noise in effect until you can focus on it enough to see that the teacher is another person and that person is somehow like you and that you could become like that person too.  So it’s the kind of bonding that goes on when you pay attention that you’re turning your mind, you’re shaping your mind according to that other person.  Perhaps one could say that the child who doesn’t have enough attention at an early age and, so he or she jumps around constantly, has partly taken the wrong lesson from everything that he or she has learned from early life which is “I don’t have time to focus on anyone. And I don’t even completely recognize that that other person’s a person like me.  So I can’t focus on the other person because I’m totally occupied with trying to get attention for myself and I don’t see that coming from anyone directly.”

(thread 3 of conversation with between seth goldstein and michael
goldhaber after oreilly’s attention economy conference, in march of
2006 in oakland)

GOLDSTEIN:   Is there a link between Attention Economy and attention deficit disorder?  For me, it’s personal.  My mom was very distracted, and I learned from an early age that it’s okay to read at the table.  It took a lot of work to get her attention.  I’m a good entrepreneur, in part, because I’m good at getting attention.  I wonder if I have an attention deficit disorder and a predisposition to multi-tasking because I was born with it; or if those qualities were developed by my circumstances.

GOLDHABER:  What you’re talking about is becoming more the case with a lot of kids, and a lot of people in general.  It’s hard to get attention.  On the other hand, you’re exposed at a very early age to TV, in which people are getting intense amounts of attention.  You’re paying a lot of attention, but you’re also aware that they have audiences who see the little children and see whoever.  Your parents have more and more competition for their own attention, and on the other hand, the children get more and more examples of attention-getting when they’re sort of supposedly off on their own, but really watching TV or doing something like that.  So, exactly the sort of training that you got I think is becoming more common, and I think it does lead to, you know, you go to school first of all, and there’s someone there who demands your attention, right? And at the same time you have been trained to try and seek your own attention, you know?

What is Attention Deficit Disorder?   I don’t know.  There’s obviously a biological difference because you’re acting different, and there’s always a biological difference when you’re acting different.  But the fact of the matter is that underlying that is, you want attention and you’re not getting it.  And so the deficit is partly the deficit that the teacher must need your attention, and you’re not paying it to him or her.  And so, I do think that in a way it is a learned thing, very much, and that it’s a product of the culture, and it developed.  We’re doing everything to keep on heightening these problems and to encourage people to compete very hard for attention, to really put more and more effort into figuring out ways of getting it, to be more and more out there and kind of…

GOLDSTEIN:   How does that relate to mirror neurons?

GOLDHABER:  Well, you know, one thought was after all the teacher’s doing things, the teacher’s active. You have to be able to focus on the teacher enough to figure out what those actions are and what they mean to some extent.  And if you’re doing that, you will presumably be having the mirror neurons higher when you get what the teacher’s doing and in other words you understand the intentionality behind the teacher’s actions.

GOLDSTEIN:  So, it’s only when I pay attention that I can learn because otherwise I’m not allowing the signal imprint on myself.  So, arguably then the ADD gets in the way of learning because it doesn’t allow you to pay attention long enough for (what you’re paying attention to0 to inform you. 

GOLDHABER:  Right, and it’s meaningless noise in effect until you can focus on it enough to see that the teacher is another person and that person is somehow like you and that you could become like that person too.  So it’s the kind of bonding that goes on when you pay attention that you’re turning your mind, you’re shaping your mind according to that other person.  Perhaps one could say that the child who doesn’t have enough attention at an early age and, so he or she jumps around constantly, has partly taken the wrong lesson from everything that he or she has learned from early life which is “I don’t have time to focus on anyone. And I don’t even completely recognize that that other person’s a person like me.  So I can’t focus on the other person because I’m totally occupied with trying to get attention for myself and I don’t see that coming from anyone directly.”

(thread 3 of conversation with between seth goldstein and michael
goldhaber after oreilly’s attention economy conference, in march of
2006 in oakland)