{"id":360,"date":"2006-05-08T00:01:11","date_gmt":"2006-05-08T06:01:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/wp\/?p=360"},"modified":"2006-05-08T00:01:11","modified_gmt":"2006-05-08T06:01:11","slug":"no_direction_ho","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=360","title":{"rendered":"Selling ourselves"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Wall Street Journal on Friday ran an email exchange<\/a> on the future of the internet between Vint Cerf and Esther Dyson, which has stirred a couple of interesting comments. Dyson writes about the “attention economy” and how most discussions of it miss the point that Michael Goldhaber made in introducing<\/a> that now hackneyed term:<\/p>\n

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Mr. Goldhaber has trouble getting attention for the mirror he is holding up. Most commentators see the attention economy as the in<\/i>tention economy, where attention = intention (to buy). That version of the attention economy is all about sales leads and monetization of attention, and radical ideas include the notion of users getting paid for their attention, whether in the form of surfing behavior or a willingness to read email.<\/p>\n

But Mr. Goldhaber’s thesis is far more radical, and people aren’t really paying … attention yet. It’s that attention has its own intrinsic value, independent of money. People go on the Web in search of attention; they don’t want to give it as much as get it. People judge their own worth by their number of friends (Friendster) or fans (MySpace) or business contacts (LinkedIn). They may tell you that they’re seeking business success, but oftentimes they seem to value contact lists in the thousands for their own sake.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Picking up on Dyson’s remark, Andrew Keen calls<\/a> “the future of media … partly a Darwinian struggle to rank higher than others, and partly an existential struggle to prove one’s own identity.” He sees in it further evidence of the “digital narcissism” that he believes forms the core of the new Web 2.0 media culture.<\/p>\n

Scott Karp sees<\/a> in Goldhaber’s idea support for his belief that participative media will be difficult to “monetize” through advertising:<\/p>\n

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In media 1.0, brands paid for the attention that media companies gathered by offering people news and entertainment (e.g. TV) in exchange for their attention. In media 2.0, people are more likely to give their attention in exchange for OTHER PEOPLE\u2019S ATTENTION.<\/p>\n

This is why MySpace can\u2019t effectively monetize its 70 million users through advertising – people use MySpace not to GIVE their attention to something that is entertaining or informative (which could thus be sold to advertisers) but rather to GET attention from other users. Why is it so appealing to MySpace users to be able to post messages publicly on other users\u2019 sites? Because they can GET attention as a function of GIVING it.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This echoes something else Dyson says: “Most users are not trying to turn attention into anything else. They are seeking it for itself. For sure, the attention economy will not replace the financial economy. But it is more than just a subset of the financial economy we know and love.”<\/p>\n

I fear that to view the attention economy as “more than just a subset of the financial economy” is to misread it, to project on it a yearning for an escape (if only a temporary one) from the consumer culture. There’s no such escape online. When we communicate to promote ourselves, to gain attention, all we are doing is turning ourselves into goods and our communications into advertising. We become salesmen of ourselves, hucksters of the “I.” In peddling our interests, moreover, we also peddle the commodities that give those interests form: songs, videos, and other saleable products. And in tying our interests to our identities, we give marketers the information they need to control those interests and, in the end, those identities. Karp’s wrong to say that MySpace is resistant to advertising. MySpace is nothing but advertising.<\/p>\n

Fred Scharmen, in his essay<\/a> “You must be logged in to do that!,” deciphers the essence of MySpace and of so-called social networks in general:<\/p>\n

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The component parts of the online soul are small pieces of marketing data. The crucial elements of the [MySpace] user\u2019s profile are lists of media – favorite bands, movies, television shows, and books. Marketing also defines the terms through which users interact with members of their peer group, sharing new music, links, and video clips …<\/p>\n

Just as online social networking sites have found ways to turn the users into the distributers for the advertising medium, these sites have also created their venues in such a way that the users themselves provide all of the content that draws the traffic to the site. The set of content that is monetized on Myspace includes the users’ identities in the form of the profile pages that they fill out, it includes the users’ interactions in the form of the online conversations they have with their friends and the bulletins that they send out to keep in touch, and Myspace also claims ownership of any original work that is uploaded to the site by the users.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Far from existing outside the financial economy, the online attention economy is its fulfillment, its perfection. It’s the place where marketing ceases to be marketing and becomes life.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Wall Street Journal on Friday ran an email exchange on the future of the internet between Vint Cerf and Esther Dyson, which has stirred a couple of interesting comments. Dyson writes about the “attention economy” and how most discussions of it miss the point that Michael Goldhaber made in introducing that now hackneyed term: […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-360","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/360","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=360"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/360\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=360"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=360"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=360"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}