The False Question Of Attention Economics

A few posts have emerged recently that recapitulate the well-worn arguments of attention scarcity and information overload in the real-time social web. So, here at start of 2010, a new decade, I will try to write a short and sweet counter argument from a cognitive science/anthropology angle.

But first let me recount the two pieces that prodded me to this.

David Armano wrote a piece called The Human Feed: How People Filter Signal From Noise:

In the earlier days of the internet, the Web became a place quickly saturated with information and we needed something to beat the information into submission. Search engines were born—and as a result the internet became more productive.  Today, the internet is still about information—but it's also about attention. There is a surplus of information, and a meta surplus of marketing in every form. For individuals, we are experiencing the opposite. We have a deficit in attention.

We've long exceeded the capacity of information that we can absorb and retain. We all suffer from technology induced attention deficit disorder, bright and shiny object syndrome and short term memory loss.

Bookmarks don't help—now we need tools like del.icio.us.  And of course we need Google more than ever. And there's once more thing we need. We need each other to make sense of it all. We need a Web with a human touch to help guide us through the fragmented, landscape of the internet. And that's where the human feed comes in. If you sign up to a service like Twitter, Friendfeed, or even subscribe to the del.ico.us links of real live people who you trust and look to for insights, you'll find that a wealth of information will be brought right to you vs. you having to go out and hunt for it.

 
David Armano

Just for history's sake, the origin of the 'poverty of attention' meme was Herbert Simon, way back in 1971:

...in an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.

 
Herbert Simon

Likewise, just around the same time as Herbert's comment, Alvin Toffler wrote Future Shock, in which he suggests that the speed up of modern society was basically driving us crazy, like soldiers suffering from shell shock, now called combat stress reaction. In other words, "too much change in too short a period of time." One major component of future shock -- to which he ascribes most of the major problems of our day -- is information overload: too much information to make sense of, with the implied context of a future shock sped-up world.

 

And, going for the oldest philosophical natterings about this, Diderot, in 1755 wrote,

As long as the centuries continue to unfold, the number of books will grow continually, and one can predict that a time will come when it will be almost as difficult to learn anything from books as from the direct study of the whole universe. It will be almost as convenient to search for some bit of truth concealed in nature as it will be to find it hidden away in an immense multitude of bound volumes.

 
Denis Diderot by Louis-Michel van Loo

So, Armano has joined that long list of philosophers, suggesting that there is too much to grasp, things are going too fast, and the techniques that we have used in the past are failing.

Another post, this one by Thomas Peterson, makes more or less the same case, although employing the stark metaphor Slaves of the Feed to suggest we have become entrapped by our tools:

Let’s start with what most people probably can agree. Information is accumulating online. The amount of available information is increasing at an exponential rate, some say it doubles every second year. This mean that any illusion of being able to stay up to date with everything that is going on is utopian and has been probably since Guttenberg invented the press.

Most people know this, yet that is exactly exactly what we all seem to be doing.

There is no shortage of content aggregators and aggregators of aggregators, daily developed to give us a better overview of all the sources of information we have subscribed to and found ourselves now depending on.

This has resulted in an endless stream of articles, news, pictures, websites, products, updates, comments of updates and comments to these comments, being delivered to us second by second that each of us have to deal with.

Constantly checking our feeds for new information, we seem to be hoping to discover something of interest, something that we can share with our networks, something that we can use, something that we can talk about, something that we can act on, something we didn’t know we didn’t know.

It almost seems like an obsession and many critics of digital technology would argue that by consuming information this way we are running the danger of destroying social interaction between humans. One might even say that we have become slaves of the feed.

 

At every point in human history there have been philosophers claiming that the current civilization has fallen from an earlier halcyon state, that the ways of the ancients had been lost, and modern innovations and practices threatened to destroy all that was good in society and culture.

This thread of Western philosophical discourse -- attention scarcity, future shock, information overload -- has become the conventional wisdom. It seems to be based on unassailable and unshakable logic. But what is that logic?

The framing of the argument includes the unspoken premise that once upon a time in some hypothetical past attention wasn't scarce, we didn't suffer from too much information, and we had all the time in the world to reason about the world, our place in it, and therefore to make wise and grounded decisions. 

But my reading of human history suggests the opposite. In the pre-industrial world, business people and governments still suffered from incomplete information, and the pace of life always seemed faster than what had gone on in earlier times. At every point in human history there have been philosophers claiming that the current civilization has fallen from an earlier halcyon state, that the ways of the ancients had been lost, and modern innovations and practices threatened to destroy all that was good in society and culture. 

So, this is merely the most recent spin on an ancient theme, as the Diderot quote indicates.

Imagine for a moment that it is true -- there was an idyllic time back in the Garden of Eden -- when we knew all that was necessary to know, and we had all the time in the world to make decisions. Maybe. I am betting it is a shadow of our psychology, the same sort of magical thought that believes in guardian angels and reincarnation. Just a slightly more intellectual superstition.

Another thread of this argument is that human beings don't have the capacity to winnow out the information we need given the torrent of information streaming past, which is in a sense Diderot's conjecture. But we really don't know what we are capable of, honestly.

The human mind is exceptionally plastic, especially when young people are exposed to media and symbolic information systems at an early age. This is why those that take up the study of music, or programming, or karate at a young age, and study for 10,000 hours gain mastery of these skills, which can be accomplished before reaching 20 years of age. And even older people can have significant improvements in cognitive skills -- like juggling or flight simulation games -- with relative small exposure.

I suggest we just haven't experimented enough with ways to render information in more usable ways, and once we start to do so, it will like take 10 years (the 10,000 hour rule again) before anyone demonstrates real mastery of the techniques involved.

These are generational time scales, people. And note: the only ones that will benefit in the next ten years will be those that expend the time needed to stretch the cognition we have, now, into the configuration needed to extract more from the increasingly real-time web.

The most difficult argument to make is the following:

• We have always been confronted with a world -- both natural and human-made -- that offers an infinite amount of information.
• We have devised cultural tools -- like written language, mathematics, and the scientific method -- to help understand the world in richer ways, over and above our emotional and inbuilt cognitive capabilities.
• We are heading into a post-industrial world where information systems and the social matrix of the web have become the most important human artifact, one that is repurposing everything that has come before.
• We will need to construct new and more complex cultural tools -- things like augmented reality, massively parallel social tools, and ubiquitous mobile connected devices -- and new societal norms and structures to assist us in using them effectively.
• Many commentators -- including Armano and Peterson -- allude to the now generally accepted notion that we will have to leverage social systems (relying on social tools) to accomplish some part of the heavy lifting in whatever new schemes we develop for understanding this new world. But it has only been 10 years since we've been talking about social tools, and less than five that we had anything like real-time streaming applications or tools involving millions of users. It's early days.

In the final analysis, I am saying there is no 'answer' to those that say we are overloaded, that we are being driven mad by or enslaved to the tools we are experimenting with, or that there is some attention calculus that trumps all other value systems.

I suggest we just haven't experimented enough with ways to render information in more usable ways, and once we start to do so, it will like take 10 years (the 10,000 hour rule again) before anyone demonstrates real mastery of the techniques involved.

Instead, I suggest we continue experimenting, cooking up new ways to represent and experience the flow of information, our friends' thoughts, recommendations, and whims, and the mess that is boiling in the huge cauldron we call the web.

There is no "answer" since they are asking a false question, one that hides preconceived premises and biases. Starting out with the assumption that we have moved past our abilities to cope with the stream of information, and therefore something has to give, is a bias.

In part, this arises from the desire of economists like Simon to find what is scarce, and ascribe a value to it. Or to media and PR types, who want to control discourse, and fill it with their 'messages' and influence social opinion or buying behavior.

But from a cognitive and anthropological viewpoint, these concerns are something like Socrate's argument that learning to read and write would debase the cognition of those that had become literate. In his era the ability to remember thousands of verses of poetry was the baseline for being enculturated, and he believed that something fundamental would be lost if we were to rely on books instead of our memories. He believed that writing was the fall from a better time, a lesser way to think and understand the world.

But I think that the rise of the social web, just like writing, the printing press, and the invention of money, are not really about the the end of what came before, but instead are the starting point for what comes next: richer and more complex societies. These technologies are a bridge we use to cross over into something new, not a wrecking ball tearing down the old.

There is no golden past that we have fallen from, and it is unlikely that we are going to hit finite human limits that will stop us from a larger and deeper understanding of the world in the decades ahead, because we are constantly extending culture to help reformulate how we perceive the world and our place in it.

Comments

[Zach Tumin]

I've been reading Selznick's Leadership in Administration (1957) - and before McLuhan or Toffler, but contemporaneous with Simon, he wondered/worried, "how does modern information technology, which vastly increases the opportunity for quick reactions, affect the competence of an organization to develop and sustain strategic perspectives?" A forerunner to the attention debate. Smart dude...

[Armando Alves]

This all sounds a bit pretentious-developed world point of view. When the rest of the world is still submerged in digital illiteracy, a few digerati claiming we're overwhelmed with information is a bunch of egocentric bigotry.

Yes, those immersed on social technologies might suffer from this problem. But it's like farmers saying they suffer from bugs on their crops. Does anyone but them really care?

[Martijn Linssen]

Challenging again Stowe, thank you!

I totally agree with you on what I call perpetuum evolution of perception: remember the first trains and people telling us that the human body couldn't endure speeds over 25 miles per hour. We poor humans keep having to readjust our definitions because our perceptions change - while at the same time the only thing that is changing, is the velocity at which things happen

Regarding attention: we crave for it from the moment we leave the womb and become disconnected, with the unfortunate goal to return to something we have outgrown or wasn't meant to last anyway. But it is our main topic in life, and very dear to us

David to me seems to be making the point that we still need the human factor to make sense of it all. Whether it's data, information or knowledge that we have at our hands: it all keeps changing along the way, and we change along with it. Not to keep up with it all, but to make it to the next level. Just like you say: richer and more complex

And I think the "infrastructure" for such is already there: http://tinyurl.com/ye7939r

[Stowe Boyd]

Armando -

Uh... Diderot and Simon are not digerati. This is a theme going back a long way. And discussing the issues besetting the developed world is not bigotry. If you'd like to discuss digital illiteracy, I'm open, but that isn't what this post was about. You're like a man running into a dance yelling "How can you be dancing when children go to bed hungry in Armenia!"

[Hello_World]

Steve

Thanks for a great essay I do in fact agree with you.

Unfortunately I think you got my point all wrong or perhaps I wasn't formulating it very well.

My point was not to paint a dystopian picture of information. What I am after was new ways to approach information.

All that I am saying is that information is important and that we should find ways to better deal with it.

I don't know about you but I would be more than happy to get a better ability to go through more information.

So just to be clear. I am not a complainer I like technology and find that they way out of our reliance on information is through it not around it.

[Armando Alves]

The theme is going back a long way indeed, but i'm pointing to the cultural relativism of the issue. We should look into it, but realize that for many people it is not that big of a problem: they're not subscribed to dozens of feeds or having to manage hundreds of followers on Twitter.

As Marting says, quoting David, we need the human factor, and information overflow is pushing some of us back to the physical shared spaces (Farmers markets, for instance).

We should strive to understand the problem (as those digerati and non-digerati did) and make the path easier for those hundreds (Armenian or not) that are getting in touch with social technologies. From neuroscience to behavioral economics, educating people on how to cope with attention deficit is something worth discussing.

[Dwayne Phillips]

Lots of knowledge readily available? And the problem is ....

[Stowe Boyd]

Hello_World - But if you start with the assumption that we are overloaded, your thoughts about information representation are skewed to that purpose.

[Stowe Boyd]

Armando - Point away. But my experience has been that what the folks at the edge are doing becomes mainstream a few years later.

As I said, I don't buy the overload meme: its not pushing us off line or anything else. It's more like cocktail party chatter when people complain about how long it takes to get their car fixed, or the long lines at Shake Shack.

There is no attention deficit: that's the point of my post.

[Hello_World]

Steve

I don't.

I start with us being primitive in our ability to consume information. You only referenced the first small part of my essay.

By all means tell me how I am wrong in suggesting that there might be other ways to deal with information than reading a feed item by item.

I want to be able to consume more information not less.

I want to be kept aware of what is going on on a bigger scale not just reading about X did Y.

I want information to be like a conversation between friends. A friend would never tell me everything unimportant thing he did, he/she would tell me what they knew I found interesting.

What part made you assume that I am talking about attention deficit?

I am talking about how to get MORE information, better information HOW to get information based on the feeds.

You are putting me in a category I don't belong in.

[Hello_World]

Not everyone makes their living writing articles and reading feeds. I for one only do that as a part of my job which is running design and media agency.

[Terry Heaton]

Stowe, this is a brilliantly presented argument. Kudos. Whenever I hear people bemoan "information overload" or call out teenagers for multitasking, I'm reminded that humans only use 10% of our brain capacity. Perhaps that's the future realm of scientific exploration.

[stowe boyd]

Hello_World - But you keep framing the discussion of these issues in terms that lead to weighting things in the wrong way. I do not 'consume information' -- that is a metaphor based on consumption of food or other tangible goods. When I read or listen to music or watch a movie, I am not consuming anything. I am experiencing it, I am thinking and so on, but its not consumption. I am not driven by a fundamental physiological need like hunger, but some philosophical desire, or a work project, to search for some information, or reason about something, or communicate with people in some activity. I am not discounting that there is a lot of information out there, or millions of wasy to communicate with people, but I am making the case that we have always had far too much available information. That hasn't changed.

[Hello_World]

And my essay is not disagreeing with that.

Saying that I am framing it the wrong way is in itself wrong as I am not concerned about attention deficit (I don't even use that expression in my essay)

I am concerned about the primitive state of how we deal with information.

We can only read one blog post at a time

you can only reed one tweet at a time

you can only listen to one piece of music at a time

you can only watch one movie at a time.

These are just facts whether you call it consumption or experiences.

You are arguing about a philosophical point that I am not making.

I look at this the same way that Google was looking at a different way to approach search.

That doesn't mean that they where afraid of attention deficit but simply that they saw that the then current model of search didn't work so they tried another way to approach it.

The issue to be is about the way we deal with information and the way we mine information.

So I am looking at other ways to approach it.

That I state the obvious (which you agree with, that there is a lot of information/data) has nothing to do with my philosophical position on information.

Hope that clears things up a bit.

[Hello_World]

Terry Heaton

Humans use 100% of our brain capacity.

The 10% claim is a myth, probably invented by someone who only used 10% of their brain capacity :)

[twitter.com/mturro]

Stowe - I tend to agree with you - humans have always and will always be faced with a surplus of information. If I read you right you seem to be saying that even as the supply of available information grows our wetware adapts and grows in ways that let it handle the increase. I totally buy that.

However, what intrigues me is pace. It seems to me that the amount of available information increases at an exponential rate - essentially a mirror of exponential growth in human population. Given that you subscribe to the 10,000 hour theory (me too) would you accept that we are perhaps now entering a space on the curve in which the growth of information is outpacing our biological capacity to effectively process it? In other words, do we have 10,000 hours to adapt before what we are adapting to is obsolete? Are we falling behind our traditional pace? Are we subconsciously sensing an inability to keep pace and experiencing it as crisis? Could this potential outpacing be feeding the strength of the scarcity meme? Might it be possible for the plasticity of our wetware to advance so that those 10,000 hours become 5000, or 2500? Does technology have a role there?

Thanks for this post and all of the great thinking you've been doing lately - it's truly fun stuff. Looking forward to you thoughts.

[Chuck Peters]

You and Thomas Petersen (Hello_World) seem to be talking past each other.

The issue is not whether people are overloaded with information. The "job to be done" is to make is easier for people to connect with relevant communities, and ease commercial transactions.

I want to be able to have much better "wayfinding". Given my interests, location, intention and mood, I would like some help on what to do next. I don't want to go back to look up scores of "packaged' bits of information and try to sort things out.

I would like an intelligent guide to information. That guide is not just an application to pull from existing information, as that existing packaged information is not structured to flow best into my needs at the moment.

So, we have to start by creating information differently in the first instance, in a structured and heavily tagged manner, so that my "tunable" application, on whatever screen I might have (smart phone, tablet, car screen or monitor) can easily display trusted,relevant and meaningful information that is helpful to me in that moment.

Dan Conover gets to some of this basic overhaul needed in http://xark.typepad.com/my_weblog/2009/03/news-futures-a-whats-next-overview.html

Thanks for keeping this conversation going. But I agree with Thomas Petersen, you are putting him into the wrong category, as I read his essay. He is asking the fundamental question - "How do we create an information network so that it is helpful to individuals looking forward, toward their next goal?"

Thanks,

Chuck

[twitter.com/Armano]

A very spirited case against the thinking that the premise of information overload is overstated or inaccurate. But, the premise of my thinking was pointing more toward the reliance of each other to make meaning from what's out there. Filtering the feed—through other humans. Hence the human feed. It's one of the reasons why Twitter is so popular and since we were both on it fairly early, we understand the appeal of this.

[Stowe Boyd]

Armano - I agree that we need new cultural structures and better tools to make better sense of the swirling world before us. So I buy the spirit of your goals. But I just don't buy the premise that we have to do this because we are overloaded. We are principally involved in enriching the social fabric of the web, and the information floating through it is not the only thing that matters: the people matter, and probably more than the snippet of info.