Wednesday, September 13, 2006

everyone wants attention

From Christopher Allen's blog (link), I just found out that I do, in fact, play MMORPGs, well nearly.

Standardised MMI (Money, Markets, Industry) is transforming into something else.

What? An attention economy. What is that?

Michael H. Goldhaber will be speaking on:

The Real Nature of the Emerging Attention Economy: Seen As a New Level in the Massively Multiplayer Game Known as Western Culture:
Think of the human world as a Massively Multiple Interactive Game (which it is). As interactions change and increase, we are passing to a new level, something that hasn’t really happened to the same depth for centuries. The rules, fundamental values, and just about everything else are diverging from what was familiar in the level characterized by the exchange of Money, the prevalence of Markets and the dominance of Industrial production of standardized goods (call this MMI). The new level also depends on human abilities and desires, but now what matters most is our strictly limited abilities to pay attention and our much greater (on average) desires to receive it. The full passage will take many decades, but we are already well along.

More links:
Michael H. Goldhaber's blog on the attention economy, serialisation of a book he is writing

Michael H. Goldhaber's website. Extract from website:
The move to cyberspace parallels the move from old feudal Europe to the New World of the Americas five centuries ago. That traverse both set the stage for and was an early indicator of the rise of the new market-based/ money-based/ industrial/ mass-production economy. Yet leaders of old feudalism didn't see that. They thought the new space, the new world, was for them; so they set up dukes and earls and viscounts to govern it for them, until they all fell.

Likewise the grand panjandrums of the money economy think the new space today, this space, cyberspace is for them, that it will just be part and parcel of that now-old system. But the parallel is that cyberspace is really arising for different reasons; to give birth to a completely new economy -- an economy that is like feudalism in one way: it has little to do with money. (Though it is unlike feudalism as can be in most other respects.)

No comments: