There’s a lot going on at the moment about Attention and Intention, and with all due respect to the Attention folks, I think you guys got it wrong.
Steve Gillmor and the Attention Gang have launched the Attention Trust and generated a lot of buzz and support from a lot of high profile digeratti.
Unfortunately, while chasing noble dreams, the core premise is flawed.
The rights they are fighting for:
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Property
You own your attention and can store it wherever you wish. You have CONTROL.
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Mobility
You can securely move your attention wherever you want whenever you want to. You have the ability to TRANSFER your attention.
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Economy
You can pay attention to whomever you wish and receive value in return. Your attention has WORTH.
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Transparency
You can see exactly how your attention is being used. You can DECIDE who you trust.
Or more concisely (from the AttentionTrust site):
Every individual has the right to own, store, move and exchange the personal attention data they create.
Unfortunately, this digital age bill of rights lacks any firm foundation in social or physical reality. We neither own nor control our attention. We never have, in any context. We never will. And it would be a bad idea if we did.
Our real-world physiological/conscious making attention is not under our control. It is mediated by a complicated sub-conscious system that decides which symbols–decoded from our environment–deserve a slice of higher-level processing. If the subconscious mind doesn’t think it is important, it doesn’t get any attention. Similarly, the subconscious mind is capable of overriding our conscious attention and directing it somewhere else. We don’t decide to hear the fire alarm. We just do.
This semi-autonomous control is a critical feature. If we could just zoom in to whatever we wanted and exclude our attention from everything else, we would have more theft, more fatal fires, and more car accidents. It’s not to hard to see the evolutionary value in limited control over our attention. Focusing only on what we desire to focus on is an evolutionary dead end.
Clearly, “Attention” is just a metaphor, and I can hear the rebuttal that the physiological etymology of the Attention Gang’s “Attention” isn’t what’s important.
So let’s look at the physical world analog to “Attention,” rather than the physiological. A log of where we go in the physical world would be a pretty good proxy for our Attention, in the Attention Gang definition. In fact, it maps almost perfectly to the clickstream we leave on our digital journeys. No one knows what we actually looked at or what we said, but they can know where we were and what we could have looked at. Just like the web.
We’ve never owned that Attention either. And have we never controlled it. Where we go, in public, is public domain. Anyone can report on it. Take note of it. Even take photos of it. In fact, the public nature of that Attention provides opportunity for community. “Hey, Steve, I saw you at the new history museum the other day with your kids. Amazing isn’t it?”
If we do something in private, that’s a different matter. But walking or driving on the streets, going into public stores or venues, all are aspects of real-world attention that we simply don’t own. The most we can do is control where we go. That’s how we control our attention. Just like on the web.
The actual complaint from the Attention Gang seems to be that companies are tracking us and making money off it!!!
Wow. Is it that companies are making money that pisses you off?
The transitional problem we can’t avoid is that it used to be expensive to collect and collate attention data: you needed detectives to track people’s activities. Online, you just need to collate a large enough pool of data. So, we feel a loss of anonymity and that feels like an invasion of privacy. But in truth, it is just the efficiencies of the digital age processing public expressions of attention.
In fact, our attention isn’t actually all that valuable. Sure, it is a limited commodity. Sure, everyone is competing for it. But it is a fickle mistress. What matters isn’t what catches our eye, it is what we do about it. Go window shopping someday and I assure you the store owners will feel the difference. Have your lover catch you eyeing a potential competitor and you’ll pay for it, but you’ll pay a lot more if caught in flagrante delicto. And somewhere in between these two extremes is when you’re caught with clear intent.
And that brings us to Doc Searls‘ concept of Intention, a much more useful and powerful metaphor for what is happening online.
Intention represents conscious desire and will to action. Attention does not. Intention is under our control. Attention is not.
Even the legal system recognizes this distinction. We can be punished for crimes of intent, in ways that we cannot be for acts of mere “attention.” (Mileage may vary depending on your jurisdiction.)
Intent represents an inherent potential for creating value. Attention does not.
Intention means you want something, a state of the universe that doesn’t yet exist, and that you are willing to act to create it. In constrast, Attention simply means you are observing something. You may not even be particularly interested: for some reason those flaming letters in the sky made you look up. We call that a distraction. However, when people’s desire becomes intention, value generation is immanent.
If you can understand someone’s intent, you can create value by helping him/her realize that intent. In contrast, knowing someone’s attention merely tells you how effective various attention-getting stimuli were. Useful in its place, but a bit circular.
See the difference?
Unfortunately, there aren’t a lot of tools to work with intent. Our clickstream is a high profile tool that has been used by merchants and advertisers on the web for over a decade. Online Attention mining has not only earned its keep, it is attracting a counter-revolutionary movement in the Attention Gang. Steve Gillmor said “Nobody can fight us on this.”
And they are clearly striking some cords. In real ways, the inherent privacy of the physical world is being eroded by the transparency of the digital one. It is a real issue. And I’ll talk more in the future about what we can do about it (short version: Identity Gang good).
But at the moment, we have the AttentionTrust rallying troops with a hollow war cry. I look forward to any progress they might make… tools for user-management of attention will naturally support expressions of intent. But attention itself is woefully overrated and I hope we don’t waste too much energy thinking it is the Holy Grail.
The real opportunity isn’t in a war for enhanced privacy. It’s in finding more efficient, more successful, more meaningful ways to satisfy intent. Including the intent to be private.
