Attention and software

RELease 1.0, March 26, 1992 by Michael Goldhaber

You can factor all this into software pricing. Marketing and upgrading strategies should differ for different attention-productivity curves. A product that's easy to learn (or imitate) should get conventional" pricing, highest at introduction and then progressively lower, together with some substantial sales effort at the outset. On the other hand, a product that's hard to learn but highly productive should start with low initial pricing or a broad beta campaign; pricing can be maintained thereafter (but probably not increased) through increasing sales efforts, and continued upgrades.

ELECTRONIC COMMUNICATIONS AND ATTENTION

E-mail is the pc technology that seems to hold the most promise for democratizing attention. It overcomes the problem suggested by the old populist saying, "Freedom of the press belongs to those who own one." In other ways to get attention, such as appearing on TV, writing for magazines or publishing software, you have to win the approval of the gatekeepers to have a shot at the audience. By lowering the threshold sharply, e-mail provides new opportunities for recognition to people with unconventional viewpoints and modes of expression, and with varying levels of articulateness or presence.

In their current form, e-mail and bulletin boards and other electronic communities provide relatively low-cost message sending and the capability of addressing large numbers of recipients or readers. They are also minimalist: short ASCII messages, no fancy packaging, no emphatic type, no theme music - nothing obvious to set up an audience effect that separates stars from non-stars as message senders. Still, just because it is so strippeddown, this medium is not equally good for everyone. It favors those who can express themselves briefly in typed words - or short programs - and is of little help for more subtle or non-verbal messages.

Of course, with everyone having his own "press," demands on attention quickly increase; increased supply of attention-getting material meets constant demand. (Personally, I belong to the WELL, but I use it sparingly, because conferences divided into hundreds of topics with hundreds of entries each are usually just too daunting. I haven't found a good way to filter out what might interest me from what doesn't.)

Gatekeepers of attention

One possible e-mail gatekeeping system that seems to preserve democracy is text-search software; mail recipients or scanners of the net can use it to find items of interest. Of course, search criteria will include not only keywords and the like, but authors, editors or endorsers. Anyone my star is a fan-of, I'm a fan-of." You will want to know what your stars have to say, or whom they're reading.

Thus, gatekeepers in some form will come to the fore to filter public information and to ward off junk e-mail, after all. One can hope though that the gatekeeping can be more democratic and egalitarian than for older forms of attention-getting, which were based on either rigid bureaucratic institutions - e.g. government as a whole or the public school system (in endorsing textbooks or ideas) - or vast private capital (Rupert Murdoch or TimeWarner). These gatekeepers tend to be especially receptive to stars or would-be stars comfortable with established interests; perhaps the net" will afford less advantage to incumbency.