Attention and software

RELease 1.0, March 26, 1992 by Michael Goldhaber

Stars on the net

As noted, the importance of the audience members - that is, how much attention they have accumulated - in creating the audience effect is crucial; a minute of a star's attention is worth much more than a minute of an ordinary person's, because attention circulates: There are many ways stars can pass along some of the attention of their audiences (endorsements, introductions, forwarding e-mail or posting it, name-dropping, invitations, photo opportunities, mentoring). A conference coordinator who filters what gets on also becomes a kind of star; you choose the conferences whose personalities you feel attend to your needs. Software that helps grab such people's attention would obviously be quite valuable, but this audience is of course usually quite sophisticated, and especially reluctant to give out valuable attention too easily.

Meanwhile stars who aren't professional net-watchers will eschew e-mailed demands on their attention; they will and up filtering with extra care. Thus e-mail communities will also have their own inequality of attention.

Nonetheless, network communities will allow people who might be boring to the world at large to find people who share their own special interests, increasing mutual attention between people who otherwise might not find each other. A dud on the cocktail circuit might be a star of sorts, or at least a respected member, in a special-interest forum on bat-watching or dyslexia or the intricacies of PageMaker scripting sequences. Moreover, the audience effect on a listener is magnified when the audience is composed of people the listener respects.

Attention and counterattention

Other uses of e-mail to get attention involve the entrance of outsiders. For example, last June's Release 1.0 proposes a kind of counter-advertising. Instead of looking through ads to find what you want, you announce yourself as interested in something: "I earn $100,000 a year and I'm looking for a fast car." Would-be sellers then approach you through return e-mail with offers. A problem in such e-mail uses is the would-be seller's lack of certainty of your purpose; do you really want to buy or are you just testing the market? (Of course, sellers in stores have that same problem, and they have learned to endure just-browsers. Sometimes the browsers even buy in spite of their intentions.) To test sincerity, sellers might devise additional filters or not treat requests very personally.

ATTENTION IN CORPORATIONS

New groupware such as Lotus Notes and e-mail may help companies increase the coherence and unity of their "personalities;" on the other hand, groupware might turn out to provide new kinds of stages in which individuals within a corporation can star in the world at large at the expense of a unified company image.

Corporations have already become major stages on which to get and hold attention. But the average corporation is not filled with people acting in dramas or comedies unrelated to the business; rather, people try to capture attention through their work, which ostensibly is of value to the business. Yet a company as such is poorly equipped to know what it needs, except through the presentations and evaluations of the very people who can use it as a stage upon which to star.