What I have been reading and investigating is this notion of the Attention Economy. If you look in my delicious links you will see the things I have been marking (I must add, though I am a great believer in delicious and the abilities of it, I don't think I use it to it's full potential :( you will notice a huge lack of information in my bookmarks and a bad habit of not grouping my tags). The thing I have been musing over is the very different ideas surrounding the Attention Economy.
When I first read the description in the course notes I immediately thought of the value of my personal attention and the attention that people pay to me. I was thinking in a web2.0, Twitter, Facebook, Google, PLN (personal learning network) sense and I immediately thought of Siemens and connectivism. Though I did think a little bit about SEO (search engine optimisation) I must admit, first and foremost was this idea that the information (the product in attention economy) that I was after when I paid my attention or attention was paid to me (attention is the currency in the attention economy) was stored in the minds and previous experiences of my wider personal learning network.
What I am starting to formulate for my assignment is that I have identified three main ideas discussed on the web relating to the Attention Economy:
- Value of your own attention – Personal Value – using the meta data of your browsing history to increase your ability to search and view the Internet.
- Value of employees’ attention – Organisational Value – harnessing the information stored in the browsing history (Internet, local network and personal computer terminal) of your employees in order to gain a better understanding of how they spend their time at work.
- Value of readers’/visitors’/customers’ attention – Popular Value – harnessing the information about attention of the readers of your blog or website visitors in order to make money
- Value of friend’s/colleagues/peers attention – Educational Value – harnessing the information stored in the connections you have with people to gain knowledge and establish a solid Personal Learning Network.
So what do you think? Am I crazy to try to connect Siemens and Goldhaber? Has anyone else thought about this, blogged about it, read about it? Can I do it in 500 words? Is this the thrust of my uni course? If so I'd like to know.....
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3 comments:
Not crazy at all. It's a sound argument, and I'm sure it'll be interesting to research and finally read. It's probably also something relevant industry types would be interested to know about. We already know how keen they are for every iota of our attention. :D
It's a good premise for a study!
it is interesting that the big bugaboo in the educational context at primary & secondary levels is ADD which I only spell out here because of its aptness - Attention Deficit Disorder. If "It's the economy stupid" then starting out with a deficit of the currency of that economy is burdensome. Of course, many ADDers may just be paying attention to something else.
It is an interesting area to think about - the conflation of attention as a currency & the concepts we explored in CCK08.
:)
I suspect you may struggle to argue something so complex in 500 words of which you'll lose about 200 words in the intro and the conclusion. Perhaps you could posit the idea as a direction for future research -just saying-.
You've probably read the text of the speech by Goldhaber that started this line of thought. If not, it's here.
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