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Tuesday, May 09, 2006

Competing for attention


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Central to the attention economy is the idea that multiple media are competing for our (scarce) attention. Web 2.0 and micromedia are accelerating this trend. Bubblegen suggests : “By networking digital media, the incentives for prosumers to produce a huge plethora of forms of micromedia pop into existence; blogs, podcasts, vlogs, machinima, fan films, and cosplay are just a few examples. The relationship between technology and media relationship has undergone a phase shift: from one to one, to many to one.” Well, yes, I’m OK with this - and the sentence that concludes. But as well as this, I’m interested in juxtaposing these ideas with what it’s actually like to consume/produce in different environments. My attention rests most easily with web-based materials that hold relevance or interest - and they’re not necessarily the visually exciting or densely linked ones. But, my inability to read screen text in a sustained or detailed way continues to surprise me (I’ve posted about this before). So I’m taking an experiential approach – regularly reading (and writing) around the blogosphere, alongside reading Henry James (why James, because I recall that the entry-cost attention was pretty high) and interspersing with Helen Simpson - who has a writing style that’s really immediate. I suppose if everything’s competing for my attention, I want to understand something about the characteristics of that attention.

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