Your attention, please
Camilo Ramirez
What is interesting in the blogosphere? Your attention. That was I heard the folks at attentiontrust discuss at a dinner that Niall Kennedy set up, the first night of the Blog Business Summit.
First, it was your links: people wanted your links, to build a fan base. Then these were googled, and you had a nice search engine worth a bunch of billions. Now, Steve Gillmor posits that they want your attention. And it makes sense, since they already own the rest of you.
Think about this: you search through them, you buy through them, you meet people through them. All the activities that take place in an economy, all the activities that define your social group, your interaction map, are being mediated through a couple of big players.
These are the ones that, by virtue of their offerings, are being the de facto government of whatever virtual piece of land you think you occupy on your virtual wireless world.
Remember the Metaverse? Or Habitat? These were both a concept and a concrete offering that were based in the premise that people actually develop connections through a computer interface, and that that world becomes as real as the one they inhabit.
Nowadays we have Terra Nova, documenting the reality of the MMORPGs and the real economies of all involved; sweatshops are possible, and violence is real, as evidenced by the actualization of virtual vendettas: The attention we devote to the world we create is as concrete as the piece of silicon in front of you.
Because out of our electronic interaction we create a world to which we adapt; through the use of all these gadgets we redefine frontiers and communities, and effectively, that which defines our attention is what we, as humans, consider our world and our particular conception of it. It is through that interaction that we get to define both cosmology and ontologies, creating both mythologies and geographies of interaction.
What does it mean for me? What does it mean for the future?
Strikingly, I am seeing a place in which there is a disconnect based on the perception of the world, an increasingly elevated barriers as variety of languages among different groups and technologies: we lose our interface with the disconnected, because all our interaction occurs through one particular connection, through one particular set of providers: our spoken language is superseded by a protocol, and the place yields to the brand.
We choose the group, but involuntarily isolate those that lack the connection and the jargon.
So, instead of a global village, we are back to the tribal organization, where localization proceeds through attention and time availability.