A talk on implications of the "Attention Economy" for social media and social computing.

1. Implications of the
Attention Economy on
Social Media/Computing
Design and Use.
Cliff Lampe (@clifflampe)

5. Attention and Social
Computing
Soliciting, managing,
and consuming
attention is a major
enterprise in social
computing design and
use.
*BUT* Attention is
fickle at the moment

6. Lightning in a bottle:
Karen Klein

12. Lessons from Karen
• Bullying sucks
• Story occurred over multiple channels,
both social and mass
• Story unfolded quickly
• Very little control over this story was
held by anyone
• Attention is a blunt object

13. Promises of social
computing
Collective action
Civil society
Cognitive surplus
Crowd sourcing
Persuasive technology
Social Capital
*plus all that money stuff...

14. Consumer with attention
Producer wants attention

15. Proposition 1:
Attention is Scarce

16. Attention and Time
Attention = time
Time is a finite resource.
1440 minutes per day,
divided amongst all
opportunities.
LONG history in social
science on how we choose
to spend our time.

17. How we spend our
time = behavior
Why we spend time =
motivation

18. Choice Frameworks
Economics = utility
Psychology = motivation
Media Choice Theory
William James - Cognition,
emotion, habit

19. Proposition 2:
Choice is cognitively
expensive

20. Herb Simon
Bounded Rationality
Satisficing
The attention Economy

21. "...in an information-rich world, the
wealth of information means a dearth
of something else: a scarcity of
whatever it is that information
consumes. What information consumes
is rather obvious: it consumes the
attention of its recipients. Hence a
wealth of information creates a
poverty of attention and a need to
allocate that attention efficiently
among the overabundance of
information sources that might
consume it. " - Herb Simon

22. Attention Economy
“There is something else that
moves through the Net,
flowing in the opposite
direction from information,
namely attention.”
- Michael Goldhaber

23. Units of Attention
Ethan Zuckerman - The
Kardashian Unit of
Attention

25. Proposition 3:
The current social media
environment is *not*
scarce.

28. Social media aggregates
and (could) overwhelm
danah boyd
peer production = more
“infomunication” than we
can attend to
Michael Bernstein
Twitter Zen

30. Proposition 4:
People have to figure
out how to spend their
attention
*and get you to spend your attention

31. Proposition 5:
Social computing
systems design and us
is about attention
management

32. Content
Social
Architecture
Attention management strategies

33. Individual strategies
• Heuristics
• Bias - Selective exposure
• Uses and gratifications
• Rational choice
• Social influence
• Etc.

34. Habit
Robert LaRose
Socio-cognitive theory
Habit = low cost choice
mechanism
Habit vs. addiction
Forming / breaking
habits
“Slashdot is for old dudes” theory

35. Content Strategies
Propaganda
Advertising
Fear Mongering
Persuasion

36. Social strategies

37. Social Signaling
Judith Donath
Assessment signals
Joe Walther
Warranting
Cues
Berrypicking?

38. “signals” in situ

39. System design

42. Content
Social
Architecture
Attention management strategies

43. Why attention matters for social computing
system research and practice

44. Proposition 6:
Attention underlies our
understanding of social
computing systems

45. Research on social
computing systems
Research dominated
by “single channel”
studies
Common theories
don’t account for
overload well.

46. Example: social capital
Benefit of interacting
with others in a social
network
Dependent on “social
grooming”
i.e. spending attention
on others

47. Example: Social Search
Facebook and Twitter
offer sweet
opportunities to seek
and share information
How useful is that if
you can’t make a bid
for the attention of
your network?

48. Implications
How do people really decide
to spend their attention?
Heuristics, rational
choice, habit
What about cross channel
choice?
Consumption vs. production?
Local vs. global optimization?

49. Cliff sometimes has bad
ideas.
Breadth - what isn’t
attention?
Overlap - king of all
science!
Obvious - no duh?
Testable - how should we
approach this?

50. Final Plea
We can change the world for the better.
Because we *can*, we must.

51. Thanks!
Cliff Lampe
cacl@umich.edu
Twitter: @clifflampe
Slideshare: clifflampe