Social Media and the Attention Economy
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Implications of the Attention Economy on Social Media/Computing Design and Use. Cliff Lampe (@clifflampe)
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Transcript of Social Media and the Attention Economy
Implications of the Attention Economy on
Social Media/Computing Design and Use.
Cliff Lampe (@clifflampe)
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
Lightning in a bottle: Karen Klein
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
Promises of social computing
Collective action
Civil society
Cognitive surplus
Crowd sourcing
Persuasive technology
Social Capital
*plus all that money stuff...
Consumer with attention
Producer wants attention
Proposition 1:Attention is Scarce
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.
How we spend our time = behavior
Why we spend time = motivation
Choice Frameworks
Economics = utility
Psychology = motivation
Media Choice Theory
William James - Cognition, emotion, habit
Proposition 2:Choice is cognitively expensive
Herb SimonBounded Rationality
Satisficing
The attention Economy
"...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
Attention Economy
“There is something else that moves through the Net, flowing in the opposite direction from information, namely attention.”
- Michael Goldhaber
Units of Attention
Ethan Zuckerman - The Kardashian Unit of Attention
Proposition 3:The current social media environment is *not* scarce.
Social media aggregates and (could) overwhelm
danah boyd
peer production = more “infomunication” than we can attend to
Michael Bernstein
Twitter Zen
Proposition 4: People have to figure out how to spend their attention
*and get you to spend your attention
Proposition 5:Social computing systems design and us is about attention management
Content
Social
Architecture
Attention management strategies
Individual strategies
• Heuristics• Bias - Selective exposure• Uses and gratifications• Rational choice• Social influence• Etc.
Habit
Robert LaRoseSocio-cognitive theoryHabit = low cost choice mechanismHabit vs. addictionForming / breaking habits
“Slashdot is for old dudes” theory
Content Strategies
Propaganda
Advertising
Fear Mongering
Persuasion
Social strategies
Social Signaling
Judith Donath Assessment signalsJoe Walther
WarrantingCues
Berrypicking?
“signals” in situ
System design
Content
Social
Architecture
Attention management strategies
Why attention matters for social computing system research and practice
Proposition 6:Attention underlies our understanding of social computing systems
Research on social computing systems
Research dominated by “single channel” studies
Common theories don’t account for overload well.
Example: social capital
Benefit of interacting with others in a social network
Dependent on “social grooming”
i.e. spending attention on others
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?
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?
Cliff sometimes has bad ideas.
Breadth - what isn’t attention?
Overlap - king of all science!
Obvious - no duh?
Testable - how should we approach this?
Final Plea
We can change the world for the better.
Because we *can*, we must.
Thanks!
Cliff Lampe
Twitter: @clifflampe
Slideshare: clifflampe
