20190120

Sun 20 Jan 2019 09:30:06 AM EST Slept from eleven to six without waking. High of thirteen (!) today and mostly sunny. Goals: - Start planning Nanook as firewall Done. - Go to bed by ten Woke up this morning thinking about something that sort neighbors the idea of an attention economy. Call it something like "attention utility". Haven't decided if this is in any way novel, or just a reframing of the original idea. My (mis?)understanding of the attention economy was: multiple producers of information compete for attention from a pool of information consumers, like viewers choosing television shows. But maybe that's a misapprehension, or at least a failure to appreciate the flip side. Maybe the attention economy idea is actually more like what I sleepily intuited as "attention utility": an individual consumer chooses how to spend their limited attention budget for competing information products. A corollary is that some some information products better reward our attention than others. A thousand hours spent on chess will be more rewarding than spending that thousand hours on tic-tac-toe — chess has an inherently higher attention utility. Is attention utility inherent or even explicit in the attention economy idea? Aspects of attention utility: depth, density, accessibility. How much of the attention value resides in the artifact itself? Consuming a product has a roughly fixed cost in absolute time, but some consumers will extract more value. Technical products might require a substantial educational background, for example. A simple example of economic value, or not so simple? …something, something post-scarcity… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_(economics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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 > He noted that many designers of information systems incorrectly represented their design problem as information scarcity rather than attention scarcity, and as a result they built systems that excelled at providing more and more information to people, when what was really needed were systems that excelled at filtering out unimportant or irrelevant information. Does the attention economy idea really not say much of anything new then? Economics is always the exchange of goods for currency. Time was always a facet of currency. My ability to consume was always limited. At root, currency is always just an abstraction of time. Attention economy doesn't really seem to mean anything more that an extreme glut of supply. Is there anything novel in attention-saving products? Like, a Roomba is labor-saving. "Information" is typically defined as being some sort of conclusive knowledge of a higher order than raw data. Does the idea of an attention-saving product differ from the information-data distinction in kind or only in degree? Attention savers: - Filters, like web ad blockers (or product ratings might even be considered a filter). - Summarizers, like automatic text abridgers. - Audio — an audio book allows for divided attention; this might be generalized into any "attention splitting". Also, voice command interfaces (Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa). - Any reliable, automated monitor+alert — even as simple as an alarm clock — saves us having to repeatedly check something. Cleaned bathroom, vacuumed. Chatted with Jay on Signal. Watched Bird Box on Netflix. Sarah Paulson is likable. Pretty good. Boy and girl. Ha. The ending felt a little tonally wrong. Maybe my expectation are just colored by I Am Legend. Music by Trent Reznor. No walk (stayed out of the cold) but I jogged around the apartment for ten minutes. Watched anime. Servings: grains 6/6, fruit 3/4, vegetables 5/4, dairy 2/2, meat 0/3, nuts 2/0.5 Breakfast: carrots, banana, cucumber, orange, coffee Lunch: bread, cheese, tomato, apple Dinner: left-over beans and rice and vegetables 145/94

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