Designing attention economies
29
Managing Your Social Portfolio: Applying Research into Attention Economics Adrian J. Ebsary @AJEbsary AdrianEbsary.com
-
Upload
adrian-j-ebsary -
Category
Social Media
-
view
49 -
download
0
Transcript of Designing attention economies
Managing Your Social Portfolio: Applying Research into Attention Economics
Adrian J. Ebsary@AJEbsary
AdrianEbsary.com
Attention Economics, Defined
@AJEbsary
About.me/AJEbsary
Attention Economics, Defined
@AJEbsary
About.me/AJEbsary
“Now, when we speak of an information-rich world, we may expect, analogically, that 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 comes 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.” – Nobel Laureate Herbert Simon
Attention Economics, Defined
@AJEbsary
About.me/AJEbsary
“This thread of Western philosophical discourse — attention scarcity, future shock, information overload — has become the conventional wisdom. It seems to be based on unassailable and unshakable logic. But what is that logic?
The framing of the argument includes the unspoken premise that once upon a time in some hypothetical past attention wasn’t scarce, we didn’t suffer from too much information, and we had all the time in the world to reason about the world, our place in it, and therefore to make wise and grounded decisions.” – Stowe Boyd
Attention Economics, Defined
@AJEbsary
About.me/AJEbsary
“… to formulate an allocation problem properly, ways must be found to measure the quantities of the scarce resources, […] we can measure how much scarce resource is consumed by a message by noting how much time the recipient spends on it.”- Herbert Simon
Attention Economics, Defined
@AJEbsary
About.me/AJEbsary
Attention Economy = any network where attention is exchanged between more than one node
Attention Economics = the study of the flow of attention within a network and the systems that organize and redistribute this attention between nodes
Attention-Tracking Technology
@AJEbsary
About.me/AJEbsary
Attention-Tracking Technology
@AJEbsary
About.me/AJEbsary
Attention-Tracking Technology
@AJEbsary
About.me/AJEbsary
Why attention economics?
@AJEbsary
About.me/AJEbsary
“Research indicates that perceived social isolation (i.e., loneliness) is a risk factor for, and may contribute to, poorer overall cognitive performance, faster cognitive decline, poorer executive functioning, more negativity and depressive cognition, heightened sensitivity to social threats, a confirmatory bias in social cognition that is self-protective and paradoxically self-defeating, heightened anthropomorphism, and contagion that threatens social cohesion.”- Cacioppo and Hawkley, 2009
“Results revealed (1) that the experimentally induced increase in status updating activity reduced loneliness, (2) that the decrease in loneliness was due to participants feeling more connected to their friends on a daily basis, and (3) that the effect of posting on loneliness was independent of direct social feedback (i.e., responses) by friends.”- Deters & Mehl, 2010
Why attention economics?
@AJEbsary
About.me/AJEbsary
“The results showed that Facebook users tend to be more extraverted and narcissistic, but less conscientious and socially lonely, than nonusers.”- Ryan and Xenos, 2011
Our results show that after Facebook browsing, individuals high in narcissism raised their public self-awareness while those low in narcissism reduced their public self-awareness. We also found that individuals low in narcissism perceived their friends’ lives to be betterthan their own and consequently experienced negative social well-being and emotion. However, this effect did not occur for individuals high in narcissism.- Qiu, Lin and Leung, 2010
Why Attention Economics?
@AJEbsary
About.me/AJEbsary
“… we find that emotionally unstable individuals are more likely to post self-relevant information online and write about their emotions when doing so – a tendency not observed offline. Further, such emotional writing, paired with the potential to receive social support helps them repair well-being after negative experiences.” – Berger and Buechel, 2012
@AJEbsary
About.me/AJEbsary
=
Is hedonic design the best strategy?
Botella, et al. 2012
Designing Attention Economies
@AJEbsary
About.me/AJEbsary
Open API = Freedom for developers = Freedom for users
Closed API = Content monopolies = Users are the product
“As I understand, a hugely divisive internal debate occurred among Twitter employees around this time. One camp wanted to build the entire business around their realtime API. In this scenario, Twitter would have turned into something like a realtime cloud API company. The other camp looked at Google's advertising model for inspiration, and decided that building their own version of AdWords would be the right way to go.
As you likely already know, the advertising group won that battle, and many of the open API people left the company. While I can understand why the latter camp wanted to build an ad-based business, the futurist in me thinks this was a tragic mistake. If you are building an advertising/media business, it would then follow that you need to own all of the screen real-estate that users see. The next logical step would be to kill all 3rd-party clients, and lock down the data in the global firehose in order to control the “content”.” – Dalton Caldwell of App.Net
Designing Attention Economies
@AJEbsary
About.me/AJEbsary
What is the best way to engineer serendipity when serving content?
Designing Attention Economies
@AJEbsary
About.me/AJEbsary
Weng et al., 2012
How do we avoid creating echo chambers?
Designing Attention Economies
@AJEbsary
About.me/AJEbsary
Attention Poverty
The 1%
Dean Josef Falkinger
Falkinger, 2003
How do we avoid concentrating attention wealth?
Designing Attention Economies
@AJEbsary
About.me/AJEbsary
BBC’s 15 Million Merits – Black Mirror Series
A cautionary tale in designing attention economies
Designing Attention Economies
@AJEbsary
About.me/AJEbsary
How much is your attention investment worth?
How much have you diluted your attention?
Attention Etiquette & Cultural Norms
@AJEbsary
About.me/AJEbsary
What do you think about the use of reciprocal subscription tactics to build an online following?
(#FollowBack)
Attention Etiquette & Cultural Norms
@AJEbsary
About.me/AJEbsary
The effects of unfollowing 8000+ Twitter accounts in several days
Attention Etiquette & Cultural Norms
@AJEbsary
About.me/AJEbsary
Kwak, Chun and Moon, 2011
Following more users is likely to result in more people unfollowing your account
Attention Etiquette & Cultural Norms
@AJEbsary
About.me/AJEbsary
How important do you think frequent broadcasting is to maintaining a community?
Attention Etiquette & Cultural Norms
@AJEbsary
About.me/AJEbsary
Wu and Huberman, 2010
Give it your best shot, on your first shot
Attention Etiquette & Cultural Norms
@AJEbsary
About.me/AJEbsary
Borgs, et al. 2010
The more you tweet, the more you are unfollowed
Attention Etiquette & Cultural Norms
@AJEbsary
About.me/AJEbsary
Kwak, Chun and Moon, 2011
Bursts of tweets in a short period time are likely to cause people to unfollow you
Attention Etiquette & Cultural Norms
@AJEbsary
About.me/AJEbsary
Hodas and Lerman, 2012
The Goldilocks zone of ‘interesting’
The Future of Attention Economics
@AJEbsary
About.me/AJEbsary
“Finally, we need to rethink our business plans. I doubt this cultural shift will be paid for by better advertising models. Advertising is based on capturing attention, typically by interrupting the broadcast message or by being inserted into the content itself. Trying to reach information flow is not about being interrupted.
Advertising does work when it's part of the flow itself. Ads are great when they provide a desirable answer to a search query or when they appear at the moment of purchase. But when the information being shared is social in nature, advertising is fundamentally a disruption.” – Dana Boyd, UX Mag
Thank you
@AJEbsary
About.me/AJEbsary
Let’s Connect:
AdrianEbsary.com
