Starting from Seth Goldstein’s mantra of attention being “the substance of focus”, I claimed in my last post that attention is the currency of intentionality.
However, if attention is already a currency itself, what does it mean to monetize it?
There seems to be no obvious way of how attention itself can be monetized in the sense that you give attention and get money for it - safe the way of how the psychotherapy business works. As said before, it is clear that we always want something back in exchange for our attention investments, but in the majority of cases this isn’t money.
Paying attention to a piece of art comes with the promise of insight or entertainment. Paying attention to a friend constitutes and strengthens our bonds to other people. We can get everything for our attention - except for money.
One could argue that companies are making a lot of money with consumer attention, where money is only moved after a stream of attention flow from consumers to their products has been setup - (that is indeed pretty trivial: You don’t buy a product that you haven’t paid attention to in a certain way).
But that is not what I mean with monetizing attention. The question is whether there can be a direct exchange of attention for money which would fully satisfy the concept of an exchange.
In my opinion (wow, blogging!) this can only be achieved by going one step further and talking about meta-attention: i.e. paying attention to what one is paying attention to.
Claim: This second-order attention is the kind of attention that can be monetized and in fact, is already generating money for a lot of people and companies, but in a rather different way from as it was put before: Instead of people paying attention to what they are paying attention to, it’s rather companies that track (aka pay attention) to what other people are paying attention to.
Two very differently perceived examples of such companies are Google and Claria. While the latter is a known Spyware distributer, the former has achieved that people are calling it a friend, turning it into a multi-billion dollar business. But in a way, both are operating in the same field, namely the Meta Attention Business. They are paying attention to what people pay attention to and convert this into money.
Now the question is, whether it would be possible for the individual to monetize its meta attention and enter this market. It seems obvious that the individual would have to take over part of Google’s and Claria’s job by not only being the theme but also the agent of the attention market: That means instead of just paying attention of the first order and leave it to the others to track this attention (aka paying 2nd order attention), we would also have to start to claim the second order part of this process for ourselves.
Even though this might sound very theoretical, there are efforts to provide tools for such a personal meta attention market to emerge: NYC based startup Root Markets and its related non-profit sister AttentionTrust aim exaclty at doing this.
The latter provides a Firefox Extension called the “Attention Extension” that enables you to to collect your clickstream or “spy on yourself”, as Seth Goldstein, founder or Root, puts it. It does precisely what is usually done by Spyware programs, but the idea is that you are the owner of this data and decide what happens with it - it’s up to you to choose whether you want to sell, keep or analyze this “MyWare” (Goldstein) - ultimately, it’s yours.

The challenge for companies in the MyWare attention market will be to elicit “3rd order attentional processes” - users will have to see that they can monetize their paying attention to attention (and that this is already being monetized by others!) - but this requires that they understand the whole idea in the first place, which again means nothing but them paying attention to the concepts and visions introduced by Goldstein, the Attentiontrust and Root.

technorati tags: attention , attentiontrust, root

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