From February 7th
One of the most best ways of understanding your own little slice of the world is to look at it through someone else's eyes; to grab a metaphor from another area of life and see if it illuminates something in yours. So I was very struck recently by a chap called Matt Webb who writes a blog at interconnected.org. In a throw-away moment he suggested that we were approaching the point of Peak Attention - borrowing an idea from the energy business and applying it to the worlds of communication and design. His thought is inspired by the notion of Peak Oil - the moment when oil production is at its highest. Before then it's cheap and plentiful, afterwards it's scarce and expensive. This doesn't just change what happens at petrol pumps, it overturns fundamental processes in the world - economically, socially, politically, militarily. There's much obsessing about exactly when Peak Oil will actually be, but what's more useful, and more interesting, is to think about what life will be like afterwards, to work out how to get the maximum value from each drop, and to look for alternatives. That's what makes Peak Attention an interesting thought experiment.
If we see advertising and media as extractive industries, dragging a scarce and diminishing resource from people, how might that help us raise our game? And there's no doubt that it's getting scarcer (the attention that's available to us at least.) Every new media choice that's adopted means less attention for everything else and we're starting to see people consciously thinking how much they're willing to devote to particular activities - based on what they need to concentrate on and get done, and on a recognition that their attention is valuable and can be sold. In the real world we're seeing informal attention management strategies like occasionally 'forgetting' your BlackBerry or judicious skipping with the Sky Plus, but online, where attention is measurable organisations like attentiontrust.org are giving people the opportunity to actively track and store their own attention data.
The active exchange of attention is something we're going to have to think harder about. Are we communicating as quickly and efficiently as possible? Are we siphoning the maximum value from each drop of attention? Are we offering sufficient reward in exchange for the attention we're extracting? This should force us to examine each bit of communication in different terms. Not just thinking of 8-sheets, 30 seconds and microsites but planning which elements of the communicative effort should be glanceable, which bits need to be studied, what it'll take to make that happen and what people will get in return. If we think about that stuff now maybe we won't have to worry about what we'll do when all the attention runs out.
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