the attention economics of information
I believe in sharing information. I encourage sharing information. I share information.
When I do the above people always ask me, “but how can you give away something you created for free?” A question which I hope to answer in this post. And yes, I do give information which I have created away for free because I believe that people stand to benefit more from me sharing information, than if I keep it all to myself. And as an extra bonus, that I also have more to gain from sharing information than from keeping it to myself.
In this post I’ll just deal with the fact that individuals stand to benefit more by sharing information than by keeping it to themselves, and I’ll make my point using the theory of attention economics.
But first, to clear things up. By information I mean anything which can easily be shared between people at no cost, such as music, software, stories, etc. Think about it, it costs nothing to play someone a song or tell them a story! Also, it costs nothing to copy a music cd to your hard drive, or to install a piece of software.
According to Wikipedia, “Attention economics is an approach to the management of information that treats human attention as a scarce commodity.” Attention economics makes sense if you consider the amount of information that we have access to. We’re bombarded with information every day, and we choose which information we pay attention to – this drives the attention economy. To be successful in the attention economy, individuals need to gain the attention of as many people as possible.
I believe that creative individuals (ie. musicians, authors, software engineers) have more to gain financially by sharing what they’ve created than by keeping it to themselves and only allowing certain people access to it, with very specific instructions as to what they can (and can’t) do with it. To see why this is so we’ll have to go back in time, to when information first became a commodity (I’ll focus on music since it’s something that everyone is familiar with!)
Before music was ever stored on some physical medium people would gather to listen to musicians play. The musicians would create a following and build up a name for themselves. This led to more and more people wanting to see them play and perform, thereby creating a steady source of income. Then the invention of the phonograph by Thomas Edison in 1877 meant that it became possible to distribute music, but doing so was expensive and involved large amounts of capital – this was the industrial age.
In recent years however things have changed – it is now easy to create and distribute music. In fact, anyone with a home computer and an internet connection can create and distribute music. The emergence of technologies such as broadband internet and new online social networks have led to a boom in the availability of information, leading to a boost in the amount of sharing that goes on, mainly across P2P networks.
Commercial distributors of information still produce their information using the industrial method. They make use of large amounts of capital for expensive, top of the range equipment. They then make use of copyright law to secure their investments. This approach to information distribution is counter productive in the attention economy as it limits the amount of people who can be reached. In order to succeed in the attention economy the creative individual needs to reach as many people as possible and thus draw as much attention to themselves as possible. Once an individual has the attention of others they then have the opportunity to capitalise on that attention. For musicians this might take the form of higher attendance levels at performances. For authors it might take the form of them being called in to discuss their views on the latest political issues. For software engineers this might take the form of them being asked to write customisations for software.
The best way for a creative individual to gain attention is to allow their works to be experienced by as many people as possible. And since there is no cost in reproducing information, the best way to get information out there is to give it away for free – to allow people to freely copy it and distribute it without fear of prosecution. In doing this creative individuals can leverage themselves and create opportunities for themselves and others which otherwise would not have existed.
Note: The following images are not subject to the same copyright terms and conditions as the rest of the article.
Amancay Maahs. Warmth. Available under CC-BY-NC-ND 2.0 at http://flickr.com/photos/amanky/1501960898/
Matt McGuire. Sharing The Juice. Available under CC-BY-NC-SA 2.0 at http://flickr.com/photos/zummersweet/1299207641/
Malenga. Sharing. Available under CC-BY-NC-ND 2.0 at http://flickr.com/photos/malenga/557556392/
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