[p2p-research] on the myth of attention scarcity

[Michel Bauwens]

excerpted from stowe boyd at
http://www.stoweboyd.com/post/764818419/the-false-question-of-attention-economics


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.

But my reading of human history suggests the opposite. In the pre-industrial
world, business people and governments still suffered from incomplete
information, and the pace of life always seemed faster than what had gone on
in earlier times. At every point in human history there have been
philosophers claiming that the current civilization has fallen from an
earlier halcyon state, that the ways of the ancients had been lost, and
modern innovations and practices threatened to destroy all that was good in
society and culture.

So, this is merely the most recent spin on an ancient theme, as the Diderot
quote indicates.

Imagine for a moment that it is true — there was an idyllic time back in the
Garden of Eden — when we knew all that was necessary to know, and we had all
the time in the world to make decisions. Maybe. I am betting it is a shadow
of our psychology, the same sort of magical thought that believes in
guardian angels and reincarnation. Just a slightly more intellectual
superstition.

Another thread of this argument is that human beings don’t have the capacity
to winnow out the information we need given the torrent of information
streaming past, which is in a sense Diderot’s conjecture. But we really
don’t know what we are capable of, honestly.

The human mind is exceptionally plastic, especially when young people are
exposed to media and symbolic information systems at an early age. This is
why those that take up the study of music, or programming, or karate at a
young age, and study for 10,000 hours gain mastery of these skills, which
can be accomplished before reaching 20 years of age. And even older people
can have significant improvements in cognitive skills — like juggling or
flight simulation games — with relative small exposure.

I suggest we just haven’t experimented enough with ways to render
information in more usable ways, and once we start to do so, it will like
take 10 years (the 10,000 hour rule again) before anyone demonstrates real
mastery of the techniques involved.

These are generational time scales, people. And note: the only ones that
will benefit in the next ten years will be those that expend the time needed
to stretch the cognition we have, now, into the configuration needed to
extract more from the increasingly real-time web.

The most difficult argument to make is the following:

   - We have always been confronted with a world — both natural and
   human-made — that offers an infinite amount of information.
   - We have devised cultural tools — like written language, mathematics,
   and the scientific method — to help understand the world in richer ways,
   over and above our emotional and inbuilt cognitive capabilities.
   - We are heading into a post-industrial world where information systems
   and the social matrix of the web have become the most important human
   artifact, one that is repurposing everything that has come before.
   - We will need to construct new and more complex cultural tools — things
   like augmented reality, massively parallel social tools, and ubiquitous
   mobile connected devices — and new societal norms and structures to assist
   us in using them effectively.
   - Many commentators — including Armano and Peterson — allude to the now
   generally accepted notion that we will have to leverage social systems
   (relying on social tools) to accomplish some part of the heavy lifting in
   whatever new schemes we develop for understanding this new world. But it has
   only been 10 years since we’ve been talking about social tools, and less
   than five that we had anything like real-time streaming applications or
   tools involving millions of users. It’s early days.

I think that the rise of the social web, just like writing, the printing
press, and the invention of money, is not really about the the end of what
came before, but instead is the starting point for what comes next: richer
and more complex societies. These technologies are a bridge we use to cross
over into something new, not a wrecking ball tearing down the old.

In the final analysis, I am saying there is no ‘answer’ to those that say we
are overloaded, that we are being driven mad by or enslaved to the tools we
are experimenting with, or that there is some attention calculus that trumps
all other value systems.

I suggest we just haven’t experimented enough with ways to render
information in more usable ways, and once we start to do so, it will like
take 10 years (the 10,000 hour rule again) before anyone demonstrates real
mastery of the techniques involved.

Instead, I suggest we continue experimenting, cooking up new ways to
represent and experience the flow of information, our friends’ thoughts,
recommendations, and whims, and the mess that is boiling in the huge
cauldron we call the web.

There is no “answer” since they are asking a false question, one that hides
preconceived premises and biases. Starting out with the assumption that we
have moved past our abilities to cope with the stream of information, and
therefore something has to give, is a bias.

In part, this arises from the desire of economists like Simon to find what
is scarce, and ascribe a value to it. Or to media and PR types, who want to
control discourse, and fill it with their ‘messages’ and influence social
opinion or buying behavior.

But from a cognitive and anthropological viewpoint, these concerns are
something like Socrate’s argument that learning to read and write would
debase the cognition of those that had become literate. In his era the
ability to remember thousands of verses of poetry was the baseline for being
enculturated, and he believed that something fundamental would be lost if we
were to rely on books instead of our memories. He believed that writing was
the fall from a better time, a lesser way to think and understand the world.

I think that the rise of the social web, just like writing, the printing
press, and the invention of money, is not really about the the end of what
came before, but instead is the starting point for what comes next: richer
and more complex societies. These technologies are a bridge we use to cross
over into something new, not a wrecking ball tearing down the old.

There is no golden past that we have fallen from, and it is unlikely that we
are going to hit finite human limits that will stop us from a larger and
deeper understanding of the world in the decades ahead, because we are
constantly extending culture to help reformulate how we perceive the world
and our place in it.


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