The Attention and Reputation Economy

Read a great new book by Chris Anderson titled, “Free – The Past and Future of a Radical Price” .

For those wondering, Chris did put his money where his mouth is.. I downloaded the entire audio book… yes for free, from Audible.com.

Overall the book is a good read/listen. Goes through the history of free, as well as the psychological impact of the whole concept along side capitalism. But certainly one of the more interesting chapters was the one that covered The Attention and Reputation Economy.

“A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention”. So as information of various forms (news, music, historic reference) becomes virtually free and money no longer rules, what does? As information is free and abundant, it requires our time or “attention” to give it value. The sources of information therefore also fight to build their “reputation” as worthy of our ongoing attention.

But what gauges the economy of Attention and Reputation? Hits on a webpage certainly represent how much attention an internet data source is receiving (similar to TV ratings), and page rank is possibly the ultimate gauge of reputation since its formula takes into consideration the number of links that point to a webpage and therefore recommend it, thereby raising its reputation. It’s then up to the owner of that attention and reputation to translate them into the monetary economy through some means, for example advertising.

There are also other micro social economies of this nature throughout the internet with their own social currency. For example, in Facebook you earn reputation through the number of friends you have, Twitter via followers, etc. I’m actually exploring one of these economies, Blip.fm,  in a more detail. Immersing myself to analyze its nature and social dynamics. It’s quite fascinating. More to come in a follow up post.

With the streamlining of our lives by computers and the sacrifice of passive TV watching for the interactive, collaborative, and social internet, we work our way up Mazlow’s heirarchy of needs, and closer to the tip of the pyramid, namely Self Actualization. Thanks to the interactive social internet that allows are creativity to produce, collaborate, and share content, these attributes have never flourished as quickly and been so accessible.

What I wonder however, if the internet is making the various levels of the pyramid more easily accessible (ie. shrinking the pyramid’s height). How will this effect the lower end of the of the hierarchy, in particular employment. In the past, the achievement of self-actualization was based primarily on the person’s contributions through their jobs, and what they achieved throughout their career. With the higher levels now more readily available to all via the internet, does this create a lesser dependency on employment for self-actualization? Is this the reason why kids these days are labeled with a sense of entitlement?

Stuck in my head…

Chunking

Just returned form completing the Ride for Heart (50K) here in TorontoMy wife had an excuse to go to a bridal shower so I did it solo this year. It’s become sort of a tradition with me to go participate in this event. out of the last 13 years, I believe I only missed one year.

Since I was on my own, I decided to bring my iPod along. Gave me a chance to get back to an audio book I had set aside. The 2.5 hour ride gave me exactly the time I needed to finish This is Your Brain on Music.

Learned an interesting fact about cognitive memory management. There are two types of memory: long term and short term or “working memory“.

Apparently working memory is limited and can normally only sustain 9 items at one time. So our brain uses “chunking” to retain more complex memory structures in working memory, thanks to knowledge retained from the past.

For example, when memorizing a phone number we “chunk” the area code as one item rather than the 3 individual digits, since we know what an area code is for say Toronto.

Napoleon is dead, long live… The Borg?

Been doing a lot of traveling for work these days which gave me a lot of airplane time to listen to my audiobooks.

Currently in the middle of the book, The Starfish and the Spider, by Ori Brafman and Rod A. Beckstrom

The book relates the hierarchical style of an organizations vs. a flat or community style. Lot’s of storytelling here including how the advanced hierarchical Aztec society was taken down easily by the Spanish by walking into each city and the killing their king. However, when they encountered the Apache Indians who were a distributed community society, it wasn’t so easy.

It then relates this to today with what’s happening thanks to the internet and entities like eMule and Skype.

… and the disruption they’ve caused in the music and telecommunication industries. The music industry successfully sued Napster out of the free P2P market, but only to be replaced by others who were lawyer proof.

Chop a spider’s head off and it dies… cut a starfish in half and you end up with 2 starfish. The benefits of a distributed neural network.

Music: It’s all about connections

Reading the book called, “This Is Your Brain On Music” by Daniel J. Levitin.

The book dives into cognitive science to determine the effects of Music on the human brain, and why we are so obsessed with the art. It’s a wonderful read if you are a musician or a music lover. In the end its all about connections, both emotional and cognitive. Which turn out to be one in the same.

Music is pleasurable to us partly because of its predictability: e.g. rhythm. And our brain takes satisfaction in matching the assumed beat with the real one. But it also takes delights when the composer violates the pattern in an interesting way. “A sort of musical joke we’re all in on.”

Emotion is interestingly described as Motivation to Act + Memory.

“We see a body of water after wondering for hours and we feel elated. We drink and it fills us with a sense of well-being and contentment: emotions that cause us to remember where that body of water is for next time.”

So people enjoy certain songs because it reminds them of similar characteristics of other songs that stir up emotions from previous memories stored deep inside our brain. So our taste in music evolves, sometimes starting with songs like “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star”.

Similarity in song is sometimes obvious to us. I recognized the similarities between aspects of “Creep” by Radiohead and “The Air That I Breathe” by the Hollies almost instantly.

Rihanna’s latest award winning album, “Good Girl Gone Bad” had at least a couple of hits based on remixes of previous hit songs by Michael Jackson and New Order. I’ll let you guess which ones.

But sometimes it’s not. I remember the first time being pleasantly surprised when I heard Hewey Lewis was suing Ray Parker Jr. because the song “Ghostbusters” sounded too much like “I Want a New Drug”. The songs were almost identical! But for some reason it didn’t click until that moment.

Some are skilled at recognizing these similarities (like VJ Brewskii, video below). So much so that a new art form called “Mashups” was created, where two or more songs that sound alike are mashed together. BTW, yes this is where the term Mashup originated.

Here’s another example that caught me by surprise… wonder if the similarity played a part in Snow Patrol’s big hit.