Social Media and the Attention Economy

Implications of the Attention Economy on

Social Media/Computing Design and Use.

Cliff Lampe (@clifflampe)

Attention and Social Computing

Soliciting, managing, and consuming attention is a major enterprise in social computing design and use.

*BUT* Attention is fickle at the moment

Lightning in a bottle: Karen Klein

Lessons from Karen

• Bullying sucks

• Story occurred over multiple channels, both social and mass

• Story unfolded quickly• Very little control over this story was

held by anyone• Attention is a blunt object

Promises of social computing

Collective action

Civil society

Cognitive surplus

Crowd sourcing

Persuasive technology

Social Capital

*plus all that money stuff...

Consumer with attention

Producer wants attention

Proposition 1:Attention is Scarce

Attention and Time

Attention = time

Time is a finite resource.

1440 minutes per day, divided amongst all opportunities.

LONG history in social science on how we choose to spend our time.

How we spend our time = behavior

Why we spend time = motivation

Choice Frameworks

Economics = utility

Psychology = motivation

Media Choice Theory

William James - Cognition, emotion, habit

Proposition 2:Choice is cognitively expensive

Herb SimonBounded Rationality

Satisficing

The attention Economy

"...in an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it. " - Herb Simon

Attention Economy

“There is something else that moves through the Net, flowing in the opposite direction from information, namely attention.”

- Michael Goldhaber

Units of Attention

Ethan Zuckerman - The Kardashian Unit of Attention

Proposition 3:The current social media environment is *not* scarce.

Social media aggregates and (could) overwhelm

danah boyd

peer production = more “infomunication” than we can attend to

Michael Bernstein

Twitter Zen

Proposition 4: People have to figure out how to spend their attention

*and get you to spend your attention

Proposition 5:Social computing systems design and us is about attention management

Content

Social

Architecture

Attention management strategies

Individual strategies

• Heuristics• Bias - Selective exposure• Uses and gratifications• Rational choice• Social influence• Etc.

Habit

Robert LaRoseSocio-cognitive theoryHabit = low cost choice mechanismHabit vs. addictionForming / breaking habits

“Slashdot is for old dudes” theory

Content Strategies

Propaganda

Advertising

Fear Mongering

Persuasion

Social strategies

Social Signaling

Judith Donath Assessment signalsJoe Walther

WarrantingCues

Berrypicking?

“signals” in situ

System design

Content

Social

Architecture

Attention management strategies

Why attention matters for social computing system research and practice

Proposition 6:Attention underlies our understanding of social computing systems

Research on social computing systems

Research dominated by “single channel” studies

Common theories don’t account for overload well.

Example: social capital

Benefit of interacting with others in a social network

Dependent on “social grooming”

i.e. spending attention on others

Example: Social Search

Facebook and Twitter offer sweet opportunities to seek and share information

How useful is that if you can’t make a bid for the attention of your network?

Implications

How do people really decide to spend their attention?

Heuristics, rational choice, habit

What about cross channel choice?

Consumption vs. production?

Local vs. global optimization?

Cliff sometimes has bad ideas.

Breadth - what isn’t attention?

Overlap - king of all science!

Obvious - no duh?

Testable - how should we approach this?

Final Plea

We can change the world for the better.

Because we *can*, we must.

Thanks!

Cliff Lampe

cacl@umich.edu

Twitter: @clifflampe

Slideshare: clifflampe