I was reading through a good book on Social Web topics and found a great quote from Herbert Simon. It basically started the concept of “Attention Economics” which I thought was fairly interesting. The quote:
“…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.”
My interpretation of what that statement says is that due to information overload a lot of people have the attention span of a steamed carrot. Based on some customers and their support questions, I think that’s pretty accurate.
I’ve spent a lot of time trying to get simple ideas across, and it seems like it’s getting more difficult all the time. With a previous manager, for every email I had to make sure I wrote the important message in the first sentence (not first paragraph – first sentence – and it usually helped if the first paragraph was the first sentence). Through empirical testing, I discovered he actually DIDN’T read anything past there – no matter how important the email.
Part of the reason for this was that nearly every one of his direct AND indirect reports cc’d him on every email (due to a horribly ineffective C.Y.A. theory they seemed to hold to be a fundamental truth). The other reason was undoubtedly that he was totally on an email high… (see “Emails hurt IQ more than pot“).
MySpace and YouTube have the same effect on people – way too much information and data (most of it completely useless) ruins the ability to filter useful from useless.
So, I’m trying to save my “attention dollars” for useful and productive and limit spending them on crap. To start, I’ve turned my “send/receive” updates down to once an hour (from every 3 minutes!)
More information about the Attention Economy is on Wikipedia.
