Perhaps the most influential article published in the last thirty years is Goldhaber's "The Attention Economy and the Net." SEE BELOW FOR PREGNANT EXTRACTS FROM THIS ARTICLE. The concepts or principles presented set the stage for the communication and publication revolution--the world in which we live today.

If anything, the rate of change has accelerated. For people  like me trained in the world of traditional scholarship and publishing, it has been a long and arduous journey--to abandon conventions and old habits. However, I think I'm here--at last.

The passages below are ones I have selected from the article--ideas I have found particular relevant--or pregnant--giving birth to today's world

Best regards,

Richard Koenigsberg, 7/19/21

BASIC CONCEPTS OF THE ATTENTION ECONOMY
(Selections from Goldhaber's paper)

• To get attention you must emit what is technically identifiable as information; likewise for information to be of any value, it must receive attention. Therefore an information technology is also an attention technology, or in other words, a transfer of information is only completed when there is also a transfer of attention proceeding in the opposite direction.
   
• The Internet reverses the ideas of a successful scholar or scientist; such a person benefits from having as many as possible citations to his or her articles. These citations of course always come after the article cited has been published, reinforcing the importance of chronology and the sense of progress inherent in the sphere of publishing of standard journals that occupy real space and appear at definite times.

• On the Internet however, to gain recognition it helps to be, in effect, in one’s own person, a node, to whom others send links from which one culls the best choices to include on one’s own site.

• H. interneticus has no such sense of fixity at all. Web sites are subject to constant revision, and users skip from site to site at will. Thus no story or argument is final, fixed; neither tale, nor blog, nor text nor Web site has a canonical form.

• Whereas print culture over the course of its five–century history quickly became and remained connected with institutional centers of considerable duration and power (libraries, major universities, governments with their printing offices, major newspapers, and scientific societies) the Internet seems by its structure radically decentralizing.
   
• Anyone has a chance of turning his or her personal listserv, blog or Web site into a node that will be in effect, and quite likely for a very limited time, an institution as powerful as any of the more stable ones of the past.
   
• For a revolution in thought to occur within any specific field, and then to endure in later generations, its proponents had to fight it out with champions of older views within (and, more rarely, among) the relevant faculties.
   
• Only those works freely available on the Internet would get much real notice and readership. The same is likely to hold for other sorts of materials: music, photos, videos, etc. Only what is not effectively copy–protected will be freely circulated, will get attention, and will have a chance of becoming known in the way anything can become known on the Internet.
   
• As we move towards an attention economy in a fuller sense, the ethos of the old economy which makes it often bad taste or a poor strategy to consciously seek attention seems to be giving way to an attitude that makes having a lot of attention rather admirable and seeking it not at all to be frowned upon.

• You most likely make many more decisions every day about where and towards whom your attention should now go than about where your or anyone else’s money should go.

• Organizations will diminish in importance at rapid pace, relative to the importance of the individuals who are temporarily in them. And whether these people are physically at Harvard or somewhere else will matter less and less, until the institution loses all coherence, all distinctness from other universities or from any one of hundreds of other organizations which have audiences in common.

• In a full-fledged attention economy the goal is simply to get either enough attention or as much as possible. Thus obtaining attention is obtaining a kind of enduring wealth, a form of wealth that puts you in a preferred position to get anything this new economy offers. Wealth that can endure and sometimes be added to is what we mean by property. Thus, in the new economy attention itself is property. Where is it? Primarily it is located in the minds of those who have paid you attention in the past, whether years ago or seconds ago.

• Seeing this kind of wealth as property suggests a strategy for maintaining and enlarging what you have that is far different from what is usually considered to be the case when dealing with ideas or information. Suppose you get attention through some text you send out over the Internet. Would you want your audience to copy this and pass it on to others who might pay attention in turn? Of course you would. It would be insane to want to stop or restrain such copying, since that would deprive you of much attention you could otherwise get.

• A continuing growth in the capacity of those on the Web to send out multimedia or virtual reality signals, and thus to capture attention through all these means. Say you are primarily a writer of mere words, i.e. text; still, on the Web you will be able to supplement your writings with your picture, with video images, with recordings of your voice, with interviews or pieces of autobiography.

• Individual attention getters of all sorts will find it ever easier to get attention directly through the Web, without any corporate packaging necessary.

• So in the case of a book, the Internet should now be viewed as a useful and free publicity mechanism. Let passages be freely copied and circulated on the Net, because most of the time, the more of copying that takes place, the more customers there will be for the physical printed version. If you have a Web site, don’t charge for it, because that will only reduce the attention it gets. If you can’t figure out how to afford it without charging, you may be doing something wrong.

• In due time, publishing companies as such will hardly be necessary, for actual physical books will be seen as cumbersome and quaint. Still, many of the kinds of tasks once performed by publishing company employees such as acquisition and line editors, designers, publicists, and so, will still be done, but on much more ad hoc and free-lance, eventually even unpaid basis.
   
• Getting attention in large quantities is being a star, and the number of people who openly make evident that they crave stardom and put out endless effort to achieve it is quite substantial.

• In the long-term intellectual property is thus a foolish and losing proposition. This is why the old and new economies won’t continue to coexist forever; they are diametrically opposed around this central question, as well as some others, and one can only grow at the ultimate expense of the other.

• Wealth therefore comes to you by expressing yourself fully. Also you accumulate attention through the full extent of your personality—everything that makes you distinctly you and not someone else. In the attention economy, you obtain wealth--that is attention--by expressing yourself, putting your real self forward as much as possible.

• Your property, what is proper to you, is what you can get attention for, and that you must put out in public.

• The more you gain attention for what you do, the more witnesses you have that what you want to say comes from you, that you have priority, and so by getting attention at the earliest possible moment for what you want to express, you retain attention and ownership of that attention.

• Anyone who copies you is turning their audience over to you, and thereby doing you a favor. Even anyone who tries to malign you or distort what you are saying calls attention to you in the process.

• Property is the ownership of wealth. If attention is the important kind of wealth, whenever you attract and hold it, you gain property.

• This understanding of rhetoric sees communication as a means of persuasion; as a way of manipulating the social world by influencing the beliefs, attitudes, values, and behaviors of audiences.
   
• This avenue for understanding communication introduces the rhetorical or dramatist model of communication, in which communication is understood as a way of exercising power over the social world. In any case, the understanding of communication as a means of transporting a message from one place to another is at the root of what James Carey has called the “transmission model” of communication.
   
• The very concept of news is being reinvented as people come to realize that they can provide the news about the environment they live in; that people can contribute their real-life conditions and this information proves worthwhile for others. “As other segments of society come on-line, we will have less and less need for some commercially driven entity that gathers the news for me, filters it, and then delivers it to me, hoping fervently that I’ll find enough of interest to keep paying for it.”
   
• “The most important and eventually most powerful aspect of the net will be the effect(s) of having access to alternative viewpoints. This access to differing ‘truths’ is similar to the communication revolution which occurred when the first printing presses made knowledge available to the common populace, instead of held in the tight fists of the clergy and ruling classes.”
   
• “The net...requires no permissions, no groveling to authority, no editors to deal with - no one basically to say, ‘no don’t say that.’ As a result - far more has been said here publicly than has probably been said in a hundred years about issues that really matter - political prisoners, democratic uprisings, exposure of disinformation - THIS is what makes the net more valuable than any other news Source.”
   
• “The difference being that for the first time in human history, the general populace has the ability to determine what it finds important, rather than relying on the whims of those who knew how to write, or controlled the printing presses. New communication technologies facilitate new ways of organizing information and of thinking.

• Our literature is characterized by the pitiless divorce which the literary institution maintains between the producer of the text and its user, between its owner and its consumer, between its author and its reader. This reader is thereby plunged into a kind of idleness—he is intransitive; he is, in short, serious: instead of functioning himself, instead of gaining access to the magic of the signifier, to the pleasure of writing, he is left with no more than the poor freedom either to accept or reject the text: reading is nothing more than a referendum.

• The visual and nonvisual technology in every way encourages in the user a heightened and ever-changing awareness of the present. It works against historical perception, which must depend on the inimical notions of logic and sequential succession.