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Saturday, October 7, 2006
Whole in won 
| | I love this story, of the Mars orbiter taing a picture of a rover from Earth poised on the rim of an amazing crater, the walls of which are exposed and poised for geological study. |
Saving the papers, cont'd
| | Rebecca MacKinnon reports on a recent meeting with news and media organization executives. A bottom line: You don't need a huge corporate budget and casts of thousands behind you to innovate in media anymore - in fact having a large organization to manage (and shareholders to answer to when things don't pan out) increasingly looks like an impediment to experimentation and creative thinking. |
| | On the latest Gillmor Gang, Jason Calacanis described his challenge at AOL as something akin to levitating an ocean liner and turning it around. What impressed me, however, was the enthusiasm, energy and smarts he's putting into doing exactly that. |
| | Maybe one of these big newspaper groups will hire a Jason who can come in and shake things up. If not, their ocean liners will stay on course toward Greenland. |
Free your minds, Neos
| | You have to be free to see how absurd silos can be. You have to see markets as wide-open spaces opened by ubiquitous relationships, and potential relationships, between digital devices and the human beings who use them. You have to see unrestricted possibilities for the people and organizations putting those devices, their applications and their data to work. Those possibilities lose their limits once you set your mind free of the notion that a free market is just a choice of silos. |
Blogging out loud
Tower falls
Lobbying in the great outdoors
Nice to see
Quote du jour
| | Live web as signs of life, signs of life as dialogue what a fabulous criteria for assessing whether we have dialogue dialogue not simply something that happens after 3 drinks when identity to the group loosens and the idea can be tossed around and played with dialogue is recognised as generative as signs of life, signs of lif |
Earth ot Earthlink (and back again)
| | Speaking of complex relationships, dig this conversation between Earthlink and customers on the matter of "dead domain handling". |
Attending to Attention
| | Unfortunately, this digital age bill of rights lacks any firm foundation in social or physical reality. We neither own nor control our attention. We never have, in any context. We never will. And it would be a bad idea if we did. |
| | Our real-world physiological/conscious making attention is not under our control. It is mediated by a complicated sub-conscious system that decides which symbols - decoded from our environment - -deserve a slice of higher-level processing. If the subconscious mind doesn¹t think it is important, it doesn¹t get any attention. Similarly, the subconscious mind is capable of overriding our conscious attention and directing it somewhere else. We don¹t decide to hear the fire alarm. We just do. |
| | This semi-autonomous control is a critical feature. If we could just zoom in to whatever we wanted and exclude our attention from everything else, we would have more theft, more fatal fires, and more car accidents. It¹s not to hard to see the evolutionary value in limited control over our attention. Focusing only on what we desire to focus on is an evolutionary dead end. |
| | Clearly, "Attention" is just a metaphor, and I can hear the rebuttal that the physiological etymology of the Attention Gang¹s ³Attention² isn¹t what¹s important. |
| | I won't rebut the physiological stuff. Instead, I'll agree with it, and use that to rebut the notion that attention is "just" anything, including a metaphor. |
| | Because we understand everything metaphorically. Even mathematics. In Where Mathematics Comes from, Lakoff and Nuñez call metaphors "a cognitive mechanism for allowing us to reason about one kind of thing as if it were another". See, our understanding of everything is fundamentally embodied, and metaphors arise from our experience as bodies in the world. For example, our moral systems metaphorize goodness as light and up and badness as dark and down. That's because we're upright-walking diurnal animals. If owls or snakes could articulate their moral systems, the metaphors might be reversed. |
| | We also tend to feel we own whatever parts of the world serve as extensions of ourselves. Through a process of indwelling (nothing nonmetphorical there) the carpenter doesn't just believe the hammer is an extension of his arm. Nor does he just know it. He experiences it when he drives a nail through a board. It's no accident that, as drivers, we'll say "my fender" or "my wheels", as if our bodies extended to comprise a machine of metal and rubber. Perceptually they do, regardless of who holds title to the machine. |
| | The very notions of property and possession have metaphorical origins in hands and opposing thumbs. Anybody with kids knows that possesion is nine tenths of the two-year-old. That rule is made obvious every time the kid won't let go of something and yells "that's mine!" Whether it's theirs or not. |
| | All that said, Joe's points about the actual nature of attention are spot-on, and an interesting challenge to the Attention Trust. |
| | Meanwhile, Joe continues, |
| | And that brings us to Doc Searls' concept of Intention, a much more useful and powerful metaphor for what is happening online. |
| | Intention represents conscious desire and will to action. Attention does not. Intention is under our control. Attention is not. |
| | Even the legal system recognizes this distinction. We can be punished for crimes of intent, in ways that we cannot be for acts of mere ³attention.² (Mileage may vary depending on your jurisdiction.) |
| | Intent represents an inherent potential for creating value. Attention does not. |
| | I agree, but I also feel a need to clarify where different folks are coming from here. The whole matter of attention (including the Attention Trust) arises from the increasing need, in a world that becomes more networked by the minute, for new relationships between supply and demand, between vendors and customers, between groups and their members. |
| | In the Industrial Age, all tech control belonged to the supply side. To an unhealthy degree, it still does. Even in today's fully computerized 21st Century CRM — Customer Relationship Management — systems, the full burden of "managing" relationships falls on the vendor. We still have no reciprocal Vendor Relationship Management systems for customers. |
| | When we have VRM, it will include tools of intention. It will include, and represent, what customers clearly mean, as well as own. It will say "I want X", "I belong to Y", "I'm a member of Z" — and "I control exactly how and what I reveal about myself, and under what conditions". |
| | If attention were a substance (and the advertising business has treated it as such for the duration), its value is almost entirely to the sell side. Meaning that its something advertisers and marketers care about and want from us. But it's not something the rest of us think about very much. Even if we do care about it. |
| | Maybe the Attention Trust can change that. I dunno, and I wish them well. Meanwhile, I'm busy working the Intention side of this thing. |
| | By the way, congrats to Joe on getting his blog going. I advised him to do that over some beers the other night. |
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