Scarcity in Attention economy

I ran across this post by Tateru Nino about the attention economy and would like to respond to/elaborate on some of the concepts there.

Attention, per person, is a finite resource and many business models these days are trying to obtain some share of that.

I agree that this is the major tenet of attention economy, that attention is scarce, and therefore valuable. Information is abundant, so the trick is to get people to pay attention to your information. Attention is finite, but how finite? I have still not seen a good method of measuring attention (eyeballs, time spent, circulation of ideas..?)

Nino concludes that one needs two things to get attention: attention and value. It is the first that interests me:

If you don’t give any attention to the market, you don’t reliably get any.

There’s a second part to that. You not only have to give attention, but it also has to be visible. Give attention, get attention. It’s one of the basic social transactions, and it’s as applicable to the relationship between a market and a business as it is to the relationships between individuals.

Sure, giving visible attention is a good way to get some back, but is it strictly necessary? For example,  Apple gets a lot of attention from the media, from consumers, from bloggers, without giving each of them attention itself. If it were a one-to-one exchange, there would be no accumulation, and every transaction would be quid pro quo.  This is where the finiteness of personal attention brushes up against the idea of the accumulation of personal attentions.

Just some thoughts. The blog this post comes from is new to me, and seems to revolve around Second Life, which is actually a pretty good model for attention economy is some ways.

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