The Looming Attention Crisis

Umair Haque said something (or actually quoted someone) at our Sessions event that has been rattling around my brain for the past week.

Umair said:

Herbert Simon said it in 1971, which is that "What does an abundance of information create?" A scarcity of attention basically, right?

So I went to Wikipedia and looked up Herbert Simon and found out that he was a cognitive psychologist who made significant contributions to the fields of artificial intelligence, economics, and philosophy.

A more "blown out" version of Umair's quote of Simon is:

"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." (Computers, Communications and the Public Interest, pages 40-41, Martin Greenberger, ed., The Johns Hopkins Press, 1971.)

With that concept rolling around in my mind, I had lunch yesterday with a bunch of smart people at the Shake Shack.  We got talking about RSS feeds.  Joshua Schachter asked Brad Feld how many feeds someone has before they reach the saturation point. We didn't exactly answer that question, but I am sure someone will do that work shortly and give us the answer.

It will be some meaningless number like 52.3 or something.

But I can tell you this.  I am way past the point of saturation and I keep adding feeds.  At this point, I have over 100 feeds subscribed to in various readers.  And I have frankly stopped paying attention to most of them.

But this issue is not limited to feeds. I have been using a lot of new web services lately.  It's part of my job to do that.  New companies submit business plans for us to evaluate. The first thing we usually do is use their service. Most of what is getting built today requires a fair amount of user participation and thus a lot of attention. I have stranded so many web services that its not even possible to count them.

I joked recently that I am giving my family "continuous partial attention".  They don't like that and demand more.  And I give them more.  Blogs and web services can't demand more attention very easily. So they get less.

Most of us have day jobs.  Many of us have families.  So we have a limited amount of attention left.  And I suspect we are consuming most of it with what we've got on our plates today.

So where does the attention come for the next wave of blogs and web services?  From the old ones, I guess.  In my case, its not going to come out of my family's attention allocation or my firm's.

So attention is a zero sum game and if we are creating (at an exponential rate?) more uses of attention, then we are facing a looming attention crisis.

That's all I can offer at this point.  I don't know when that crisis will hit and what its effects are going to be.  Maybe something will come along that allocates attention more efficiently (delicious or digg?) and the crisis will be averted for now.

I suppose anything is possible, but I feel in my gut that we are facing a "poverty of attention" and something is going to give.

Comments

[Robert Young]

Having studied under Herb Simon at CMU, perhaps it would be helpful to know that he invented a word and used it religiously in the classroom to drive his message home: "satisficing"... a state of being satisfied even though you're sacrificing.

Satisficing was meant to reflect his theory that optimization of supply and demand (of information and attention) would necessarily be affected due to sacrifices resulting from scarcity of attention. Having said that, he also felt AI would provide the solution by helping people optimize more efficiently (he would have been impressed with Google's ad placement heuristics and pointed to it as an excellent example).

[steve]

we toy freaks and techie early adopters are way past the "attention crisis" point. how many times have you heard friends and colleagues complain they need to "slow down" or "get away"? how often does the sound of a cel phone ringing (your own or someone else's) fill you with dread, even anger? personally, i am committed to less toys and distractions, not more. i am not going to get a blackberry or other "continuous push" handheld email device, not because i dont think they're cool and way efficient, but rather precisely because i do. my wife has zero desire -- actively is against -- to add PCs in multiple locations around our (good sized) house not because its a pain, but because its so easy. teenagers aside, i suspect that if you poll your peers, you will find overwhelmingly that people are feeling overwhelmed by media and interactivity and are also feeling very very unclear on what if any benefits they are receiving by, say, having wifi on airplanes, or their personal photos serachable by tags.

Just a hunch.

[Dave Rodger]

Isn't the thing that gets lost in this simply quality? That is, by timeslicing so finely, aren't we in danger of never completing anything, but rather simply trying to figure out what is the minimum step I can take to "release this thread" and switch to the next thing that's pending in my queue?

And, isn't it already here? Meetings called to make decisions, where *all* of the participants are reading/emailing on their blackberries--not efficient...

[james governor]

are you aware of attentiontrust and its work?
putting a value on attention.

[scott partee]

Fred, that is very well said! I've been suffering attention defecit ever since I got broadband. It was manageable until I had a baby, then she won away a huge portion of it. The victims have been my blogging and my podcast as well as following a ton of other media and, sadly, books.

One of the most shocking events for me personally was that one day, I realized I had held a thought in my head long enough to work it through -- something we all do and should do all the time. I hadn't done it in so long that it thoroughly surprised me when I did it. I'd been skimming off of everything. That's when I made the decision to pare things back a lot. No more podcasts until X was done (X was never done), no more telelvision at all (sold it), no wireless email device. It has helped.

The whole issue cries out for smarter computers and technologies. We need not only more efficient ways to get, organize, track and snort up the information, but we are going to increasingly rely on "smarter" agents to automatically get us just the right things.

[eric goldstein]

I'm not that good at articulating things but i'd say that your observation was the driving force behind us creating Clipmarks. By being able to find information that other people have clipped when they were previously looking for the same thing, people will be able to more efficiently spend their allotment of time and attention. That's the hope at least.

[Mo Nourb]

A picture is worth thousand words.

[keith bohanna]

Nice post Fred - well articulated.

For what it is worth - put children in front of a selection of "bad for them" food and they will consume far too much. Ditto for computer games versus physical activity.

Adulthood does not appear to make this element of human nature go away - we (in the developed world) consume far too much of everything and information / feeds / data / opinions are part of that.

The problem is not too much information or insufficently advanced tools - it is lack of self control and focus :-)

keith

[Neville]

When cars were new people drove them off the road a lot more than they do now. The causes included both the initially primitive design of the vehicles and their drivers' lack of experience.

Let's not start an 'attention' version of 'the world is running out of oil'. Just as current adjustments in oil prices are routine from an economic point of view rather than apocalyptic, our adjustment to the rate at which information is available to us will be highly effective, but less than instantaneous.

[Rick]

With more and more information, there will be a flight to quality. Quality services, quality blogs, news, etc.

btw... I can only keep up with about 35 feeds, at the very most, in my feed reader (start.com).

[jackson]

I'm sorry, I didn't catch that, I wasn't paying attention....

[David Gibbons]

so, you have 2 options ...
1) Pay attention only to increasingly valuable information.
2) Increase your attention capacity.

We're all focussing on 1 right now - aggregation, but ... I disagree with you Fred that 2 is not an option; and think it offers a lot of promise for new products and services.

I think that we will ultimately be able to inrease our personal attention by outsourcing it - the same way companies increase their attentive capacity.

We do too much for ourselves in "the modern world" ... technology is yet to help us with the crap that takes up most of our attention ... laundry / cooking / pumping gas, i.e. our daily chores ... we all still type most of our own business documents, yet how many of us type as fast as we could dictate?

The flipside of the technical solution to the attention deficit is a professional services revolution - half of the World is unemployed, the other half overworked - surely balancing that out would be to everyone's benefit.

[Daniel Nerezov]

Very insightful post Fred.

RSS Feeds: I've rolled all of mine into one and display it on a webpage by pasting in a bit of Java script (everything done using Feeddigest.com). It sounds silly, but I'm easily coping with 400 odd feeds, no sweat, because everything is condensed into one feed.

But yeah...the attention crisis has got me too. I don't use my cell phone anymore, and I am very reluctant to use Skype.

The crisis is very real.

[Eric Mattson]

Bruce Kasanoff wrote an interesting ChangeThis manifesto about how businesses should offer their customers less.

http://www.changethis.com/3.Less

I also like Jason Fried's "less is more" blog post.

http://37signals.com/svn/archives2/less_as_a_competitive_advantage_my_10_minutes_at_web_20.php

[Brian Schneeberg]

Fred, this is the problem that we are working on at Grimaldi Productions. As one poster said, "A picture is worth a thousand words." This is the angle we are approaching the problem from - providing an at-a-glance, distilled, pictorial representation of your net-driven life via our Mentations software service (www.mentations.com). While we haven't reached V1.0 yet, a preview version is available on our site; we'd love to get your feedback! (hint: right-click on things to customize)

[Chas. Porter]

Software needs to get smarter and start providing better filters to deal with all this information. I'd like my newsreader (NetNewsWire) to record my behaviour, counting the number of times I click on a link and open a post from the various feeds in my subscription bin . This would go a long way toward helping determine the value of each subscription. Knowing that, I could identify and clear the dead wood.Knowing what I open and read, the newsreader could then suggest new feeds that extend my favorites with "People who read X also read Y" recommendations.

[Karl]

Chas - I think what you suggest is what the latest FeedDemon beta does.

This conversation brings to mind an old - but increasingly relevant book - "Data Smog" by David Shenk. Anyone here read it per chance? What did you think?

[ed]

I'm fairly certain it's not a attention-deficit crisis you're refering but a matching issue. We don't say Google is addressing a time-deficit crisis because I don't have time to click through every web page on the planet. Instead it prioritizes the possible solutions to what we're looking for. Going shopping is not a attention-deficit issue it's matching. You're not overwhelmed with information and therefore can't cover all your possible interests, it's that you are constantly trying to maximize the effectiveness of any given minute but your use of selecting feeds is a poor way of matching your highest priority information needs with what's available. Think Amazon lists or MusicMatch. That's the next frontier. Real-time, contextual - by person and by the minute - information matching. Self-selection of feeds are suboptimal if the granularity and timing are insufficient to create a continuous match.

[Pete Cashmore]

"Joshua Schachter asked Brad Feld how many feeds someone has before they reach the saturation point. "

In my experience, it's around 300, but this figure will no doubt depend on how many other tasks require your attention in daily life.

The solution to the "attention crisis" may be better prioritization. Findory.com is attempting to sort news on a personal level, while Digg and Memeorandum help us to assign attention based on subject area. Perhaps this explains the sudden explosion of blog news sites - we simply don't have the time to trawl through all our feeds any more.

[grumpY!]

spot-on post. to be specific i personally am having a huge attention-rot with respect to web2 and web2 metadata (one could arge that web2 really is just the corpus of web2 metadata - blogs on web2 linking to blogs on web2, tagged as such). how many more css tricks can i take? how many more javascript quirks can i digest? not many more. also it is very annoying watching the crayon crowd pretend to be engineers.

[Greg Linden]

Great post, Fred. There is a crisis of attention.

The comments on your post are filled with people proposing solutions using AI, software agents, and a couple even talking about how they want Amazon.com-like personalization and recommendations to help them filter and prioritize.

I think it's become clear that it's impossible to manage the flood of information manually. We are simply overwhelmed with information in our daily lives. We need help to filter, prioritize, and focus.

We knew this was coming two years ago when we created Findory. Findory is building personalizing information.

When you use Findory, it learns what you like, quietly shares what others in the community liked, and surfaces interesting and relevant information.

It's not just your attention, but the attention of everyone in the community, all combining to help you find what you need. It's all done quietly for you, no effort, no work.

In the future, all information streams will be personalized. It is inevitable.

[Hart Rossman]

I really think this is a great discussion topic. I've proposed several times that we need at least a two pronged approach to managing the consumption of distributed data. The first is clearly to innovate on the technology & UI side. The second, much harder prong, is to upgrade our wetware. In the "information age", there is little reason why we shouldn't train people to consume data faster, filter it more efficiently, and store it with richer context. I still marvel at how slow the transition to touch typing seemed (and how many early business people didn't touch-type as a status/job skills statement) although in fact it spread quickly as a modern survival skill. So, in effect, we have established a societal institution that allows us to generate more data at a faster rate (and no longer by professional class). However, we haven't bothered to establish a societal institution that allows us to consume data at a faster rate. I wonder how long it will take for skills such as speed reading and advanced memory mnemonics to become just as prevalent in the school system (and fundamental job skill requirements).

"Continuous partial attention" appears to be the miscreant driving network access rules during meetings, conferences, workshops, etc. Those who can't seem to leverage the trend tend to force a more sterile, less collaborate environment for regular meetings & workshops. Harkening back to the days of death by powerpoint with no escape. Those who can capitalize on it also tend to be the ones generating innovative web services, collaboration tools, data management schemes, and business models.

[Brooks Jordan]

Attention poverty makes good design and simplicity more important. I think Oliver Wendell Holmes was right when he (supposedly) said: "I don't give a whit for simplicity on this side of complexity, but I would give give my life for simplicity on the other side of complexity." Currently, we have a lot of complexity . . . but if the good and usefulness within it can be simplified, very powerful.

[grumpY!]

Hart Rossman: first show me data worth absorbing, then i will upgrade my wetware. right now all i see is data smog.

[charlie crystle]

simplify, simplify, simplify.

Of course, just once would have been simpler.