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

[Jed]

You got my attention, and I'm persuaded to never grant it again.

[Rob]

David,
The neuroscientists are working on #2...

Fred,
You may like Peter Morville's "Ambient Findability" a pretty unique book I just finished.

[Esteban Kozak]

You nailed it. You are still an early adopter and certainly ahead of the mass market. However, we agree that the winner in this space will provide users the best information possible without demanding extra attention. In the near future, you won't consume feeds anymore but an aggregated stream of information that is highly personalized and relevant to your interests.

Check SearchFox RSS, we have developed the only intelligent RSS reader that uses attention and community data to overcome information overload.

[paolo]

You decide where to put your attention, for example, I stopped watching any television (since few years).
I guess my grand mother didn't have a poverty of attention simply because time were different: my grandmother was walking to her school and the walk took her 3 hours per day! She was spending all the rest of her day working looking after little siblings and working in the fields.
So, do you prefer to read blogs or work in the field and walk for 3 hours to reach your school?

[vinnie mrichandani]

taking about time an attention - would you rather trade for a corporate job with endless meetings, emails and voice mails....read link below

http://dealarchitect.typepad.com/deal_architect/2005/11/attention_when_.html#

[Sunir Shah]

Humans have solved the attention problem a long time ago, but it's expensive. We create very large social organizations to crunch, decide, and act on information in ways that the leaders only have to comprehend in statistical or bird's eye terms.

That's 'undemocratic', sure, but mostly it's expensive. An alternate option is to build information systems to crunch, decide, and act on your behalf. This is the computer science dream. It's not very realistic in a way. I don't trust software to make a lot of decisions for me because software is not accountable.

An inbetween option is to remove inefficiencies in the system. When you installed an aggregator, you removed an inefficiency (clicking around, remembering where to click) that allowed you to read more blogs. Services like PubSub help by automating searching for keywords; and searching for keywords helps because it means you don't have to read a lot of crap. Services like Orbitz simplify searching for airlines (and the time & cost of talking to a travel agent).

There's a finite limit to the shear amount of valuable information you can receive and process, but that hasn't been reached yet. e.g. How much crap do you read in a day?

What do you do when that limit is reached? You hire someone else because it becomes economical to do so.

And so the cycle begins again.

[christy]

Well, I think people are using the term "attention" to mean a lot of different things in this discussion. In terms of what we can attend to visually or hold in short-term memory, we have extremely limited capacity. In fact, the number of things we can attend to in visual space is four. The number of things we can hold in short-term memory is four. The complexity of the items we're trying to attend to or remember has some impact on the number, but four is the basic upper boundary (fewer items if they are more visually complex, or acoustically longer). There are little things you can do to pack more information into those four basic units, but not much.

But I think what a lot of the comments refer to is how to reduce the amount of attention *switching* that we need to do in every day life. If you switch your attention between one thing and another, it will take you longer to do both than it would if you did one thing first, the second thing second. There are lots of theories about why this is the case, but the upshot is that anything that we can do to lower the amount of task-switching we need to do will essentially increase our ability to remember and attend.

Another thing that the comments allude to is the need to inhibit information that's not contextually appropriate. Constantly needing to inhibit distracting information to keep our mental workspaces available for performing computations takes a severe toll (incidentally, the only thing you could do about that is acquire bigger frontal lobes -- no neuroscientist that I know of is working on that problem).

The above may imply that services like, for example, feedreaders are counter-productive. It might be that it's better to just read each blog, one at a time, checking in once every few days than to try to track 300 every day all at once. Another thing that might help everyone absorb more information is the removal of a lot of the visual clutter from computer interfaces. Visual clutter depletes our resources by either taking up precious resources or by causing us to use resources to inhibit it.

[City Hippy]

Great post. Reminds me of my masters dissertation from 1997 on how publishers derive value in, what I then termed, the Post-Information age (a world where info is so ubiquitous its value is being displaced by the value of relevance, attention, context and so on.)

I tend to agree with:

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

The importance of content delivery systems, editors and content brands has never been greater and is only increasing as info overload increases.

Media is devolving and so the value of quality and context is skyrocketing.

For me I monitor 120 feeds and ignore 90 of them to be honest. Maybe once a month I whip through them if I can...although yours is one of the chosen Fred ;)

My desire to monitor them all is outweighed by bigger priorities: Wife is 37 weeks pregnant, house to run, blog to run, brand to build, day job to excel at and so on. Used to consume it all and go to bed at 2am. Not sustainable.

Quality and relevance wins the day for me.

Namaste

CityHippy

[Pat Ferrel]

A lot of food for thought came out of the peer production conference. What is particularly interesting to me is the idea that peer production might be turned on the attention crisis. In some ways it seems odd that it has taken us this long to notice that there is too much happening on the web for unaided individuals to absorb. Surely there are ways to find things if you have the time to devote and there are ways to subscribe to some portion of the content out there but even that may overwhelm.

What we need is a web that adapts to us. The machine must step in to out aid. But even that will be insufficient without putting humans in the loop. The usefulness of pagerank, tagging, and tag search has made the case for including human choice in the process of machine aided discovery. But why is search confined to an activity. One overreaching problem is that we spend too much of our attention on performing activities that should be automated and we have to tell the system over and over again what we want. Why doesn't the web learn your interests and morph into something more relevant and why doesn't it take into account what fellow information seekers think? What we need is an adaptive web and collaborative browsing.

[Doug Richard]

I think part of the question is as always, if a scarcity of attention is an issue, what will emerge to help satisfy the issue. I would assert that part of the response will be the rise of trusted authorities. Individuals will emerge oriented by subject or otherwise who gain our trust and become superstars in their own right. To steal a phrase from a friend, I think we will see the rise of the "Curator Class." How they wil monetize their position is unknown but irelevant; a new asset type will emerge which equates to the aggregate of the contributed attention of a market segment. And that will be worth money.

[Bluestocking]

VERY interesting...particularly since, as it happens, the thesis which I wrote for my master's degree in developmental psychology several years ago was about ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder). It was and continues to be my theory that ADD may at least in part be a by-product or side effect resulting from the dramatic increase of the "pace of life" within our culture over the past few decades -- that it may be an adaptation of sorts to the changes in our environment, especially given the fact that the amount of information that's readily available has increased exponentially. Unfortunately, since the educational system has by and large not changed to quite the same degree, this is seen as an illness or disorder which must be fixed instead of as a possible indicator that the educational system may need to be changed in order to better meet the changes which have taken place in our society.

[Pito Salas]

I am even getting overloaded with all these articles about information overload. IMHO aggregators need better tools to help the user filter and sort and prioritize and clean up their feeds - I say tools, because I don't think any kind of automagic interpretation of semantic information and behavior is ever going to work, but better, more powerful tools for the power user are what we need...See http://www.blogbridge.com/archives/2005/11/the_addictive_p.php

[brad]

the irony of this post by fred is, after reading it, there are like 13 trackback posts of people talking about it on their sites. I'm sorry, this is why I think trackbacks don't work. those are too many referential links to consume, much less the direct comment posts on the a vc page itself. yes, my attention is waning--I can't read 'everyone's' opinion. and now-a-days, it seems like there are way too many opinions to choose from...

[Bosko Milekic]

Hmmmm... I'm late to join this conversation. Oh well.

The over-consumption problem is in my "top 5 problems that must be solved by 2007 at the latest" list. It's there along with "following communication that occurs in comments sections of blogs I comment in."

I haven't solved the over-consumption problem in a general sense, but I believe I have helped myself deal with one aspect of it (a completely generalized solution is difficult because overconsumption happens for more than one reason).

A good part of my consumed content is "official published content" and a good part is content produced by my friends or people I care about in the form of bookmarks, blog postings, photos, etc. The latter almost always required me to subscribe to 4-5 different RSS feeds per person, and even then in some cases I would get stuff I actually didn't want in the end.

I built the Peoplefeeds (http://peoplefeeds.com/) service to help with this problem. The people I need to follow now have kindly aggregated all their content in Peoplefeeds, and I've marked precisely what from their content interests me (via tags); then Peoplefeeds produced an RSS feed for each person with entries matching my marked tags-of-interest, and with duplicates removed. It also built me an OPML with all those feeds referenced in one place, which I imported to Newsgator (or Bloglines, or whatever). My watchlist is at: http://peoplefeeds.com/bosko/watchlist -- you'll notice something here: personalized RSS feeds help make this happen. e.g., from my friend Eric I'm tracking all stuff he tagged "gtd", "toread", and "ruby", and here's the resulting feed:
http://peoplefeeds.com/rss/piko/spliced_for/bosko

To subscribe to other people's stuff, they aggregate it, and I surf their profiles either by category (e.g., bookmarks, photos, blog, etc.) or by tags (Peoplefeeds imports all your tags from all your sources, including del.icio.us, Flickr, Technorati tags and categories from your blog). My profile is: http://peoplefeeds.com/bosko/profile for an example of the result.

In terms of overconsumption of all feeds in general, I think that the real way to solve this is to change the way people consume entries in their feed readers. The best I've seen so far (but not the best in terms of UI) is a service called "My Syndicaat" by a company out of Italy (http://www.mysyndicaat.com/). It's not very well known compared to the others but it allows you to do some unique things. You can break down subscription lists into "tabs" (sets of subscriptions) for various different occasions (e.g., @work, @home, @leisure, etc.). You can apply filters to particular subscriptions within tabs, and so on.

Personally, the biggest problem I have with overconsumption is the fact that I can't always control what I read _in what situation_. I don't want to be reading photography stuff at work (unless I'm a photographer). The concepts implemented in MySyndicaat and Peoplefeeds help. But they are not the be-all end-all and there's much more work to be done here. I'm excited for 2006.