Attention Economy/Attention metaphors
Ever since i read this post on
by Venkatesh rao, i have been thinking of the metaphors we use for our
attention.
We live in an attention economy
Steve Jobs, and his persona was a good example of it. Good as in someone who
exemplified the power of attention and what it can be put use to. While i must
say, i haven’t used many apple products, I don’t think all of their products
deserve to be worshipped. I agree they have been the leaders with iPad and it’s
a cool technology alright(along with ipod of course). But they have always made
design decisions that have alienated a nerd,power user like me.
Anyway, the point am trying to make is that with the mouse, Mac captured the
attention of a range of audience lot bigger than the small,programming and/or
nerd community. You can extend that to explain almost all of their products.
They were all designed to capture the majority of (sigma, for summation)attention
of the consumer population. That was Steve Job’s vision and the Reality
Distortion Field**, is his ability capture who he was talking to/selling his
ideas to.
It struck me that majority of us use the clock metaphor when it comes to our
attention.
i.e: it’s a replenishable resource.
1 – A phrase if i remember right coined about 4-5 years ago in some pop-best
seller (research required on what it was).
** – I have no personal experience meeting, so my only idea of the
RDF is that from reading and watching “pirates of the silicon valley”
*** – My emotional core/moral value system definitely looks down at manipulating attention to profit or make money, but the rational side of me sees it as ok and normal in the case of what steve jobs did, just as we have magicians. I assume if any of that had led to federal policy changes, that in turn caused loss of lives, even the rational side would be furious about that.
softwaremechanic 