Jesse Sample’s Freak of the Week Airs EVERY WEDNESDAY at 5pm EASTERN only on RadioRadioX.com
This is Jesse Sample. We hear the phrase “Attention Economy” thrown round all the time. I never really thought much of it. My initial interpretation of it was, “Okay, for you to sell your product, you have to get people’s attention and make them aware of the product you’re trying to sell.” In this lens, the attention is the hook and the money changing hands is the where the buyer and the seller eat. But this doesn’t really address all sides of the exchange or even its true nature.
The person accredited with coining the phrase back in 1971 was economist and psychologist, Herbert Simon. He said, “In an information-rich world, a wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. 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.”
Wow. This came from a guy in a time where we had 3 television stations and no internet. If he could only see us now.
I rather appreciate his framing of attention. I works around supply and demand and makes sense in any pure economic sense.
But I want to flip the script. Yes, our attention is finite. We can measure it in seconds and in decades. And in economics, we also learn that scarcity is something that makes things valuable. In this framing, our attention is gold and how we spend it makes a lot of difference, especially to us. And when we’re conscious, we all gotta ball.
Through this frame, it’s my responsibility to spend attention wisely. It’s foolish to spend this precious resource on fear mongering, and gossip, and on other people’s uninformed opinions. I want that valuable information. I want to know if there is shark behind me, a new episode of Mobland, or if my family knows how much I love them, when I get on a plane. If you want me to spend my attention, you better be some really good information
Here’s the deal. In this lens, you and I are holding the gold, not the information, and we’ll be doing the consuming around here.
This week, Rosa and I paid our attention to creating a fresh new track and we invested well. We laid tracks and we sent a train, laden with that sweet conscious gold, barreling through the studio. We took you east for the bridge and dropped you right back off in time square for the final chorus. We reached out to Ben Zoleski, and he put down some very mean bass tracks, that made this little ditty groove very hard. Then Rosa took a boatload of attention and dumped it into the mix and then the master.
Thanks to all of you folks holding the gold and tuned into RadioRadioX. This is the Freak of the Week, “I Fight.”
