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Michel Bauwens of the Peer to Peer Foundation recently conducted an email exchange with Michael Goldhaber on attention, and he blogged it the other week. Goldhaber writes:

In principle, I am very much for human equality and valuing every person equally. That’s why in principle I favor some kind of socialism, which entails an equal division of important kinds of wealth, very much including attention. But, like everyone else I know, I find it hard in practice to pay equal attention to everyone, for the reasons just stated. It takes an incredible degree of self-discipline. If we could devise means for each person to express themselves in ways equally interesting to all others, then we might have what might be called “attention socialism.” I encourage everyone to work towards that ideal. In all probability, the efforts will be imperfect, but they might well help flatten the differences between stars and fans, or , in other words, they might eliminate some of the inequalities inherent in the attention economy.

I'm not a socialist, in principle or otherwise, but I am an egalitarian, and I'm personally sympathetic to Michael's aims here. However, I don't believe that systems reliant on "self-discipline" scale well work at all.

We'll never have a flat demand curve for attention, because attention begets itself, but we can certainly extend and populate the tail, in Chris Anderson's schema. We can't all be stars in the grandest sense (nor do we all want to be), but we can find other, more relevant, more meaningful people to pay attention to, and we can receive attention in return through the use of improved, personalized discovery and recommendation systems. These tools will make use of our attention data to help us connect with people, ideas and content that provide a greater return on our investment of time and attention.

tags: attention attentiontrust attention+trust attention+economy attention+data michael+goldhaber michel+bauwens p2p+foundation