Paying for attention: November 17, 1997 issue of New Thinking

November 17, 1997 New Thinking:
Paying for attention

Website content management

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November 17, 1997

Paying for attention

This week's New Thinking is brought to you by
Mary Morris

People are desperately looking for commerce on the Internet. They are turning over every stone, program and website looking for it. Little do most people realize that commerce is going on before our very eyes. The problem is we just don't see the exchange because we are so used to the idea that commerce is based upon monetary exchange.

With the Internet we have been thrown back into the olden days before currency was common, to a time when bartering resources was the way transactions occurred. Try though we might, most folks only see one resource to trade on the Internet, namely information. Many folks see the transfer of information to a user as a gift, not a transaction. They don't see what the user gives back to the website.

You see, the user pays for every bit of information they receive. First of all, they "pay attention". It is already reflected in our language that this is an exchange, but it is an exchange that we take for granted, under the guise of courtesy.

Today it is accepted that others listen when a person speaks. Yet our ancestors did not offer this same courtesy to every barker at the market. They would have starved to death while shopping for food if that was the case. Many of the more "modern" surfers are learning to tune out the messages that they don't want to "pay attention" to.

Because of this, marketers are becoming more creative in finding ways to "capture attention". Thus, we have gone from a society where attention was earned and then paid for, to a society where courtesy forced us to pay attention as if it was a tax, to the current day when our pockets are picked and our valuable resource, attention, is taken from us.

Our attention is captured every time we must read a web page while an animated banner plays on at the edge of our sight. Again, every time we must read through irrelevant email commonly called SPAM before the delete finger gets too itchy.

There are some folks that have developed a natural adaptation to this hiway robbery. These folks have trained their minds to function in the high stimulus environment of the Internet, MTV, and movies, where a scene lasts 4-8 seconds now instead of the old 30 seconds. They do this by totally ignoring the ads, and blocking the SPAM before it arrives. But the average person has not learned these survival skills any more than the average person learned to protect themselves by becoming a knight in the Middle Ages.

Perhaps it is time to start demanding value for the attention that we do pay to sites. Or perhaps it is time to play Robin Hood. However, until we start letting businesses know that we value our attention highly, that our time is important to us and not something to be trifled with, we will be stuck paying with some of our most valuable resources.

Gerry McGovern

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Our attention is captured every time we must read a web page while an animated banner plays on at the edge of our sight.