EXTRACTS FROM THE ARTICLE

To get attention you must emit what is technically identifiable as information; likewise for information to be of any value, it must receive attention. Therefore an information technology is also an attention technology, or in other words, a transfer of information is only completed when there is also a transfer of attention proceeding in the opposite direction.

In the past, for a revolution in thought to occur within any specific field, and then to endure in later generations, its proponents had to fight it out with champions of older views within (and, more rarely, among) the relevant faculties.

Only those works freely available on the Internet would get much real notice and readership. (The same is likely to hold for other sorts of materials: music, photos, videos, etc. Only what is not effectively copy–protected will be freely circulated, will get attention, and will have a chance of becoming known in the way anything can become known on the Internet.)

As we move towards an attention economy in a fuller sense, the ethos of the old economy which makes it often bad taste or a poor strategy to consciously seek attention seems to be giving way to an attitude that makes having a lot of attention rather admirable and seeking it not at all to be frowned upon. You most likely make many more decisions every day about where and towards whom your attention should now go than about where your or anyone else’s money should go.

In a full-fledged attention economy the goal is simply to get either enough attention or as much as possible. Thus obtaining attention is obtaining a kind of enduring wealth, a form of wealth that puts you in a preferred position to get anything this new economy offers. Wealth that can endure and sometimes be added to is what we mean by property. Thus, in the new economy attention itself is property. Where is it? Primarily it is located in the minds of those who have paid you attention in the past, whether years ago or seconds ago.

Seeing this kind of wealth as property suggests a strategy for maintaining and enlarging what you have that is far different from what is usually considered to be the case when dealing with ideas or information. Suppose you get attention through some text you send out over the Internet. Would you want your audience to copy this and pass it on to others who might pay attention in turn? Of course you would. It would be insane to want to stop or restrain such copying, since that would deprive you of much attention you could otherwise get.

Individual attention getters of all sorts will find it ever easier to get attention directly through the Web, without any corporate packaging necessary. So even if you have lots of money, you will find it less and less convenient or worthwhile to bother to use it. As a result, our deeply ingrained desire for monetary recompense will begin to fade as well.

So in the case of a book, the Internet should now be viewed as a useful and free publicity mechanism. Let passages be freely copied and circulated on the Net, because most of the time, the more of copying that takes place, the more customers there will be for the physical printed version. If you have a Web site, don’t charge for it, because that will only reduce the attention it gets. If you can’t figure out how to afford it without charging, you may be doing something wrong.

In due time, publishing companies as such will hardly be necessary, for actual physical books will be seen as cumbersome and quaint. Still, many of the kinds of tasks once performed by publishing company employees such as acquisition and line editors, designers, publicists, and so, will still be done, but on much more ad hoc and free-lance, eventually even unpaid basis.

Getting attention in large quantities is being a star, and the number of people who openly make evident that they crave stardom and put out endless effort to achieve it is quite substantial. In the long term intellectual property is thus a foolish and losing proposition. This is why the old and new economies won’t continue to coexist forever; they are diametrically opposed around this central question, as well as some others, and one can only grow at the ultimate expense of the other.

Wealth therefore comes to you by expressing yourself fully. Also you accumulate attention through the full extent of your personality—everything that makes you distinctly you and not someone else. In the attention economy, you obtain wealth--that is attention--by expressing yourself, putting your real self forward as much as possible.

Your property, what is proper to you, is what you can get attention for, and that you must put out in public. The more you gain attention for what you do, the more witnesses you have that what you want to say comes from you, that you have priority, and so by getting attention at the earliest possible moment for what you want to express, you retain attention and ownership of that attention.

Anyone who copies you is turning their audience over to you, and thereby doing you a favor. Even anyone who tries to malign you or distort what you are saying calls attention to you in the process. Property is the ownership of wealth. If attention is the important kind of wealth, whenever you attract and hold it, you gain property.

This understanding of rhetoric sees communication as a means of persuasion; as a way of manipulating the social world by influencing the beliefs, attitudes, values, and behaviors of audiences. This avenue for understanding communication introduces the rhetorical or dramatist model of communication, in which communication is understood as a way of exercising power over the social world. In any case, the understanding of communication as a means of transporting a message from one place to another is at the root of what James Carey has called the “transmission model” of communication.