Getting Attention for One's Scholarship
(Changing the World)
Richard Koenigsberg

My transition from a "traditional" scholar--to someone who publishes papers and essays through this Newsletter--began when I read an article, BASIC CONCEPTS OF THE ATTENTION ECONOMY: The Attention Economy and the Net, by Michael H. Goldhaber. Excerpts from this groundbreaking piece of writing appear below.

I did not go gently into this new mode of conveying ideas. I had been well trained as a scholar and scientist. I knew what the rules and norms were.

Yet and still (as the cats at Univiversity of Michigan used to say), why would I hesitate? I had been published at a very young age in prestigious journals such as the American Imago and Psychoanalytic Review. I was promoted at a very young age to "Assistant Professor of Behavioral Science." What did I have to lose?

The thing of it is (as the cats at University of Michigan used to say): an essay or paper published through the Library of Social Science Newsletter is read by more people in a single day than a typical article published in a journal is read in its lifetime. 

If the objective is to convey one's ideas to colleagues, students, and professionals in one's field (as well as to publishing executives, who also are on our mailing list) why would one hesitate?

I recently received an invitation from Steven Pinker to publish in a prominent journal. I like and respect Steven Pinker, but sadly declined his invitation. Why would I publish in this prestigious journal if it would reduce my readership by about 90%?

Yes, I know, this is the way things are done, that is, this is the way things used to be done. 

Among the people who have been the most consistent contributors to the Library of Social Science Newsletter are some of the finest scholars in the world, among them Roger Griffin, Ivan Strenki, Scott Atran, Michael E. Vlahos, Walter Skya, and many others. See our list of published authors here and here. 

What do these authors have in common? They are passionate about conveying their thinking. They have a powerful desire to get their ideas out into the world; even to change the world. Yes, I do think it's possible to change the world through ideas. How else does the world change?

When I write about "attention," I'm not speaking of an infantile desire to "get one's name in lights," the principle that governs the Internet ("Me, me, me, me," as my brother used to say).

I'm talking about the desire to shine light on great ideas. This is what scholarship is. This is what scholarship is all about.

Best regards,

Richard Koenigsberg, PhD
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  • 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.
     
  • The Internet reverses the ideas of a successful scholar or scientist; such a person benefits from having as many as possible citations to his or her articles. These citations of course always come after the article cited has been published, reinforcing the importance of chronology and the sense of progress inherent in the sphere of publishing of standard journals that occupy real space and appear at definite times.
     
  • On the Internet however, to gain recognition it helps to be, in effect, in one’s own person, a node, to whom others send links from which one culls the best choices to include on one’s own site.
     
  • H. interneticus has no such sense of fixity at all. Web sites are subject to constant revision, and users skip from site to site at will. Thus no story or argument is final, fixed; neither tale, nor blog, nor text nor Web site has a canonical form.
     
  • Whereas print culture over the course of its five–century history quickly became and remained connected with institutional centers of considerable duration and power (libraries, major universities, governments with their printing offices, major newspapers, and scientific societies) the Internet seems by its structure radically decentralizing.
     
  • Anyone has a chance of turning his or her personal listserv, blog or Web site into a node that will be in effect, and quite likely for a very limited time, an institution as powerful as any of the more stable ones of 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.
     
  • H. typographicus tends to think of most kinds of material items that can be property as such because they can remain with us for a long time into the future, in more or less unchanged form. (Thus, one barely regards a morsel of food one is in the process of eating as one’s property.)
     
  • 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.
     
  • Organizations will diminish in importance at rapid pace, relative to the importance of the individuals who are temporarily in them. And whether these people are physically at Harvard or somewhere else will matter less and less, until the institution loses all coherence, all distinctness from other universities or from any one of hundreds of other organizations which have audiences in common.
     
  • 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.
     
  • Possessors of today’s rising kind of wealth, which is attention, and whom we label stars of every sort, have an easy time getting money.