_{Came across this interesting, 20-year old post: http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/519/440}

_{Also, it's recommended to check out the "Advice for the Transition" and "Closing" sections at the end of the linked article. Enjoy the read!}

_{Note: This is simply a curation / summary for something that might be of great interest to the community. Also, it's for an ongoing research.}

Highlights of the essay

1. If you want to thrive in this new world, it behooves you not to mistake it for a place where the dukes and earls of today will naturally continue to prosper, but rather to learn to think in terms of the economy natural to it.

2. We have a word to describe a very attentive audience, and that word is "enthralled." A thrall is basically a slave. If, for instance, I should take it in my head to mention panda bears, you who are paying attention are forced to think "panda bears," a thought you had no inkling would come up when you decided to listen to this talk. Now let me ask, how many of you, on hearing the word "panda" saw a glimpse of a panda in your imagination? Raise your hands, please. Thank you. ... A ha.

3. What just happened? I had your attention and I was able to convert it into a physical action on some of your parts, raising your hands. It comes with the territory. That is part of the power that goes with having attention, a point I will have reason to return to. Right now, it should be evident that having your attention means that I have the power to bend your minds and your bodies to my will, within limits that in turn have to do with how good I am at enthralling you. This can be a remarkable power. When you have superb control over your own body, so that you can perform great athletic feats, it feels great; likewise, it feels good when your mind feels focused and powerful; how much more wonderful then to be able to have the minds and bodies of others at your disposal! On the rather rare occasions when I have felt I was holding an audience "in the palm of my hand, hanging on my every word," I have very much enjoyed the feeling, and of course others who have felt the same have reported their feelings in the same terms. The elation is independent of what you happen to be talking about, even if it is to decry something you think is horrible.

4. This is not a particularly huge audience, but it is possible to enthrall any number of people if you can reach them and if you are good enough at it. So having attention is very, very desirable, in some ways infinitely so, since the larger the audience, the better. And, yet, attention is also difficult to achieve owing to its intrinsic scarcity. That combination makes it the potential driving force of a very intense economy.

5. Of course, not everybody necessarily wants a great deal of attention, just as in a money economy not everybody wants a great deal of money or many of the material goods that money can buy. But, just as in a money economy practically everyone must have some money to survive, so attention in some quantities is pretty much a prerequisite for survival, and attention is actually far more basic. No matter how humble you now may be, at some time in your own childhood you certainly sought attention, or you wouldn't be here.

6. We are living a temporary attention economy in miniature right at this moment. It should be evident by now that everyone has always lived with some degree of an attention economy, but through most of human history it hasn't been primary. Material needs and the production of material goods or the provision of purely material and basically impersonal services such as railways held sway. Even fifty years ago, the percentage of the American population that could take basic material needs for granted and didn't work directly in factories or on farms was much smaller than it is today.

7. When real attention of the right sort is unavailable, one has to make do to make do with the illusory kind, which comes through an increasing variety of media: paperback books, sound recordings, movies, radio, magazines, TV, video, and most recently computer software, CD-ROMs and the Web.

8. In a full attention economy practically all organizations will be basically temporary, either communities in which attention is shared around pretty equally, or, more often, entourages of fans who form around one or a few stars to help them achieve the performances they are attempting. Think of the groups that come together to make a movie or to create a new piece of software, etc. More often than not, a few stars dominate the process; in the case of a movie, it is not only the main actors, but the directors, writer, producer, and possibly the cinematographer, the chief editor, and a few others. If the movie is to be made, everyone else involved focuses their attention on these stars; afterwards, the stars usually go their separate ways, bringing together different entourages for their next performance.

9. This might be good point to add that since it is hard to get new attention by repeating exactly what you or someone else has done before, this new economy is based on endless originality, or at least attempts at originality. By contrast, the old industrial economy worked on the basis of making interchangeable objects in huge numbers. One could spend a lifetime of work in a factory, for instance, repeating the same motions over and over, polishing the same small area on car after car, for instance. And it was such repetition that allowed standard prices for things and standard wages for definite jobs to make sense. The entire money system is based on the simultaneous inter-changeability of units of money, on the one hand, and of standardized goods on the other. One dollar is as good as another; one quart of non-fat milk is as good as another; both statements must be true, or non-fat milk will have no price. With the endless originality and diversity of the attention economy, that kind of exchange is no longer possible. Even though one can loosely compare amounts of attention paid to different performances, attention does not come in precise, indistinguishable units, and neither does the illusory attention for which it is exchanged.

10. Organizations Diminish as Transparency Grows

11. In an attention economy as confined as a conference of this sort, the material goods such as a snack or a sandwich come from outside the system. If the whole world is an attention economy, then making material goods, growing food from scratch in a garden or on a farm, or obtaining resources in any other fashion, and ultimately turning these over to you can be a direct act of attention paying. Thus, if you have enough attention, you can get anything you want. If you don't have enough your options will be distinctly more limited, but supplying you with some range of items, produced in a fairly automated fashion, can also be a successful form of paying you illusory attention, in return for some real attention that you pay to whomever is apparently doing this for you.

12. Someone who wants your attention just can't rely on paying you money to get it, but has to do more, has to be interesting, that is must offer you illusory attention, in just about the same amounts as they would if you had instead been paying money to listen to them -- which by the way is closer to the case here. Money flows to attention, and much less well does attention flow to money.

13. Business as performance - it's still a lively spectator sport for instance, and just as we care about who is the best or the record breaker in football or basketball or any other such game, so we are interested in who heads lists like the Forbes 400 of those with the most money.

14. Companies of all kinds will have less definite and fixed structures, since they will be structured not by physical walls and buildings, but through the Net itself, and more and more of their proceedings will be done in the full glare of Web attention, as temporary and rapidly re-forming projects. This means that companies will be unable to provide even what loyalty they do now to their employees, or say, in the case of publishers, to authors who have signed with them. Just as baseball stars move around from team to team or TV stars from network to network, so employee loyalties to companies will decrease as well. What will matter more for everyone is the stars one has particular loyalty to, or the Net communities of which one is a part and through which one gets attention.

15. Attention transactions, which already are far more numerous than monetary transactions will come to dominate even further. 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.

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_{Linked essay and content of highlights authored by Michael H. Goldhaber}

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