SimonWaldman.net

Like all the best theories - this one is at best half-baked, and it’s been rushed out in time for Easter. But, I think there’s something there…perhaps.

So this is the question that’s been bugging me. When did we all get so willing to share so much information about ourselves with strangers?

Forget the technology, Ajax, buzzwords and theories, at the heart of so much that is happening on the web is people’s willingness to reveal copious amounts of information about themselves online.

Blogging, myspace profiles, Flickr accounts, twittering, last.fm accounts, del.icio.us bookmarks, videos on youtube - what was once private has become instantly public. Call me all coy and English - but even though I take part in this myself (to an extent) it seems like a remarkable shift. How has that happened? And why? Or has technology just taken the seed of something that already existed in society and blown it up out of all recognisable proportion.

I saw Jimmy Wales speak a while ago at an FT conference - the quote that really stuck in my mind from his presentation was - after he’d pointed out that the technology underlying Wikipedia was actually quite old - ‘this is a social innovation, not just a technological innovation‘.

Rather annoyingly he then skipped on to something else. Annoying, because it begs the question what’s driving this social innovation? What made it happen?

As I mentioned when wittering on about OhMyNews (and as Robb Montgomery followed up in a comment) - that site’s initial success was completely intertwined with the political landscape in South Korea at the time. I sense that like successful magazines capture the mood of the moment (Loaded, Heat and Grazia in the UK) online activity succeeds not because of great programming (that just choses winning implementation from losing) but because it chimes with the mood and needs of the time.

There is a lot written about a sense of community - a general sense of activity for the greater good. I like this idea, but I fear it is what we’d like it to be - rather than what it actually is . It also sidesteps the fact that a lot of what happens in communal spaces online is also destructive, the much vaunted Tragedy of the Commons.

Everything starts with a single selfish act

My general rule of thumb has been that most successful communal activity starts by people making a single selfish act. So, del.icio.us for examples starts out as a way of storing your bookmarks - but when tens and hundreds of thousands of people act in this selfish way, it takes on a new dimension.

Similarly Flickr - here’s a handy way to store your photos online, but as everyone takes part..well we know what happens next.

But that makes it all too functional. I still believe (and call me a cynic) that much communal activity is the result of selfish acts - but I think that selfish act isn’t simply about, say, being able to store your photos online.

I posed this question to my friend Sue, who works in advertising and is generally considered to be quite smart. Her answer (and I paraphrase) was ‘I think that once you scrape below the surface, most people do most things to make up for the lack of attention they got as children‘.

Well - I’ll skip the psychology thing of this - but the idea that what we are seeing unravel before us is millions and millions of people scrabbling for attention, really works for me.

Just as John Lanchester said at the end of his review of Web 2.0 hotshots in Weekend a few months ago

Everybody sitting at a computer screen is alone. Everybody sitting at a computer screen is at the centre of the world. Everybody sitting at a computer screen, increasingly, wants everything to be all about them.

There has been much talk about ‘The attention economy‘ - where our attention is seen as an increasingly scarce commodity that companies now have to fight for. This (very fine) write up on ReadWriteWeb for example sees The Attention economy as a way of putting the user back in control. It’s a head to head battle between (little old) us and (big bad) them.

But I think there’s another attention economy - and this is based on the attention that we all crave from each other - a peer-to-peer attention economy.

And in this new world, the joyous - or perhaps troubling fact - is that attention, once a ethereal immeasurable thing, has been quantified and hard coded into every element of Web 2.0.

The KPIs of attention seekers

Around blogging a whole litany of services have blossomed that allow bloggers to monitor the attention they receive. You look at your site stats a thousand times a day. You check an RSS feed of a search for your name/ URL on technorati and you monitor the number of links on your technorati cosmos in the same way that Bridget Jones monitors her weight.

Your flickr account tells you how many times each picture has been viewed, lets you see who has commented or favourited your pics.
Your friends list on MySpace/Bebo, the number of ’snogs’ you get on a site like ‘flirtomatic‘, names that feature on your MyBlogLog widget. In the real world these are immeasurable looks, glances and innuendo. Online they are cold hard stats - the KPIs of attention seekers.

And, I’d argue that much that is seen as communal behaviour is in fact attention seeking. Putting comments on people’s blogs; adding them to your blogroll - is a perfect act. It attracts attention to yourself, while also paying attention to your target. Why put your photos on Flickr rather than a more private environment like Box.net? Doh! because if you put them on Flickr, people are going to stumble across and say they’re pretty good..

But, given that attention is a finite commodity - even with a nearly infinite number of people out there - you have to compete for it. So, it’s not enough to have a really boring MySpace profile you have to tart it up - ditch the boring pic and give us one of your six-pack. There is no point having a blog, and just posting once a quarter - you have to post five times a day. And the system works - because the more you put in (or perhaps put out) the more attention you get back. And you can measure it. Hell, you can almost touch it.

And the beauty is it sort of works for everyone who takes part. They used to say that no-one knows you’re a dog on the internet. With photos everywhere, and people putting more and more of themselves online - anonymity is no longer the attraction. Everyone will know you’re a dog - but the thing is, there’s bound to be plenty of canine fanciers out there somewhere looking for you.
And if you can’t be bothered playing it this way - then you get disruptive. And this is why trolls and wreckers are just the flipside of the same attention-seeking coin. It’s simply the quickest route to grab the most attention.

In this economy, then - the real value goes to those who provide the tools and the environments that allow us to secure the attention we need. On a grand scale this can be MySpace or Flickr, but at a more local level, it can be Technorati or a simple stats package.

So to go back to one of my original questions - is there something new here? No - but I do think, as I said, something quite old fashioned - our need for attention - has been exploded into something previously unrecognisable.

Anything is better than being ignored

When the Guardian’s Dorian Lynsky was talking about people commenting on his articles/ reviews and how he dealt with criticism, he concluded

No amount of abuse at the foot of a blog is quite as disheartening as the dread phrase: “Comments (0)”.

In other words - even a journalist used to publishign work on a regular basis feels the need for such measurable levels of attention as the number of comments that follow one of his reviews.

Is it a bad thing? Actually, you could argue the opposite way - if it means that people are getting and feeling the attention they crave and that they might have been deprived of without the net to facilitate it; and they are happier and more capable of dealing with the real world as a result - it can be a fantastic thing. If it means a refuge into cyberspace as the only place where any attention can be found - then, it’s not good - but there’s more going on there. It’s an effect of trouble, not a cause of it.

What is a worry is that in the scrabble for attention we let too much of ourselves out of the bag. There are things that employers, future partners, friends and family simply don’t want to know (and, for that matter, that stalkers groomers shouldn’t be allowed to know).

And what about those who shriek in horror at the thought of self-exposure? Well it’s not that they don’t seek attention - more that they either get it elsewhere, or like Dorian Lynsky their real fear is a most measurable failure.

I will of course be following how much attention this post gets. Incessantly.