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Next Up for the Internet: The Attention Rights Movement

In shorter supply than either fossil fuel or ozone, attention -- our cognitive ability to focus on information -- is being squandered, even stolen, everyday by desperate marketers, their bad advertising, unrelenting spam, and old imposition models.

The most recent report by leading IT media, research, and exposition company IDG shows that the Internet has now passed TV and print media in hours of attention consumed. Users polled exceeded 32 hours online per week compared to 16 for television and 4 for print. This is good news for the world of online media, but we are approaching a critical "jump point" in the power balance between producer and consumer.

As marketers and advertisers hungrily explore ways to monetize online attention, they face mounting challenges. Consumers have migrated online precisely because they want more control over the media they consume. The old bargain -- content for attention -- is broken. Empowered viewers now reject TV’s standard promise of 22 minutes of content in exchange for eight minutes of brain-dead ads. With place- and time-shifting technology at their disposal, viewers, listeners, and readers do not want, nor need they endure, advertisements. As a result, online ads, be they behavioral, contextual, or declarative data-based, are all falling short. Give consumers the choice, and they would rather get information from a trusted friend or expert. This is giving the old Hollywood/Madison Avenue nexus fits. The ROI on a dollar of integrated advertising today, even when measurable, is dismal.

Worse yet, the information-overwhelmed prey are getting restless, even hostile. And for good reason. In many ways, unwanted interruption-based advertising is nothing short of a misdemeanor. Run an absurdly out-of-place banner ad over my page views, or punctuate my ballgame with, say, a feminine hygiene product spot, and I feel violated. You have wasted my attention, pilfering precious time and focus I could have reserved for dearer claims on my bandwidth, such as my family and friends. Simply put: Attention theft is a crime.

People like Michael Goldhaber have been writing about the Attention Economy for ten years. The very idea of an economy implies an exchange of value for value. It is not clear at this point what advertisers need to do to sweeten the attention bargain, but the current jig is up.

The global resistance movement is gaining steam, and, since the publication last week of my new book, Jump Point: How Network Culture is Revolutionizing Business, I have become an inconvenient truth-teller shedding light on the mounting consumer backlash. There are many efforts feeding the energy.

Over at my alma mater, Boston University, Professor Marshall Van Alstyne has advocated “attention bonds,” whereby emailers would post bonds on the promise not to waste a recipient’s time and attention with unwanted spam. At AttentionTrust.org, they are proposing an attention management utility that gives the user control over the deluge. Globally, we should pay heed to efforts in São Paolo, where all outdoor advertising has been banned as a blight on the landscape; or in Germany, where the "Informationelle Selbstbestimmung" (literally, Information Self-Determination) campaign has already resulted in national consumer-rights legislation. And, I suspect that SEO (search engine optimization) is next up in the cross-hairs, with practices like link farms, keyword stuffing, cloaking, and automated content generators and duplicators getting more consumer fraud scrutiny.

I am sure you'll want to debate me on this: Get in line. But first consider the following manifesto I am offering for the movement. Hard to disagree with these simple dignities:

• I am the sole owner of my attention.
• I have a right to compensation for my attention, value for value.
• Demands on my attention shall be transparent.
• I have a right to decide what information I want. And don’t want.
• I own my click stream and all other representations of my attention.
• My email box is an extension of my person. No one has an intrinsic right to send me mail.
• Attention theft is a crime.

The End of the Internet as We Knew It

The biggest take-away from last week’s Consumer Electronics Show is that every device in our lives is rapidly becoming a computer connected to the Internet.  That new reality means the Internet will soon transition from the conspicuous to the unconscious-from something you go “onto” to something you never go off of-and in fact hardly even think about.

Much the way electricity did a hundred years ago, the Internet is segueing from near-magic to life staple.  And much the way electrified homes and cities revolutionized our culture and economy at the turn of the 20^th century, the Internet as core utility will do the same for this century.

Light on actual new gadgets, the CES was a watershed for showcasing network ubiquity.  Machine-to-machine communications, what some used to call the Internet2, will mean that modern life depends on connectedness in a whole new way.  In fact, we may soon stop referring to the developed and undeveloped worlds, and instead talk about the hot and the dark worlds-the online and the offline hemispheres.  And as I write about in my book, Jump Point, by 2011 more people will be online than off as the Internet crosses the 3.5 Billion user mark that year. So it makes sense that the CES this year looked more like the consumer shows of the 1950s in demonstrating the new wonders and conveniences of the modern home.  Almost every booth featured models of the digital lifestyle.  For example:

• By 2011, 90 percent of all Sony ^[1] products will connect to the Internet, Howard Stringer ^[2], the chief executive of Sony, predicted.
• New televisions from LG, Samsung and others will now let viewers seamlessly watch movies from Netflix ^[3] and other Internet sites.
• The Palm Pre phone promises to make it easy to call your friends by looking up their phone numbers on Facebook ^[4] for you.
• A new version of the Ford ^[5] F150 pickup truck will let contractors check service manuals by browsing the Web from an in-dash computer.

The new drive is to embed computer chips with Internet connections– all of which keep getting cheaper and smaller–into more and more everyday products.  Sony introduced an Internet-connected alarm clock that will wake you up with your favorite music videos and traffic forecasts for your commute.  Asustek, the giant Taiwanese electronics company, showed a touch-screen computer that hangs on a wall and a TV remote with built-in PC and keyboard that lets users surf the Net on their TVs. According to Jonney Shih, the chairman of Asustek, soon everything in your house, even your bathroom mirror, will be a computer display.

What’s the big idea from all this connectivity?  For one thing, if you still see the Internet as a plus-market or mere conveyance, you’d better rethink the future of your business.  If you think the Internet is just for downloading digital products, you had better watch out for the coming revolution in distribution and supply chains.  If you think the Internet is just for the young, hip and adventurous, try going dark and see what happens to your business.  One thing is certain; the world on the other side of this economic downturn will be very different than it is today.  And, that helps explain some of the pain and fear.  What we are experiencing now is as wrenching a transition as the change-over from rural to urban or agrarian to industrial.  A century ago a brave world hailed the electrification of Main Street and ushered in the modern consumer economy.  Last week we celebrated the connectivity of Main Street and welcomed the start of the real Internet era.