"Achtung," from fscklog on Flickr

More and more, people are talking about the “attention economy.” If you’re new to the term, here’s the basic idea: Attention is scarce, meaning it’s a finite commodity that can be gathered and exhausted. Using economics as a model, we have to choose where we “spend” our attention, and those seeking to gain our attention have to use market-based tactics — a.k.a., “marketing!” aha! — to win us over.

Models like this are very attractive to us as a culture because we’re so familiar with transaction-based economies. As I wrote in “Share This!,” it’s how we think of everything we do. If I pay you $5, you'll give me a pint of Ben and Jerry's. If I refinish your flooring, you'll pay me for my labor. Even when we think of bartering, we still focus on the transactional moment: If I cook you dinner, you'll show me how to set up a website.

When we apply transactions to how traditional media works (think: one-directional, few-to-many broadcast messages), it’s easy to see how we ended up with the dismal state of affairs that exist: reality TV, infotainment news, etc. If, as a producer of content, I need to get the most bang for my buck out of each “transaction,” I’m going to create something that will gain the most attention. I’ll have to yell the loudest, create the most spectacle. It’s not worth my time or money to create niche content that will draw in specific kinds of audiences; partly because this is one-directional, and I have all the control, I can blast people with content and hope for the best out of that transactional moment, when I print an article or air a show. The more outrageous that content is, the better chance I have of at least catching people’s eye for a moment — take advantage of humanity’s rubbernecking instinct.

As we enter a more social, and perhaps more holistic, way of interacting with the world around us, squeezing our attention span in this kind of transaction-based, market model is turning out to be fraught with problems. First, the transactional moment is more bi-directional (or even multi-directional) than ever. We’re having conversations with one another, so it’s not just about me producing content and you consuming it. It’s about how we interact with what gets put out there, and how that content changes once we start interacting with it.

It’s also different because it’s not a few-to-many model, it’s a many-to-many model. This is where applying an economic analysis to attention becomes sticky. In the case of social media, and probably much of our non-media lives, attention isn’t actually a scarce commodity. We have to reframe our interactions with one another– it’s not about trying to “pay attention” to everything that comes our way, and running out of attention to pay. It’s more about making the world around us a stream or flow of information, and dipping in and out of that flow as necessary or desired. Attention, in this model, isn’t a scarce commodity — it’s actually an unending stream that gets woven in and out of other streams. (Suddenly I’m having a Ghostbusters moment.)

Since attention isn’t comprised of chunks that get accumulated and doled out as we progress into this way of thinking, there’s not much use in thinking about the system as an finite economy. Who yells the loudest and makes the biggest fool of themselves will become less important as our notions of celebrity also change — having higher numbers of viewers or followers or fans doesn’t equal influence and fame. Or, it doesn’t have to, anyways. If we can turn around our thinking, away from the style of mass media which has only served to alienate us from one another, and produce lowest-common denominator content, towards one of a more holistic, ecosystem-like view where relationships to and relevancy of content matter, then attention’s scarcity also begins to disappear.

Once scarcity is removed from the model, there’s no market economics that apply to it. You’re not competing for others’ attention, you’re creating sustainable relationships across which content flows, many ways. What happens as a result of those relationships might be quantifiable in some way, but how we choose to do so absolutely must become more nuanced than units of product sold, pageviews/uniques, or number of followers/fans gained. This is another key point missing from much of the conversations being had about social media’s impact: we are at a critical, cultural juncture where it is up to us to experiment and ultimately define how things work in the ecosystem. Markets work for certain things, but information, attention and relationships aren’t among them. It’s time to ditch the desire to commoditize our world. What say ye?

There is the obvious tragedy of the dead and wounded in Binghamton, NY. The anger and despair, the terror of knowing that a gunman can walk into a building in a relatively small city in rural, industrial upstate New York and massacre people at will.

Then the other layers start piling on top of the fear and the rage: the layers that make the story just a little cloudier and darker. Yeah, there’s an inside joke in there– I grew up there, and Binghamton is the seventh cloudiest city in the country. The cloudiest east of the Rockies. No doubt that the lack of direct sun contributes to a sense of malaise in town, but it’s likely the overall economic decline over the last 20-25 years that makes Binghamton just a very sad city in many ways.

We all have our grownup sensibilities about the towns we come from, especially those of us that moved to Big Cities– all our bravado about how glad we are that we “got out,” our vows to never look back (maybe), or quietly and smugly looking back at those quaint li’l places. But there is something special about Binghamton. It was never a thriving metropolis, but it got by alright, and that’s what most of the folks that live there seem to live by.

I once wrote that the people from my hometown were never the stars of the production. We were always happy to be in the background, providing the scenery. Maybe once in a while, we were the people that got a line, fingering the suspect. “That’s the guy,” we’d say. It would be straightforward, without fanfare. That’s how people from Binghamton operate.

Being brought to a national stage like this, under such horrible circumstances, is devastating. Not only do “things like this” not happen in Binghamton, but additional layers — economic duress, the immigrant aid center where it happened — make it all the more sharp.

We have long been the destination of swaths of migrant populations: in the early 1900s, it was Eastern Europeans, and the Orthodox churches’ gold onion domes still dot the city landscape when you drive out along Route 17. More recently, it’s been populations of folk from a number of countries in Southeast Asia: Vietnamese, Cambodians, Laotian and more. Not to say that there hasn’t been difficulty in transitioning populations, especially for a place with largely conservative values, but I always had the feeling that Binghamton prided itself on its immigrant foundations and offerings. Centers like the American Civic Association give new immigrants a place to find their footing in a cloudy city in upstate New York.

Offerings. IBM was in many ways the responsible party for Binghamton’s survival for a lot of years, and when they left town, so did most of everything else. Now we’re learning that the shooter was recently laid off from one of the last vestiges of IBM. Economic distress might have been the thing that flipped this guy’s sanity over to the dark side. And now people are dead.