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.

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