Michael Goldhaber

Who they are

Goldhaber trained as a theoretical physicist and works as a writer and consultant. In the 1980s he worked on technology policy at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, DC, and he is the author of Reinventing Technology: Policies for Democratic Values, published by Routledge in 1986.

The 1997 paper began as a talk given in January 1997 at a conference on the economics of digital information in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and appeared in First Monday, volume 2, number 4, on 7 April 1997. The posted text is a second draft of the talk. Its first move is methodological: people understand new phenomena through familiar categories, and conventional economics, he argues, misreads the Internet and the Web for that reason, so a fresh view is needed that identifies what is actually changing.

Key papers

Goldhaber, M. H. (1997). The attention economy and the Net. First Monday, 2(4). https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v2i4.519

The argument proceeds in stages. Cyberspace moves digital information rather than physical goods, and the usual explanations for the growth of the information sector, higher business productivity or the satisfaction of individual wants for information, do not fit well. Industrial economies, he argues, grow until material wants are largely met, after which extra goods offer diminishing returns. Information is more abundant than goods and much of it goes unread, so growth cannot be explained by ordinary consumer demand for it.

His hypothesis is that information has value only if someone attends to it, and that attention is both scarce and desirable. Every transfer of information is completed by a flow of attention in the opposite direction, and links on the Web make it easier to pass attention along a chain. Only sentient beings can give meaningful attention, and each person can attend fully to only one other person at a time, so the supply per person stays limited however technology develops.

Key ideas

Attention differs from material goods in that it can be received without being returned in equal measure, and he describes people who receive more attention than they give and people who give more than they receive. Because attention is a basic human need, he argues, everyone needs some minimum of it.

Illusory attention is his term for the feeling of being personally addressed by a figure who is addressing many people at once.

The paper also sets out proposals for the period of transition, including on intellectual property, where he argues that attention-based wealth grows by openness. These are proposals made in 1997 and belong to the debates of that decade. The framing that lasted is the idea of attention as something that can be given, held and competed for, with the Net as a place where many people can seek it.

In the paper's closing sections he considers where this might lead. He notes that attention lasts, so that people who hold an audience tend to keep it through setbacks, and he treats attention as a versatile resource that can be converted into other forms of standing. He sketches a scenario in which money gradually loses importance, as noble titles once did, and observes that for many people exchanges of attention already outnumber monetary transactions. He ends with a picture of the Net as a global, continuous conference, in which almost anyone can seek attention and become briefly visible, and in which material production becomes secondary. These passages are forecasts and images, offered as a way of thinking about the transition rather than as measured results.

---