Attention

Full Title or Meme

For the commercial internet, the most valuable commodity is acquiring the Attention of the user's that are likely to spend money on whatever it might be that the web site is selling.

Context

• Attention is your most valuable resource. Nietzsche describes a person who has turned out was thus:

  What does not kill him makes him stronger. Instinctively, he collects from everything he sees, hears, lives through, his sum: he is a principle of selection, he discards much. He is always in his own company, whether he associates with books, human beings, or landscapes: he honors by choosing, by admitting, by trusting

• Privacy is the right to be let alone as defined in the late 19th century.
• As long ago as the mid-1980s Michael Goldhaber's epiphany was this: One of the most finite resources in the world is human attention. To describe its scarcity, he latched onto what was then an obscure term, coined by a psychologist, Herbert A. Simon: 'the attention economy.'"
• Most advertisers or influencers talk about trying to maximize the "eyeballs" that are focused on their offerings, but since the rise of podcasts it is better to focus on the user's Attention which is what will drive their actions.
• The same can even be said about selling ideas to venture capitalists. First is the name of the idea, then the elevator pitch and then the pitch points in a slide deck presentation. Again, get and hold the attention of the source of money; That's the same.

Value

Personal

When the US Senat was investigating Andrew Carnegie for corruption one of them asked how did you manage to make so much money and become successful so fast? To which Carnegie revealed his secret of success, his words were very simple, but profound. He said, “I can keep my mind focused on something for five minutes at a stretch.” Just five minutes. Everyone was surprised to hear this. They thought he must be joking. Andrew Carnegie asked the members, “Can any of you do it?” Everyone thought they could and started the experiment. But none of them could focus their mind on anything for even a few seconds. This is the nature of the mind, it is restless.

Andrew Carnegie had mastered the ability to keep his mind focused and attentive. He could explore new opportunities, visualize creative schemes and implement them with huge success due to his ability to pay attention. He had mastered the art of keeping an attentive mind, observing things with openness and receptivity, which helped him unlock great treasures. Others missed it, because they couldn’t pay attention, the same way Carnegie did it.

Andrew Carnegie in an interview with Dale Carnegie told him, “Controlled attention magnetizes the brain with the nature of one’s dominating thoughts, aims, and purposes, thus causing one to be always in search of every necessary thing that is related to one’s dominating thoughts.”

When your dominating thoughts, attention and focus are aligned on something you want to achieve, you invariably achieve it. Andrew Carnegie had mastered the art of keeping his focused attention on the object of his desire. To keep your mind focused on something for five minutes is a great skill & one that pays rich dividends.

Problems

Users are not (yet) attached directly to the internet. They are (nearly) all using a mobile computing device (a smartphone) to make a connection to the internet and some user agent to attach to the World Wide Web (WWW). Since the time of Netscape, the preferred user agent was the web browser. In some countries (2020) the preferred user agent as become Facebook, which is now (2021) engaged in an existential effort to ensure the pipeline of emergent users continues to choose one or more of their platforms, such as Instagram. The insight here is not new, users are fickle. The hot new toy of this Holiday season is in short supply now but will be forgotten in a year. Internet apps are not different. Facebook does not seem to understand, Google and Apple do. The user needs some sort of agent that will be attentive to their current, shifting desire for distraction from boredom.

Solutions

Attention is a valuable resource, use it well and wisely whether it is your own or your customer's.

Attention Networks

• The concept that makes Artificial Intelligence most useful is Attention Networks, a standard deep-learning technique that lets an AI focus on specific parts of its input data. This tech underpins language models like GPT-3, where it directs the neural networks to relevant words in a sentence.
• The idea behind attention in Artificial Intelligence is from the article "Attention Is All You Need," that described the best performing models that connect the encoder and decoder through an attention mechanism. It proposes a new simple network architecture, the Transformer, based solely on attention mechanisms, dispensing with recurrence and convolutions entirely.

Pitch Points

This is phrased in terms of a pitch to a venture capitalist, but the idea of grabbing and maintaining attention is a universal.

• Nuts and Bolts of Creating a Pitch Deck MIT hosted Allison Byers, CEO and founder of Scroobious on YouTube 2022-01-25