Attention
Contents
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.
"Attention is a limited resource, so pay attention to where to you put your attention."- Howard Reingold.
Context
- Attention is your most valuable resource. Nietzsche describes a person who has turned out was thus:[1]
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. [2]
- 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.'"[3] This idea affected him deeply. "I kept thinking that Attention is highly desirable and that those who want it fend to want as much as they can possibly get." For more on this subject see the wiki page 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.
Types
A good analysis of types can be found in Chris Hayes' book.Cite error: Closing </ref> missing for <ref> tag
Solutions
Attention is a valuable resource, use it well and wisely whether it is your own or your customer's.
This isn't New
Reading Jill La Pore's history of the US[4] we see that even here in the USA there has been a constant churn of media and people's adaption to the new media. The first was the vitriolic news papers which were all highly partisan.
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.[5]
- 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.[6]
Pitch Points
For whatever reason you want a person's attention, you have only 2-3 seconds to get them to pay any attention at all, and then the first message must be very brief, then you can give them your "pitch points."
The following 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
References
- ↑ Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecco Homo
- ↑ Warren and Brandeis The Right to Privacy (1890-12-15) Harvard Law Review http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.805/articles/privacy/Privacy_brand_warr2.html
- ↑ Charlie Warzel, The Internet Rewired our Brains., New York Times 2021-02-07. pp. R4-5.
- ↑ Jill La Pore.These Truths: A History of the United States
- ↑ Will Douglas Heaven, Deepmind's Big Science Experiment Technology Review (2022-03) Vol 125 no 2 p. 31 ff.
- ↑ Ashish Vaswani, Attention Is All You Need (2017-06-22) https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762
