Wanted: A Theory of Attention

It has been said that we are moving from a distance-based economy to an economy based on attention. The traditional economy has a number of intermediaries to overcome the distance from the production of goods to the final consumers.

In the internet economy, although the products have still to be transported to a possibly distant destination (at least the tangible ones, since the others can travel the net), many of the traditional intermediaries can and will disappear: there are no distances on the web. But there are many destinations or links to follow, and now the main challenge is how to get attention. New intermediaries are appearing to fill the attention gap, such as portals, content aggregators, etc.

On the other hand, persons are becoming increasingly accessible through technologies such as chat, VoIP, mobile phones, wireless networks, etc. Although we want to be reachable in urgent cases, we don't want to be interrupted constantly and so prevented from continuing our main intended activity (be it work, relax, or whatever).

We are seing first attention-controlling artifacts in some tools. For instance in chat or VoIP tools, we can make ourselves available, invisible, partially available, be or look busy, etc. But these are just very primitive rudiments of attention control.

Several years ago, systems were designed without security in mind, and a whole security theory has been developed and implemented, I do believe that an attention theory has to be developed and implemented for communication systems. This theory should take into account the spam phenomenon: Somebody should not be allowed to get my attention without permission. Additionally, attention could be parametrised with another datum that is of increasing importance, namely that of location.
Theory, languages, policies, algorithms to deal with the issue of attention - that is what we have to turn our attention to.