12.15.07
User generated currency
The power equations will be rewritten in the new version of social stock exchanges. It’s a merger of social value in a medium where the individual has asserted a new level of power. the intermediary’s role in an online exchange that treats people and the planet as of some intrinsic value will be different. Technology itself is one reason that new power dynamic will accompany transactions across these exchanges. User generated content becomes user generated value. This is an exchange that will attract a lot of liquidity from those most familiar with the web, and who want to play in this inherently liberating medium (TCP/IP matters; it sends power to the edge of the network).
Technology’s impact on this comes from the fact that the modern computer is an interactive device. The speed of communication inbound determines the pace of your response, if you are paying the attention (attention in kind and attention in quantity) that full productive use of the device demands. The tool demands, it doesn’t just give; the tool makes the user an extension of the tool, rather than a tool being an extension of our will or force, as previous, non interactive tools were.
The tool demands a certain kind of attention. You don’t give it attention. It snares you subtly into loops of attention, communication and response, like a tar baby who can dance.
I wonder if you can measure the level of attention demand a particular media has? It’s AIK and its AIQ. Of course there are probably consumption metrics to map against the attention matrix; dollar spend, against time, against durable vs. electronic vs. other goods, etc. how do you spend your depending on the kind of attention you pay when connected to an interactive device? Why would you want to give that information to any old vendor, though. Isn’t there a higher value you could place on it if you computed your attention index? Would that be the coin that would cause John Hegel’s original attention economy to trickle into being?
