As consumers, we’ve all been tracked for decades based on what we buy, where we keep our money, what credit cards we use, and what ZIP+4 we live in. We’ve even become used to individual web sites tracking our page choices, visit duration, and viewing sequences (Amazon.com even tells us what else we should buy). Now, programmers are working to make even something as ethereal and fleeting as our attention (across web sites and Internet services) available for review and for sale.
Attention, in this case, means on-line attention…the CNN news stories we choose to click on, the newsfeeds we subscribe to, the sites we visit, and so on. It’s a coded lists of our wanderings in the on-line world (stored somewhere, owned by someone, as yet to be determined), opening up all sorts of personal and commercial possibilities. Steven Johnson suggests the idea has both great promise and great cause for concern:
Think of the vast potential to harness that information and do something useful with it — building tools that clue us in to the emerging trends in our own mindscapes and point us in new directions that would be of great use to us, as well as tools that allow us to share the details of our interests with our families, friends and colleagues. Think of the vast potential to harness that information and do bad things with it — sell it to fleabag marketers and spammers who have no scruples about the methods they use to gain even the tiniest slice of our attention.
Jim Cuene has a thoughtful overview of the technology and its implications, as well.
Whether used for good or evil, attention-tracking is coming on fast…yet another technology with fascinating implications for arts and cultural managers. Hard to keep up.
In 1984 a physicist named, I think, O’Neal wrote a book called 2084 (cannot find it on amazon) in which, among other predictions, he envisioned a voluntary community in 2084 in which each member would wear a wristband, allowing him or her, for instance, to simply walk out of a store with merchandise, which would automatically be charged. Everyone’s location would be known minute by minute, so crimes of violence and theft of things are unknown. Pulling on your wristband would summon the police, and so forth.
I can imagine a voluntary society in which my activities are monitored and (when I choose to turn it on) a service suggests to me relevant materials and services available worldwide, along with nearby performances and museum displays that I might like. The service would gradually learn more and more about my interests and inclinations in order to be of greater and greater specific service to me (and presumably to the commercial interests who provide me with the free service).
Is there a problem if my participation is voluntary and I can turn it off at will? Don’t know!
Thanks for the comment.
A common concern for attention tracking, beyond whether the system would be voluntary and have an ”on/off” switch, is about who owns and controls the content of your attention file — if you could edit it yourself, or delete it, or clear it; and if you could know who bought the rights to see it, and deny that right to anyone that’s causing you trouble.
This technology sounds scary. However, it could be of enormous value to Development departments across the land. If these departments could track the tax brackets of individuals who happened upon their institution’s website through this attention-tracking software, then a potentially new donor base could be tapped.
Technology like Amazon’s recommendations and Findory.com can be appropriated into helping to recatagorise the market and help art managers identifying ‘threads’ that runs through these catagories. Using music as an example, as opposed to using traditional linear catagoriations for classical, jazz, pop, electronica to differiencate music, we can place each piece somewhere in a fuzzy cloud of catagorisation, drawing parallels with websites like Flickr.com and del.icio.us where ‘clouds’ of ‘tags’ are used to classify information, and allowing each piece of data to simultaniously process more than one property, and allow it to relate to a multitude of other data.
All this will give art managers a new way to manage the increasing inter-disiplinary approach between different art forms, and format them in a way that will match the increasing diverse tastes the audience have. New associations will emerge which will appeal to a wider audience, but will be a more appreciative audience, making audience targeting more effective.