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.<\/p>\n
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<\/a> the idea has both great promise and great cause for concern:<\/p>\n
\nThink 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.
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