What's attention

Contentious argument - "the ability to shape people’s attention is now a more valuable commodity than the things around which our attention is presumably focused" - Richard Lanham, cited by Eric Gordon in an article in latest Digital Humanities Quarterly (thanks to George Siemens for link).

I'm going to use this next week in a set of sessions with MoD training experts. Is their business one where the thing you're trying to learn about is less valuable than the commanding of attention ?

I think he's right but for the wrong reason. This is a truism that has probably always been the case. That's to say, I don't think any but a hard line Platonist would have disagreed 2500 years ago. Nor would any teacher even possibly a religious teacher in the time since. So it's right because it's always been right; not because the digital age has suddenly made it a burning question.

Cebrian and the Pianist in the Whorehouse

I haven't read the full text but the extract in El Pais of Juan Luis Cebrian's new book El Pianista en el Burdel makes for compelling insight.

Cebrian takes the story back to the infancy of journalistic writing, the "Gazzetto" pamphlets distributed by Gondoliers in Seventeenth Century Venice.

Cebrian seems not to say much about it, but I think these ancient fathers of daily writing have something to inspire today's online writers. In their brand new medium, they had a total disregard for authority, and a reckless determination to find readerships.

Nevertheless, Cebrian is gloomy about the low returns of digital publishing: in El Pais's summary, "estamos ante una revolución ("y todas las revoluciones se han hecho con sangre") en la que "las costumbres de los lectores cambian más rápido que los modelos empresariales y profesionales de los periódicos". Según Cebrián la sociedad digital es una oportunidad, no una amenaza. Eso sí, el margen de beneficios en el periodismo digital (entre un 2% y un 3%) es mucho menor que en el distribuido en papel (entre un 20% y un 25 %). ¿Y en qué se traduce esa reducción? "En que por ahora se puede hacer menos inversión en capital humano, algo que afecta a la calidad de la información. Sólo hay que pensar en que la guerra de Irak se ha quedado sin enviados especiales".

I wonder if we need to be so pessimistic ?

Africa's brilliant network info system

Here's an elegant information management network which I observed in Senegal's Gares Routieres (Bus Stations) last week. These apparently chaotic and formless empty spaces are crammed with ancient vehicles, beggars, rubbish. Nothing to suggest that any system at all is operating, let alone a textbook network design in gathering and locating information.

A SEPT-PLACES (seven seater) is big car that departs when it is full, for a pre-set fare. Passengers' waiting decisisions are quite simple - they sit there until the seats are all taken, or they buy up other seats if they are impatient. We waited over two hours at Kaoloack, central Senegal, for a sept places to our destination to fill up - and had time to observe how the drivers make their waiting decisions.

Any driver wanting to run any given route writes his car number on this wooden board in a biro. Each car that departs gets crossed off. The driver can see the length of the queue of cars in front of him, make an estimate of how long till his turn comes, and decide what routes they should offer. So far so simple - just a fair queuing system.







The real genius of it is that the number on the board is also an index to locate a much more complex body of information. Working from the number, the drivers can reference someone who is likely to know the route conditions. During the wait, the drivers use the numbers to find colleagues who ran their route sector earlier that day, and get road updates. So the passengers have the benefit of latest information. A driver will always be able to tell you at the start of the journey, how long the previous driver took for that route. It's storytelling, basically, but indexed by geo-location so everyone finds the story they want,

Quality of personal contact - as in all networks - is what makes this system work. For drivers from out of town, there is a supervisor, who has a his own version of the index - a list of all next departures to all destinations written on the back of an unfolded Marlboro box. He can confirm that fairness is applied to all, and suggest routes and predict waiting times. Here he is.



What I like about this network is that the balance between the information recording system, and the roles of the human participants, is very even.

What our digital information networks often miss, is present here: the data system is above all an index to human stories and so it enables us not just to access some factual details, but also to cement networks that start with data, into personal relationships of trust and familiarity.

Also, it's real time. Information more than a few days old is discarded and doesn't clog things up. It successfully exploits the fact that the communication channel is always online.

I'd like to use this system as the basis of solving a problem where suppliers need to exchange rich information in real time. Any kind of sales management or delivery system organised this way would be very effective.