RE: Economy of Attention

["Hunsucker, R.L." <R.L.Hunsucker@uva.nl>]

> Joe gets it right (yet again) with his discussion of attention.

I quite agree -- Joe Esposito's posting in question is -- totally 
unsurprisingly -- an excellent one. He's got, to my mind, very 
much the right approach.

> An excellent short summary of Georg Frank's Economy of 
> Attention is freely available from Science.

The attention economy notion in its current form seems to go back 
to Herbert Simon (in 1971), but I like also Michael H. 
Goldhaber's piece, "The attention economy and the Net", in 
_Firstmonday_ 2.4 (1997) 
(http://firstmonday.dk/issues/issue2_4/goldhaber/).

In the same year, Richard Lanham, of course, applied the same 
notion to the role of libraries (p.151-167, in _Gateways to 
knowledge : the role of academic libraries in teaching, learning, 
and research_ / ed. by Lawrence Dowler [MIT Press, 1997]), but 
for his more recent thinking, see his _The economics of 
{attention} [sic] : style and substance in the age of 
information_ (University of Chicago Press, 2006).

- Laval Hunsucker
   Universiteitsbibliotheek
   U. van Amsterdam

> -----Oorspronkelijk bericht-----
> [mailto:owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu]Namens Phil Davis
> Verzonden: maandag 2 juli 2007 7:21
> Aan: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
> Onderwerp: Economy of Attention
>
> Joe gets it right (yet again) with his discussion of attention. 
> It is a scarce resource and something publishers fiercely 
> compete for.  As readers, we are loath to waste some of this 
> precious resource on locating and evaluating what we should 
> devote our attention.  We are all cognitive misers and use 
> simple heuristics to make our decisions: the prestige of the 
> journal, its impact factor, the reputation of the author, a 
> referral.
>
> An excellent short summary of Georg Frank's Economy of 
> Attention is freely available from Science
>
> Franck, G. (1999). Scientific Communication--A Vanity Fair? 
> Science, 286(5437), 53-55. 
> http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/286/5437/53
>
> --Phil Davis