Rethinking the Information Economy: Is it really an Attention Economy?

I have a Google Alert set to the word "rethinking," and it is fun to check out the diverse subjects that pop up in that daily digest. These posts serve to stimulate my own thinking-- and rethinking-- and I am enjoying the seemingly random ideas that people are rethinking, courtesy of the information filters of Google.

The range this week went from Rethinking Sex Work as Labor, to Rethinking the Personal Carbon Calculator, to Rethinking Healthcare. It would be easy to spend a lot of time nosing around this stuff. People are spending a lot of time rethinking the world! It's inspiring, and time-consuming, even when I manage to just scan and stay disciplined in my reading. But I only have so much attention.

The I ran across an entry from synaptify.com on Rethinking the Knowledge Economy. For the full and fascinating post, see http://synaptify.com/?p=613686
In his December 5 post, Dominiek ter Heide begins by reviewing the common understanding of the distinction between data, information, and knowledge:

• Data is raw facts
• Information is data that is organized, analyzed or placed into a certain context
• Knowledge is internalized information: skills, experience, cognition, etc.

Now things get more interesting...

Informational v.s. Physical

To understand the fundamentals of the problem, we have to take a look at the difference between information and physical objects. Physical objects abide by different laws than information. A physical object can only exist in one place in one time and it deteriorates when used or touched. Information on the other hand, can exist in many places at any time and multiplies when touched.

Thanks to zero-cost communication, the replicating nature of information has showed itself over the last decade. There are now vast amounts of knowledge (and obsoledge) being generated every day, making many derivatives of information (content, knowledge) a commodity. Kevin Kelley explains this well in his essay ‘Better than Free’, where he compares the internet to a giant copy machine where the copies drop in value. Interestingly, when those copies become abundant, the value starts shifting to what’s scarce: the attention of people. This is where the concept of the Attention Economy starts.

From Wikipedia: Attention economics is an approach to the management of information that treats human attention as a scarce commodity, and applies economic theory to solve various information management problems.

Attention Economics!! This has my attention. Stay tuned for further exploration.

Eric Belsky on Rethinking the Cult of Home Ownership

Excerpted from the Los Angeles Times, November 12, 2009

We are a country still in the thrall of homeownership.

Ironically, owning may make more sense to some people today than when housing markets were booming. After all, chances are greater now that people will buy at or near the bottom. But should Americans assume that homeownership is always the right choice? We should spend as much time thinking about how public policy can encourage intelligent housing choices as we have thinking about how it can encourage intelligent mortgage choices. The choice to own or rent comes first.

Let’s assume that the way to get out from underneath the weight of foreclosures is to not let speculators and homeowners at risk of falling behind again roll the dice.

Let’s instead consider programs that aggregate ownership of properties, especially two- to four-unit ones, in the hands of nonprofits that can rent them out. These small complexes are estimated to account for up to two in five foreclosures. It might make more sense to get these properties into the hands of nonprofits that own many properties, so that a single rental vacancy constitutes the loss of only a small fraction of rental income. By contrast, one vacancy could constitute up to 100 percent of the rental income needed to make the mortgage payment for a resident/owner of a single small property, making that a less stable investment.

It’s time we make homeownership just one option in a more innovative, affordable and broader housing market.

Eric S. Belsky is executive director of the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University. He wrote this commentary for the Los Angeles Times.

Rethinking Family and Divorce

I envision this blog as a more professional forum than my learning journal. And yet the subject I have been rethinking all week is very personal. Because all of us are affected in some way by the way we frame family and divorce, I have decided to share some of my thoughts.

My experience with family is that it is more declarative than accidental. We speak and our actions align with our speaking, and something is created. We may have been born into a certain family, but that family was born for the most part through another declaration: one of love. Love may change its shape and form, it may even have a certain natural trajectory, but we can honor it throughout its arc.

I am thinking of the many conversations I have had with friends in India about arranged marriage vs. "love matches" as they are called there. I remember asking my friend Mingmar, whom I had known for about 15 years at the time, how he could love a complete stranger who had been brought in to marry him on about 2 weeks' notice. His answer was simple and profound to me: "Why do you love your child? You love your child because she is your child. I love my wife because she is my wife."

Certain people I consider family out of simple declaration, and I know this is common. My brother's ex-wife and one of his ex-girlfriends will always be family. Certain friends have earned that distinction through the blessing of a shared kindred spirit. Note the root of the word "kindred." Some of these ties are certainly stronger than simple blood relation.

How does all this relate to divorce? Divorce is a declaration too. Rarely as simple as "I divorce thee, I divorce thee, I divorce thee,"  it redefines a relationship central to family. Having made the declaration that I am divorcing the father of my children, I navigate the rocky coastline of this new part of my personal journey, doing my best to remain creative and avoid wreckage. My brother Sandy and my friend Paul have managed this, and I have faith that I can too. Relationship can be honored even as it is redefined. I declare my intention to do so.

Alternatives to Constant Growth Models: A Vision from Judy Wicks

Found a great new source today: GlobalGeopolitics.net. They are now on my list of inspiring blogs to follow.
Here is an excerpt from yesterday's post on ENVIRONMENT: Rethinking Jobs for a Sustainable Economy.

"The possibility of environmental catastrophe has led many leaders, scholars and average citizens to reconsider an economy based on constant growth. It is becoming clear that people, especially in the United States, will need to consume less in the way of natural resources to avoid planetary peril. The million-dollar question, of course, is how the U.S. can move to a sustainable, zero-growth economy without losing more jobs. If people are consuming fewer goods and services, does that mean fewer jobs in the manufacturing, sale, and provision of those goods and services? 'It’s a good question because we are faced with unsustainable levels of consumption right now,' said John Talberth, president for the Center for Sustainable Economy. 'The whole economy collapses if we don’t consume enough, and we’ve got to change.'"


"Judy Wicks, founder of the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies says, 'It’s going to mean more businesses, many more owners. Business ownership will be distributed much more broadly,' Wicks said. 'This means that the benefits of our consumption as a community will go more to families, and less to stockholders and financial institutions', she explained. 'Local ownership really brings out the unique, supports local innovators. In local living economies, we support our local artists, local musicians, our local culture, so that our community creates unique products that express our local culture. It might be a great wine, a great cheese, a new fashion… it could be anything a community creates,' Wicks said, 'so that our economy is about creating things that celebrate our being human [instead of] commodity crops.'"

I have been a fan of Judy Wicks ever since meeting her last year as a Change Agent In Residence (CAIR) at Bainbridge Graduate Institute. Her vision makes a lot of sense to me.

I then think of the structural problem I noticed last year when studying microcredit and noticing how difficult it is to translate that model to an American context. In India, for example, it takes very little in the way of resources to set someone up to be able to make a living for their family with a small business. You can be illiterate and still support your family. Here, even allowing for the difference in cost of living, etc, our economy is structured to require a good deal more in the way of resources: education, cultural literacy, and a much steeper financial requirement for even the most basic business. This makes the micro-lending model significantly less micro, and less simple, at least in terms of application to developed economies. And it is the developed economies that require the most adjustment if we are to save the planet.

Where does this point us? Perhaps Judy's note that with a focus on local living economies, the benefits of our consumption as a community will go more to families, and less to stockholders and financial institutions holds some of the answer. If we can cut out-- or down-- the percentage of profit that leaves the community, we can keep more of what we make, and we may need to make less money entirely to make the system fly. We can downshift with less pain, and perhaps some added pleasure in terms of the quality of our lives.

What do you think?

RRRethinking the Possibilities: from Blank-Slate to Adaptive Reuse Solutions

Worldchanging, one of my favorite sites (and books) published a thought-provoking story by Alex Steffen October 26: How Can Bright Green Cities Thrive Without Capital?

In the article Steffen considers that the combining factors of rapidly-increasing city populations, younger demographics in those cities, and the lack of credit due to the global credit crunch may lead to creative and sustainable solutions.

"For much of this decade, some of our most beloved sustainability solutions have been blank slate answers: new cities built from scratch; new technological solutions for swapping out pieces of unsustainable systems with imagined replacements that would be less unsustainable (hydrogen cars come easily to mind); new massively-scaled alternatives for depleting fuels and materials. But blank slate answers demand capital -- lots and lots of it, at that -- and that capital is going to be hard to come by. That doesn't mean that innovation is dead, or that green tech and clean energy are over. They aren't.


What it does mean is that the kinds of innovations we most need, and which will be most widely adopted, might involve both a reinterpretation of the possibilities of the cities we already live in -- adaptive reuse on a massive scale; the reclaiming of unused spaces and the ruins of the unsustainable; a willingness to experiment with regulations and codes -- and a preference for new kinds of projects that can be capitalized in new ways, ways that lie beyond the capacities of microcredit and community commerce but escape dependence on large investment banks."

I find this exciting. Most innovative solutions are born of constraint. Art has form, and part of the challenge for an artist is to channel their vision through the constriants of that form. Similarly, we are forced to be more creative when credit is tighter and the materials at hand are limited. Good news! As our collective sense of urgency increases, more people will join the conversation to create new approaches to address shared problems. We might even get a truer form of democracy as a result.

Edward de Bono on Intentional Creativity

This week I discovered a blog ( http://www.thinkingmanagers.com/blog ) that focuses on the work of Dr. Edward de Bono, someone whose name I first heard through my Creativity and Right Livelihood class this quarter at Bainbridge Graduate Institute.

Below is an excerpt from the blog of Robert Heller at Thinking Managers, who posted these thoughts of de Bono's on 11/20/2005.
They are very much in alignment with my intention of my own work.

• We need to match skills of analysis with an equal emphasis on the skills of design 
• We need to do as much idea-work as we do information-work. We need to shift from an obsession with history to a concern for the future
•  We need to emphasize ‘operacy’ as much as knowledge. The skills of doing are as important as the skills of knowing
•  We need, for the first time, to realise that creative thinking is a serious and essential part of the thinking process
•  We need to move from our exclusive concern with the logic of processing to the logic of perception (from rock logic to water logic)

I will be spending some time processing these ideas. How to integrate this approach into everyday life? How to support others in these ways of thinking/rethinking? In a way, these are affirmations of the importance of Right-Brained approaches, which are surely neccessary if we are to solve the global problems we face which were largely created by Left-Brained solutions.

What do you think?

In what ways might we...rethink, reimagine, recreate the world?

RRRethink.


The idea is simple. We want to create something that doesn’t add more STUFF to the world. We want to SUBTRACT stuff. Stuff like plastic and cardboard that end up in landfills. There are a lot of costs associated with this one-use stuff, some of which are easy to track and some of which aren’t. Some of these costs are paid by all of us.

If we can subtract some of the bad stuff, then we can create the net impact of adding more of the good. Like trees that continue to be trees instead of cardboard. And the beauty and oxygen that comes from them. Plastic can be used in more intelligent ways than we use it now, given proper design and some re-thinking.

This blog is about rethinking things.

Why RRRethink? Because it resonates with the three RRRs we already know so well: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. And it ties in with the entrepreneurship project I am pursuing this year at Bainbridge Graduate Institute with Cheryl Schneiderhan, Jim McRae, and Brian Trunk, and the business name we have coined for it: RRRepeat.

Not so much thinking outside the box as rethinking the whole box.