We interweave every day, application to application, to web page, etc. Yet we don’t just VISIT something, we DO something, we have intent, purpose, machinations even.
We can track certain aspects of this weaving, we can try to label that tracking as “attention”, but it’s not really. Attention involves more than the process of weaving our lives together, we have a mind with synapses that form on new concepts and apply thought to determine a desired outcome.
Interestingly, attention can be defined as a courteous act indicating affection; “she tried to win his heart with her many attentions”
In many ways this applies to the landscape created by the disparate parts of our online social interaction.
We try to influence the external world of people places and things by our presence; when online our digital ghost provides an influencing framework through a continually contextual presence interacting with our social wake and bow wave. Our acts of attempted influence is our attention, just as much as our attention, when speaking in the language of quantum physics, creates our reality.
Twitter: Tools, Tips, Math and the Tao of Twitter | Reality is Relative // Jun 7, 2008 at 11:46 am
[...] I am sure an enterprising mathematician will come along and put these metrics to some sort of use (Brian Caldwell?) perhaps a Golden Twitter Ratio so we don’t blow out our neocortex before quantum computing [...]
“…How Do You Define Attention?”
I define it as *labor* ( inviting friends, adding people to my network, clicking on stuff ) and there is a mark-up language for it written @erdogan and @arikan called User Labor Mark-up Language ( ULML );
“…The recent trends in participatory web indicate that the spectacle users create in social web services ( through creating social content and meta-content) is not a by-product of use, but the product itself. Many web services today base their business models on capitalizing on this product, the creative capacity of their users, through sophisticated advertising networks while positioning the user as both the producer and the consumer of content. The service cycle is familiar: service provider facilitates social use, user produces content, content generates traffic, traffic attracts advertising revenue for the service.”
userlabor.org