peterme.com   Thoughts, links, and essays from Peter Merholz
petermescellany   petermemes

Home

Archives
Archives before June 13, 2001

RSS Feed

Adaptive Path (my company!)

About peterme

Coordinates
Most of the Time
Oakland, CA

Interests
Current
American history around the time of the Revolution, figuring out how to marry top-down task-based information architecture processes with bottom-up document-based ones, finding a good dentist in San Francisco Oakland
Perennial
Designing the user experience (interaction design, information architecture, user research, etc.), cognitive science, ice cream, films and film theory, girls, commuter bicycling, coffee, travel, theoretical physics for laypeople, single malt scotch, fresh salmon nigiri, hanging out, comics formalism, applied complexity theory, Krispy Kreme donuts.

surf
Click to see where I wander.

Wish list
Show me you love me by
buying me things.

Spyonme
Track updates of this page with Spyonit. Clickee here.

Essays
[Editor's note: peterme.com began as a site of self-published essays, a la Stating The Obvious. This evolved (or devolved) towards link lists and shorter thoughtpieces. These essays are getting a tad old, but have some good ideas.]
Reader Favorites
Interface Design Recommended Reading List
Whose "My" Is It Anyway?
Frames: Information Vs. Application

Subjects
Interface Design
Web Development
Movie Reviews
Travel

 
Achtung! Posted on 09/07/2001.

It's been quiet around here. I've been sick and busy. Thought I'd emerge for a bit to call, um, attention to a book, The Attention Economy (Amazon; book's web site).

It's a decent and quick read. I appreciated it most for it's persistent hammering at the "attention" meme... When your finished, you'll definitely look at business processes around you in a new light. I also was quite pleased with the degree of scientific foundation the authors brought to their thesis--there's a whole chapter on the "psychobiology of attention" which was quite good.

Still, business books such as this one need to be taken with many grains of salt (perhaps even a whole salt lick). The author's have an annoying tendency to re-frame all manner of interaction as being part of this overarching "attention economy." There's also a glib-ness to their evolutionary psychology references, comments that feel too pat when considered with reference to a real situation.

In all, I don't think the author's have hit upon a truly fundamental shift in terms of thinking about business and the world around us--while fighting for attention is an ever-increasingly important endeavor, I think it still fits within current economic understanding, as opposed to warranting a paradigm shift (but, hey, it's paradigm shifts that sell books!). Still, many of the points they raise are valid and interesting concerns that will need to be addressed.

0 comments so far. Add a comment.

Previous entry: "Treasure trove of design thought."
Next entry: "The Media Amoeba."

Add A New Comment:

Name

E-Mail (optional)

Homepage (optional)

Comments Now with a bigger box for text entry! Whee!


All contents of peterme.com are © 1998 - 2002 Peter Merholz.