(Photo Credit:http://www.clipartpanda.com/categories/attention-clip-art-free)
Attention please. I have been using steemit for just a short while and I have seen multiple posts asking "where does the money come from?" and "how is steemit able to pay us for what we do?". These are extremely valid questions and questions that I myself have had. This led me to start doing some deeper looking as I had yet to really find a post that specifically addressed the core principal of steemit.
Steemit as well as a few others out there today are trying to bring the attention economy to a level of which we have never seen before. But what is this attention economy and how is there value in it?
(Photo Credit:http://gclipart.com/question-mark-clipart/)
The attention economy is an economic theory based on a need to manage information so that it can be directed towards human attention. In this theory, as with many others, we view "attention" as a commodity because it is truly a limited resource. Attention can there for be defined as focused mental engagement on a particular item of information. Seeing how there is such a mass of information and only a limited amount of attention to be had, the attention itself becomes the commodity.
The modern attention economy is thus for one where the consumer product costs nothing to reproduce and the problem facing the supplier of the product lies in adding valuable intangibles that cannot be reproduced at any cost. These intangibles are as follows:
Immediacy - priority access, immediate delivery
Personalization - tailored just for you
Interpretation - support and guidance
Authenticity - how can you be sure it is the real thing?
Accessibility - wherever, whenever
Embodiment - books, live music
Patronage - "paying simply because it feels good",
Findability - "When there are millions of books, millions of songs, millions of films, millions of applications, millions of everything requesting our attention — and most of it free — being found is valuable."
At this point one can really start to understand how value is assigned in the steemit community. "Findability" becomes the key role in succeeding here. In order for our work to be seen we need findability. As all of us on steemit have experienced, getting people to locate and read our posts is a challenge in itself. On top of that we need to create or reproduce content that is of value to other users on the platform. This value varies immensily depending upon the eyeballs viewing it. Where one person may read a post and go "boring", another may read it filled with joy and excitement to have found such good information. This broad diversity adds to the content creators ability to produce something that is of great self worth and have others find use for it. As you can see we have now been able to produce and economy in which demand can be found.
We see this economy in effect every single time we see spam in our emails or ad's on our google searches. Because the information out weighs the attention by so much, user interface applications have been created to "sort" and "filter" according to where we direct our attention most. Imagine if you were to use a search engine that had no filters and no adaptation to your needs. The search you would perform would probably not result in the answer you were looking for and after sorting through 2-3 pages you may simply give up your search. Your attention is only viable for a short amount of time and as we interface more and more, it grows even shorter.
The internet and other media sources bring participation into the economy by creating new channels for distributing attention. Steemit and other blockchain technology are being used to try to solve the problems of the attention economy by creating platforms for information that allows for our "attention" or "time" to be monetized, thus for giving it value.
I hope this may give a little more understanding of value in the steemit community. As we move into our future, platforms such as this will become the jobs of tomorrow. It is my belief that as robotics become more and more advanced we will see declining need for labor work. This will lead to people seeking a purpose and a means of income. Hopefully we are able to adopt this way of life without to much turmoil. This last paragraph is simply opinion so take it with a grain of salt.
As always, if you enjoy my content please follow, comment, upvote and reSteemit!
Peace,
The Last Sage