I was just listening to Steve Gillmore talk about the Gesture Economy during is Gnomedex speech and I wanted to know more about the Gesture Economy. I discovered an initial description in GestureBank.
Of course, nothing is for free, really. Gmail is free, but at the cost of your metadata. Search is free, but at the cost of a tactical answer, not a strategic one. Which result you choose is the payment, setting off an event chain that sometimes results in action and monetization. The metadata–which item you choose, the fork in the road you take–is captured but not shared. The result: an opportunity cost lost to the Google or Yahoo or MSN silo. The cost: time not saved.
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Attention to something is valuable, but in a world of too much information divided by the time to consume a portion of it, signalling a lack of attention is more valuable. By that construct, gestures of inattention will fetch a greater price, and purveyors of gestures of indirection or redirection will gain inordinate value as compared to domain experts. Deriving GestureRank is therefore a function not only of who the gesturer is, but what is the nature (or type) of the gesture, and who or what group or domain it is directed toward.
The Gesture Economy’s power derives from its obedience to the time constraints of the user-in-charge. The key to understanding the inevitability of this transformation is the profound effect the gesture dynamic has on the content that it refers to. Where current information is created in a broadcast, attention-seeking environment, Gesture-triggered data is generated as a result of multiple proferred contracts with users. It’s the opposite of invasion of privacy, the invitation of privacy. A request for proposal, complete with cues as to how to prioritize the inflow of information to deliver the most time-efficient transfer.
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Examine your inputs from an attention perspective and you’ll see most if not all sources are based on attention fundamentals. Google Desktop’s Web Clips are my current favorite example–click the Options link and you are offered the opportunity to “Automatically add commonly viewed clips.” From the moment you check the box, Web Clips tracks not just what you drill into in the Web Clips menu but everything you read regardless of reader, interface, attention metrics, whatever. It is a blunt instrument, but it has built-in amplification of what you pay attention to across your environment.
Gillmor is brilliant. We at AHLLC did a huge 250 slide deck about Google’s use of the honey pot and Google’s sincere understanding that the gifts Google gives its users need to be commensurate with the value of the attention and time relinquished by the users.
As I wrote in When in Rome Do As the Romans Do, Gift and Asset Distribution, Activating Bloggers, and Always Bring Something to the Party, business, marketers and PR execs, needs to learn the true value of user time, attention, and commitment. Most firms undervalue user time and attention to the extent that they don’t value user time at all.
This is a grave error. Users are not chattel and bloggers and early-adopters posses the same cache in their Rolodex as their journalist, writer, editor, and reporter file.
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