Weaving the Web

One of the things we are learning here is that we are the economy. That is, the 'economy' as the aggregate or the emergent properties (my preferred term!) of people--you and I (etc) doing the things we need to do to earn a living, house ourselves and family, feed ourselves and family, and lately (the last 50 years or so) our pursuit of leisure activities.
It's important to know that the economy is a bottom up phenomenon.. Or, as Adam Smith observed some 250 years ago, our "propensity to truck and barter". (We'll save discussions around supply and demand for another post another day) I also never tire of wanting to point out that the stock markets are not the economy, nor or they a measurement of the economy.

What happened in the United  States, and to lesser degrees elsewhere around the world, was an economy based on speculation over a period of 15 years--this so called bull run--rather than sound economic activity. Policy wonks, politicians, economic schools of thought, ad nauseum debate and fight over what to do, in a rather ironic misguided conceptual basis that we have a command economy. En mass, somehow experts while knowing better prescribe 'solutions' like a centralized authority controls or manages the economy!

Unfortunately, or fortunately depending how you look at this, it comes back down to people getting down to the hard work of making themselves more productive, and the companies they own or run, or work for, more productive. This is inescapable.

For people like us, the more we connect our own efforts to become more productive, more knowledgeable, becoming more understanding of what it means and takes to become more productive, to add more value, in the 'information age', we'll realize the enormous opportunity that exists in front of us.

There is, right now, the weaving of the web of the economic basis for a healthier economy. There is tremendous opportunity for those of us who understand enough of those dynamics to harness and network our energies.

Network Theory 101

Let me connect a dot or two for you, for us.

Networks produce more than the sum of it's parts. A network of bees produces more than an individual bee, or than what 150 individual bees could produce. It's the networking of them that not only produces a hive, but also hive intelligence. Likewise with your mind. The mind is the emergence of what a network of 3 billion brain cells produces by being dynamically networked.

A tribe, our tribe in particular, will produce more than that of our individual efforts. One hundred and fifty of us will produce, more productivity, more value, more growth more results if we form a tight network. And the more you put in the more you get out. The more Vancouver gains, the more the region gains, etc, etc.The more Vancouver, the more the regions, etc, etc gains, the more we gain.

These are natural systems occurrences.

Networks naturally create productivity. Understanding and directing the nature of networks creates more productivity.

Highly creative, innovative networks lie on a moving scale between order and chaos. Too much order, stifles creativity and growth, too much chaos doesn't harness the capital the network brings and creates.

Bureaucracies and systematic order stifle growth. Growth happens in spite of these highly ordered systems.

The Attention Economy.

Of the many many things we'll learn as our tribe grows, and shares our collective knowledge, this just might, just very well may be one of the top ten things we need to understand.

The Attention Economy.
And from that, we derive the concept of separating signal from noise.
And from this,  we derive the concept of that for every signal there is a sender and receiver.

Take this blog.
There are, give or take, 42 million blogs out there .

If it was more directed at a general audience, I would be competing for attention with those blogs. Fortunately for me, I am not competing with those blogs. I am sending out a specific signal to specific receivers.
Furthering that, I want to ever refine the relationship between the sender and the receiver for the explicit purpose of creating value for all of us.

What the attention economy is is the scarse amount of your attention and where, how and on what you chose to spend that attention. Ninety percent of people waste their spending of their attention. I want to talk to the ten percent who don't want to waste that attention.

There is a key point here in social networking (the veritable sea of senders and receivers, the vast universe of noise in search of attention, the vast majority of which is senseless noise to 98% of people), you want to create and send a clear and valuable signal to receivers who find it of value. In a dynamic two way environment (an inherent weakness of blogs. Not entirely, but they are more designed to send signals rather than receive them and interact the signals.), there should be a process to refine and clarify the signal between senders and receivers (along with the passive followers!) with the explicit purpose of creating value for all involved.

There are three incredibly valuable things that emerge from this:
We create value above and beyond what previously existed (key to growth)
We create trust and reputation. (key to value)
We create signal from the noise. (key to prospering in the attention economy)

The ecology of the social media will not be getting less crowded any time soon. Those that can create signal between sender and receiver (the larger the passive audience the better!!), those that can create trust and reputation, those that can create value in this ever increasing sea of noise--that is, attract and hold attention will have a huge advantage over those that can't.

Bonus points!!

Do you want to understand why superstar athletes get so much money? Why Super Bowl  ads can get 100,000s  of dollars per second?
The key to understanding that is the attention economy. The Super Bowl and Tiger Woods (et al) attract and hold attention. In an economy where the only scarce resource is your attention, that has enormous value.

(hat tip: I picked up on and want to credit  the concept of the Attention Economy to an article from Wired magazine from around 12 years ago. I do not recall the writer.)
(bonus points to whomever can send me who that was!)