“How Google Dominates Us” (from Instapaper: Starred)

How thoroughly and how radically Google has already transformed the information economy has not been well understood. The merchandise of the information economy is not information; it is attention. These commodities have an inverse relationship. When information is cheap, attention becomes expensive. Attention is what we, the users, give to Google, and our attention is what Google sells—concentrated, focused, and crystallized.

Two things here: One, James Gleick can make anything sound beautiful and profound. This (admittedly old) essay from the New York Review of Books is killer reading for the language alone — “the oracle of redirection,” “a constellation of server farms,” “neurons in the world brain.” (Can we be real for a minute? He’s talking about a search engine.)

I also think this graph, if not the entire essay, provides an interesting lens for the whole digital shift. It’s an elegant summary of what media organizations do online: Attract and lose and trade and buy and sell attention. A story’s success is measured in pageviews. Portals launder it from one site to another. Attention has obviously always been part of the media equation, via circ sales and ad sales and who knows what other marketing shenanigans that I don’t even know about … but as Gleick captures here, attention appreciates where information does not.

So here’s the second thing I like about this essay: It crystallizes, perhaps accidentally, the creeping paradigm shift between new media and old. And in doing so, it begs the question — is our work more about eyeballs or ideas? And is that good? And is Google to blame? (The trio of rhetorical questions signifies, of course, that I have a lot more musing to do on this topic.)