Supernova Interview: Dr. Bernardo Huberman and the Attention Economy

Dr. Bernardo Huberman is a Senior Fellow at HP Labs, and spends a lot of time studying the actual social interactions we all have on Social Networks, in email, and in person.

He notes in this interview that “given the collapse in the value of information, attention is very very valuable, if only because it is so scarce.” Some of the work he’s doing will help people get the maximum value out of the attention they “spend” on content, while at the same time helping content providers get the maximum value out of the attention we give their content.

Huberman and his team are also creating software to help us understand those networks and how we’re interacting with them. People in networks declare a large number of “friends” or followers but Huberman actually studied how many people users on twitter actually interact with, versus how many they follow. The number is actually somewhat small. And they researched the process of reciprocity – we tweet those who tweet us. If you’re a good at reciprocating, you’ll be more valuable.

He also talks about people who have “attention income” – celebrities are people whose attention generates income. He notes that when people pay attention to your content, you’re more likely to create more, and when that attention wanes, you’ll create less. Seems logical, but it has a bunch of implications for people contributing to large public projects like Wikipedia or open source efforts.

Dr. Huberman also discusses possible alternate models for how attention can generate income. Thanks to him for a fascinating discussion, and I look forward to his session in just a few weeks at Supernova.