I don’t like too much the concept “Attention Economy”. I prefer focus my attention on grasping concepts such as Reputation Economy and Gift Economy. Nevertheless I loved the following definition from “The Real Nature of the Emerging Attention Economy” 2006 Etech by Michael H. Goldhaber (slides in PDF).
An Economy, Most Generally…..
• is a massively multiplayer
• SINGLE-LEVEL game
• that involves some kind of passing of
• scarce entities
• between players
• so as to knit all players intricately together
So, don’t you think it is time we all level up together? Maybe not just one but two or three levels?
The link to the PDF is in error. Looks like a mistaken relative link. Try
http://www.well.com/user/mgoldh/MMIG.pdf
And the intrusive FireFox banner is no fun after the first visit. I know what browser I am running. You are not responsible for my soul.
Thanks for the comment about the broken link, it is now fixed!
About the Firefox banner, I understand your point, but I feel very important to do something for keeping the Web free, based on standard protocols (HTTP) and standard languages (HTML) and in which innovation can happen on the edges. I think Microsoft is dangerous for the Web, because, controlling a large percentage of the browsers in the world, it can shape the future of the Web (changing slightly the accepted HTML for instance, in a way similar to what microsoft does with the secret format .doc which does not allow competition and free market of office suites).
I think the code of the browsers should be free software so that there isn’t a single entity that can control how the people of the world perceive the Web.
And the banner is my small contribution for what I believe in.
Anyway, I’ll try to make the banner smaller and less intrusive.
If I may ask, why don’t you use Firefox for browsing the Web?
I got that is what you believe in.
To answer your question, I have used IE since somewhere close to 1.0 and it works fine for me. So I don’t add other software because, for my purposes, what I have is not broken and I don’t want to have to administer more software, security updates, etc., with yet another source.
It’s a marginal utility versus complexity of operation trade-off for me. The marginal utility is not enough for me to make my administration of my own and my family systems more complicated.
Also, although I agree that monoculture is risky, my appraisal of the alleged Microsoft deviousness is not the same as yours, and that is also a factor in my personal trade-off decisions.