Over at Online Spin, Max Kalehoff has re-activated the hornet’s nest originally molested by Chris Anderson, touching on an issue that is large and growing larger:

money is not the only scarcity. While costs of technologies or information may be moving toward free, the scarcities of reputation and 1. attention are very real.

So I’m getting lots of things for free in exchange for my attention, which is kind of ironic because the free things are also demanding my attention.

Some of you may recall my agony over the growing number of unread items in my Bloglines account. I solved it, momentarily. Then I realized that if I let a weekend go by without clearing the deck, I’m overwhelmed again by Monday.

And I choose to enjoy my weekends. They are for sanity. I don’t want to die from blogging. So I have no choice but to declare bankruptcy, and default on some of my mental obligations. I can’t read everything. I can’t be an expert on everything. I can’t spend 147% of my time clearing Google Alerts out of my inbox and the other 92% of the time reading Bloglines and the other 68% on Twitter and the rest on Facebook. At some point, I have to do something productive.

And what’s going to happen is what happens with all scarce resources. I’m going to have to make a choice.

Kalehoff references Forrester CEO George Colony:

1. First, there’s the value of time. Free means sacrificing your time so you can battle your way, with a machete, out of thick forests of mental traps and distractions.

2. Then there’s cognitive pollution. Free and the ensuing entrapments — often advertising — seldom bring serious learning, teaching or valuable advice. Overexposure to ad impressions or other extraneous activity dulls and distracts the mind. That’s not a preferable mental state in an information economy.

Colony understands this: not everybody wants free.

I pay someone to wash my car because the time is worth more to me than the money. I pay someone to paint the house because I’d rather get it done right.

Many are willing to sacrifice time and attention to get their content free. But a growing market will pay to get just what they need, when they want it, with few or no ads.

If you are taking advantage of free (and I certainly am; Google isn’t the least of the benefits I receive from the new economy), be aware of the price you do pay: in time, in attention, in sanity.

If you take too much for free, you’ll run out of attention with which to pay the bills. You’ll have to declare mental bankruptcy: ‘Sorry, GMail and Twitter and Facebook and Bloglines and New York Times and Wall Street Journal and Mark Halperin at The Page. I’d love to keep paying attention, but I’ve overspent my budget, so I’m just going to default.’

Isn’t our sanity worth anything?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 8th, 2008 at 6:54 am and is filed under People matter. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.