FactoryCity: The power of 1000 monkeys _…I think this misses the historical significance that the experience of a thousands of monkeys can offer to a culture. I’m sure at some point some wise fella claimed that no one would ever walk around carrying a “portable phone”, but clearly after the monkeys got a hold of them, culture soon changed so that now that’s now the common reality (at least in developed countries).
So I wouldn’t poo-poo the notion just coz us geeks need to better attenuate our attention streams. We’re on the vanguard here, and what we need today will surely eventually be needed by nongeeks, especially those kids growing up on MySpace and LiveJournal today.
So think about it this way. The drains on our personal attention are getter greater and more promiscuous. We will need to manage it. The kids in school tomorrow will need more and more tools to manage it—and will be looking for tools. What happens next? The cult of a thousand teenage monkeys will go about the incremental effort of virally spreading those tools to their friends, and will ultimately install it on mom and dad and grandma’s computer… and say stuff like, “Oh no! You’re still using that silly [insert obsolete app here]?? Here, try this!”
And poof. One thousand elder monkeys will get the trickle up benefit of having their attention stream whipped, chopped, sliced and diced without ever knowing what RSS, blogging or the attention trust concept is all about owing to the tenacity and technological prowess of a generation of a thousand younger monkeys. Don’t underestimate the network, Noah. It might seem like all this stuff is just for geeks now, and that may be true for the next couple years. But as software improves and gets easier to use—we’re all going to be experiencing personal attention deficits like we’ve never witnessed—and then, yes then, just like the intarweb of today, the domain of attention attenuators will become the commonplace hangout of the jocks and divas, our moms and dads—and yes, we’ll still be there too, grappling with 3800 unread items._
check out the withinlinked http://attentiontrust.org/ too. very intersting.