The End of Anonymity and the Raising of Voices

Esther Dyson's latest Release 1.0 piece (free registration required) is on the end of anonymity, and it implicitly recognizes that attention is its opposite:

The popular perception is that people want anonymity; in fact, it appears that most people crave recognition. Many young people want it so much that they join multiple networking sites, rate themselves and friends on various scales, and fill in online questionnaires and surveys. Even as individuals evince more and more concern about privacy and identity theft, they flood onto the Web as themselves, publishing blogs, posting photos, contributing reviews, and revealing all (or so it seems) on dating sites.

In effect, people are trading anonymity for a voice. (emphasis added)

Esther's describing what the prescient Michael Goldhaber predicted in 1996:

Cyberspace is where the new kind of economy comes into its own. Like any economy the new one is based on what is both most desirable and ultimately most scarce, and now this is the attention that comes from other people...

Unlike the old matter-based wealth, the new wealth is nothing you can hope to put under lock and key. You get it by reaching out into the world.

Wealth therefore comes to you by expressing yourself fully. The best guarantee you have for attention going to you for what you do is living your life as openly as possible, expressing yourself as publicly as possible...

Also you accumulate attention through the full extent of your personality --everything that makes you distinctly you and not someone else...

As Esther notes, we've exchanged anonymity for a voice. As Michael makes clear, the whole purpose of having a voice is to be heard, to attract attention.

And what Steve Gillmor, Seth Goldstein and others have been saying is that what we pay attention to is an aspect of our voice. We are implicitly speaking through our attention gestures; we're saying, "This is important to me--it has meaning and relevance."

And now we can make those implicit statements public and visible. We can document our attention gestures with an Attention Recorder and share them with an attention service like Seth's Root Markets. The next step will be using services like Root to "speak" even more explicitly, using the language of our attention to tell our friends, other individuals, companies, institutions--the world--what matters to us, what we value.