The Looming Attention Crisis

Fred at A VC posted an interesting quote by

Umair Haque:

Herbert Simon said it in 1971, which is that "What does an abundance of information create?" A scarcity of attention basically, right?

He goes on to say:

Most of us have day jobs. Many of us have families. So we have a limited amount of attention left. And I suspect we are consuming most of it with what we've got on our plates today.

So where does the attention come for the next wave of blogs and web services? From the old ones, I guess. In my case, its not going to come out of my family's attention allocation or my firm's.

So attention is a zero sum game and if we are creating (at an exponential rate?) more uses of attention, then we are facing a looming attention crisis.

Let us let this sink in for a couple of hours and read what others have to say about attention.