The Mac is the first computer good enough to be criticized. ... The IBM PC is beneath comment. It's been known for 12 years how to do a good-looking display and IBM didn't put one on its machine. You can't have any favorable comment beyond that. That is the ultimate in know-nothingness.- Alan Kay (Apple Fellow) in an interview with InfoWorld, June 11, 1984.
Jun 11, 2011
June 11, 1984
Jun 1, 2011
June 1, 1971
Thirty-five years before the launch of Twitter, American political scientist, economist, sociologist, and psychologist Herbert Simon coins the term "Attention economy" in the essay "Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World" published in Computers, Communication, and the Public Interest by The Johns Hopkins Press on this day on June 1, 1971.
In his paper, Simon recognizes that many designers of information systems incorrectly represented their design problem as information scarcity rather than attention scarcity, and as a result they built systems that excell at providing more and more information to people, when what was really needed were systems that excelled at filtering out unimportant or irrelevant information.
"In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it." (pp 40 - 41)
In his paper, Simon recognizes that many designers of information systems incorrectly represented their design problem as information scarcity rather than attention scarcity, and as a result they built systems that excell at providing more and more information to people, when what was really needed were systems that excelled at filtering out unimportant or irrelevant information.
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