The last thing I will write about today is Jörgen Skågeby, talking about giving gifts online. Or in his words ‘gifting technologies’. The definition of a gift-giving being: The management of social relations through the circulation of goods and services.

What happens to gifts when we apply them to social media? Jörgen states that gifts online can be many things, but that ‘to give is to enslave’ (Satre), for example if someone comments on your Facebook photo, they are affirming the social tie between you. (And then you need to comment back).

..On an ending note think about that you can make massive social experiments by changing one feature in a social media application..

After a (well-deserved) coffee break we had Imren Borsuk, who was talking about how internet projects can influence social movements.

In Turkey the internet was introduced in ´93 and really took off around 2000. By now 36% of the population uses it. She made the valuable comment that in Turkey there are still many illiterate people, which means you have the A & B people. The A-ones being the ones that are on the tech-wagon and the B-ones being the ones that aren’t.

She gave a few examples of how the internet was used to start social movements, that otherwise would never have been possible to accomplish. One example she mentioned was the conflict that Turkey has with Kurdistan. Kurdistan now mobilises children to throw stones at Turkish military. Those Kurdish kids aged 12-18 are then charged under the ‘law on terrorism act’ and can risk from 10 months to 161 years in prison! The ‘Justice for Children’ organised an online petition, and got 1000 and 1000’s of people to sign. – They could never have mobilised so many people by other means like a demonstration, for example, which would never have been approved by the Turkish government.

So I’m at this conference in Sweden, called ’Paying attention – Digital Media Cultures and Generational Responsibility.

More here: payingattention.org

It will be going on for 2 more days, and I’ll blog something every day, as it might be interesting to users of the woohaaa blog. We started out with a talk by Tiziana Terranova from the University of Naples, titled ’The bios of attention’. She started explaining how the ’digital economy’ came about.

It all started with a digital explosion of information. Moving away from the industrial economy, into the limitless abundance of information (the internet). To start with this was worthless as a tradable economy. But after year 2000, (even though the dot.com crash) the internet kept growing leading us to web 2.0, where the real deal began, the economy based on user activity (Amazon, MySpace, YouTube) and this actually creating what we refer to as a ‘digital economy’.

So what is important in this digital economy? It is not simply to make people buy stuff, but what is really the key thing to obtain here is attention. The attention is acting as the counterforce to the abundance of information. So the modern struggle in the digital economy is that information consumes attention, so we are suffering from a serious poverty of attention. Which leads us to term ’The attention economy’, which Tiziana describes as ’a system that evolves around paying, receiving, and seeking the attention of other human beings’.

Cool, so that’s what we can think about when we are trying to create anything that should go online and demand peoples attention.

Then she went into a (for me) more fluffy and unknown area:
The connection between neuroscience and the digital economy:

a)    The changing brain

b)    The brain in action

c)    The brain learns by imitation

Her conclusion was not on a positive-only note: The internet is an interruptive system, it seizes our attention only to scramble it. Paying attention is about ’being invaded’, having your brain invaded (you become what you pay attention to), which in other words could be said as ’you are enslaved by the digital culture’.

Then we went on to Tania Bucher from the University of Oslo, who has been doing research on peoples uses of social media.
She points out the distinction between hyper-attention (switching focus rapidly between different tasks, like what you do when you are online) and deep attention (like reading a book).

Criticisms of hyper-attention are ’ sustained concentration for a longer period of time, will forever be destroyed’, ’loose ability to focus and become increasingly impatient’.
She then continued to talk about how it is interesting when media is produced with attention in mind. Like the MTV media culture is produced based on research on how long you can keep a focused attention (2-3 minuets, therefore 2-3 minuets music videos..).

But she, on the other hand, was more positive stating that attention is medium specific, and that we are able to switch to different states of attention.

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