Gifts of Attention and Twitter: Why Follow?

The "attention economy" has been talked about for years, maybe since the 1970s. Kevin Kelly has had interesting things to say about it in New Rules for the New Economy, which is available here, and in his article Better Than Free on Edge.org.

Gift economy is an older idea. Wikipedia has a good description: "simultaneous or recurring giving serves to circulate and redistribute valuables within the community".

Twitter seems like a pure expression of these two ideas in combination. Using twitter you tend to develop a desire for more followers, and there's a bit of a social norm to thank followers. I say a "bit of a social norm" because not everybody does this. I don't, although I'm starting to wonder if I'm being rude. This isn't immediate, at least not in everybody's case. My starting attitude about Twitter included "why would I want lots of followers I don't know?" and "why would I want to follow lots of people if I don't know them?"

I used to be pretty picky about who I followed. I wanted to follow (more or less in order) people I knew personally, people whose work I knew in some way, and people doing work somehow related to what I do, or what I'm particularly interested in. I would check out someone's tweets and website first, then decide whether to follow them.

This changed pretty quickly; it was a combination of things. My attitude about what Twitter was for changed -- or more precisely, my sense that Twitter had to be for something in particular faded. My sense of determinism about people's activities faded too. Determinism in the sense that "John did an interesting thing in the past, so he will do an interesting thing in the future" -- and even more, "John hasn't done anything I think was interesting, so I don't think he's going to."

We all tend to have this sense of determinism about people, I think. It has to do with your own attention, which is a relatively limited thing. But in Twitter, it's different; you can make your attention go further, in a sense, by spreading it over many, many people you follow. Thinking about attention in a traditional "this is a resource" way suggests that this is a straightforward problem of division: you have X attention and you divide it among Y people (or Y tweets, I suppose). However, in the same sense that folk wisdom suggests things like love, trust, and the like actually increase when they're "used" more, I think Twitter is an attention multiplier.

Giving away your attention by following lots of people somehow multiplies the attention you have to give. And oddly enough, it actually feels satisfying; you have the sense that it's a gift. Chalk up another truth to folk wisdom; giving a gift feels at least as good as receiving one.

Update 4/13/09
Talked myself into it; now I do thank everybody who follows me.