(March 19, 2009) Attention is the primary online currency. People do things to get attention. Other people do things by giving attention. As it is in any economy, the market seeks a balance between value given and value received.

Unlike a nation, whose currency is regulated, the internet is a barter economy. What looks like a lot of attention to one might well be insignificant to another.

There seems to be a connection between the need for attention and some personality types. My theory is that there is an aspect of personality that is the lens through which attention is viewed. A little attention is too much for some. A lot of attention is too little for others. It's rare to encounter someone who feels that they have it 'just right'.

In any case, attention can be intoxicating. In Animal's interview with William Tincup (an amazing series in an amazing website that you ought to peruse), the old howler warmly recalls an episode in which I pointed out the difficult consequences of attention. Then as now, I am sure that micro-celebrity has harsh consequences on its early victims. Managing the glare of the spotlight requires some experience. Virtually everyone makes the same mistakes when first confronted with being 'well known'.

When people complain about Spam, they are really complaining about not getting a good return on their attention. Everyone I know is certain that they can easily identify spam when they see it. Usually it boils down to "My very targeted value laden email is your spam and vice versa." In other words, when I consumed your spam, I got less than I gave.

The essence of web economics (and any economics) is to give more value that you receive. Spam inverts the formula and takes small increments of value from many, many people. With solid roots in direct marketing theory, spam is one of those excesses that is impossible to correct.

Here's why.

If the thought police arrive en masse to yell at a supposed spammer, the net result is more and more viewing of the spam. For a relatively small price (unhappy people somewhere out there in cyberspace), a spammer on RBC can have his/her posting held in the spotlight for a very long time. By trying to embarrass the spammer into submission, the lynch mob gives the piece the attention and reach it needs. So, enforcement is exactly what the spammer hopes for.

On the other hand, the absence of enforcement leads to being nibbled to death by an avalanche of irritating nonsense. You are damned if you do and damned if you don't. That means good filtering and the willingness to ignore the ridiculous are the base strategies in spam management.

Much of the art of building and managing online community is a balancing act. Great community managers have a gift for sensing where the middle of the road is. Rather than policing a problem, they redesign to avoid it. The essence of the approach is to remove the ways that attention is rewarding inappropriate behavior. Sometimes, the community can do this on its own. But, too often, that leads to an intimidating lynch mob. Really great community managers gracefully move the attention away from unwanted behavior.

Rule making doesn't work. Policing rewards the bad behavior. Lynch mobs intimidate novices. Public thought experiments (another form of attention robbery) usually tear up the public space disrespectfully.

You can tell its going to get nasty when the bullies and attention thieves wrap themselves in the rhetoric of free speech. It's a tactic for the vocal minority to impose order on the majority by making it too risky to write. Claiming free speech while suppressing it is the ultimate mind-fuck.

In the best of all worlds, kindness and compassion prevail. Learning to grasp the fact that those letters and pixels on your screen are actually other people is unnatural and takes time.