Yes, it’s been too long since I’ve posted here: other concerns, other priorities. I’ve got a milestone coming up, though, after which I’ll likely be posting more.
To that end, an observation: I was glad to see that Elinor Ostrom won the Nobel for economics. I’ve only read those who’ve been influenced by her work, even though clew pointed me her way six years ago (d’oh!), so now I need to get a copy of Governing the Commons from the library. But the accounts I’ve looked at lead me to wonder: Lanham talks about the so-called information economy being actually an economy of attention, and then undertakes a wholly market-based discussion of that economy. But what if that economy of attention isn’t a market (as I’m pretty sure it isn’t), driven by scarcity and competition?
What if attention is a commons?
I have been mulling this over for days — this connection between attention and the commons. I think of the balloon boy hoax as a good case of an attention of the commons. There are other cases that are less of the genre of spectacle such as when a city decides to read the same book together. Would these instances be examples of what you have in mind?