Tim passed me this great Herb Simon quote he wandered across on Wikipedia that perfectly sums up the “Attention Economy” theme of this year’s ETech.
“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.” (Computers, Communications and the Public Interest, pages 40-41, Martin Greenberger, ed., The Johns Hopkins Press, 1971.)