(2025-05-30) Tamari Overcoming Information Overload With Circular Attention Economies

Ronen Tamari: Overcoming information overload with circular attention economies. Herbert Simon, in the oft-quoted passage from the 1971 piece “Designing Organizations For An Information-Rich World”, foresaw how information overload would transform attention into one of the most valuable resources:

In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients.

Over 50 years have passed and internet scale data has made this problem more acute than Simon could have ever imagined. Yet our research infrastructure does not reflect this reality.

"What papers, trends and discussions should I, as a researcher, be paying attention to?"

For most researchers, information overload results in a constant feeling of falling behind the exponential growth of knowledge in their field.

Journals used to be the answer; traditionally, they were tasked with filtering out poor research and curating high quality work. However, journals have fundamentally failed to scale with the explosion of research output, often taking years to review and publish while knowledge evolves at internet speed.

Can’t we just ask Claude or ChatGPT? Despite remarkable recent advances, AI alone is not a solution either. To see why not, try to imagine Goodreads or IMDB reviews where all the reviews are AI generated.

for most of us, something would be missing. AI will certainly be part of the solution, synthesizing, aggregating and organizing information, but there is a fundamentally social aspect of attention that cannot and should not be automated.

The promise and limits of social media

Ask a researcher how they find interesting papers to read, and more often than not, social media figures largely in their answer. And yet, social media is not designed for science; research content is buried in noisy feeds, platforms optimize for engagement and not sensemaking, data is siloed and fragmented, and the medium is not expressive enough for complex knowledge work.

From linear to circular: rethinking the attention economy

Let's revisit Herbert Simon's statement of the information overload problem. In his account, the attention economy is linear: attention is a resource consumed by information, lost forever - like fossil fuels burned to generate energy. But what if we thought about attention differently? In contrast to a linear economy, a circular economy aims to create systems where resources are continually reused and recycled.

The untapped creative exhaust of research

Classic examples of attention artifacts are notes or annotations in personal knowledge (PKM) tools like Obsidian, Notion or Zotero. Sometimes there may be no material "attention traces" - perhaps a paper wasn't worth finishing or taking notes on. And obviously, in some cases insights will be kept private. But more and more researchers are sharing insights publicly, for example as posts on social media recommending or critiquing something they recently read. (Working in Public)

These short shared insights - public products of human attention - are like ant pheromone trails, crucial signals for shaping collective attention. They represent a more circular attention economy at work, where one person's consumed attention becomes a signal that guides others' attention allocation. (stigmeric)

But such sharing is still few and far between. How much of what we read do we actually share publicly, even when privacy is not an issue? Why Don't More People Share Their Digital Gardens?

Joel Chan, a researcher at the University of Maryland, talks about the "untapped creative exhaust" of millions of researchers already pouring over hundreds of millions of references. ((2021-08-23) Chan Sustainable Authorship Models For A Discourse-based Scholarly Communication Infrastructure)

Arthur Boston, a scholarly communications librarian at Murray State University, has also written extensively about the great (yet unfulfilled) promise of harnessing internet-scale energy for open micro-reviews: “Considering the web’s tendency for moderation and review, it’s honestly a little weird we don’t already have established practices in place to more systematically enable, capture, and display open comment on research objects”. (open review)

Co-augmented reality

Imagine if digital attention sharing was more of the norm. The fellow in the meme would have access to a kind of “co-augmented reality glasses” to overlay their bookshelf, surfacing previously hidden trails of knowledge and insight shared by others:

The Goodreads mobile app demonstrates this kind of co-augmented reality at work. You point your phone at a book and pull up human reviews about it.

AlphaXiv is an example of some great work being done in this direction of Science Goodreads, specifically for arXiv preprints.

Building infrastructure for circular attention economies

building tools that make it easy and worthwhile for researchers to share their attention traces - whether that's a short review, an annotation, or a recommendation - and then intelligently routing those signals to others who would benefit from them.

Such a system would create positive feedback loops: the more researchers participate by sharing their attention traces, the better the system becomes at helping everyone find relevant, high-quality information

still many open questions to address as we build this infrastructure:

Incentivizing participation:

Quality and moderation:

Interface design:

Aggregation and discovery:

Data sovereignty and ownership

Navigating the perils and promise of the digital age requires, according to author James Williams, that “we give the right sort of attention to the right sort of things... A major function, if not the primary purpose, of information technology should be to advance this end.”

Building circular attention economies represents one promising path toward that goal - turning our attention from a scarce resource into a renewable one that compounds in value as more people participate.

We’re excited to be attending to attention and pursuing these questions at Cosmik.

See

• Webs Of Thinkers And Thoughts
• thread