The Sirens' Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource

by Chris Hayes

What makes a given information processing system useful to an organization isn’t how much information it generates or even the raw amount of information it can process. Rather, “The crucial question is how much information it will allow to be withheld from the attention of other parts of the system.” In other words, “To be an attention conserver for an organization, an information-processing system (abbreviated IPS) must be an information condenser.”[14] This framework is the opposite of how so many organizations think about information and organizational resources. Simon uses the example of a foreign office whose purview is to process intelligence information. The problem, as this hypothetical foreign office sees it, is not enough communication, not enough information being passed along. “When events in the world were lively, the teletypes carrying incoming dispatches frequently fell behind. The solution: replace the teletypes with line printers of much greater capacity. No one apparently asked whether the IPSs (including the Foreign Minister) that received and processed messages from the teletypes would be ready, willing, and able to process the much larger volume of messages from the line printers.”[15]