The process for awarding host city honors came under intense scrutiny after Salt Lake City had beenawarded the right to host the 2002 Olympic Games. Soon after the host city had been announced, it wasdiscovered that the organizers had engaged in an elaborate bribery scheme to     31   with IOC(International Olympic Committee) officials. Gifts and other financial considerations were given to thosewho would evaluate and vote on Salt Lake City’s bid. These gifts included medical treatment for relatives,a college scholarship for one member’s son and a land deal in Utah. Even IOC president Juan AntonioSamaranch received two rifles    32   $2,000. Samaranch defended the gift as inconsequential since, aspresident, he was a non-voting member. 

     The subsequent investigation has uncovered inconsistencies in the bids for every Olympics (bothSummer and Winter) since 1988.   33   , the gifts received by IOC members from the JapaneseOrganizing Committee for Nagano’s bid for the 1998 Winter Olympics were described by the investigationcommittee as “astronomical.” Although nothing strictly illegal had been done, the IOC feared thatcorporate sponsors would lose faith in the integrity of the process and that the Olympic brand would betarnished to such an extent   34   advertisers would begin to pull their support. The investigation resulted in the expulsion of 10 IOC members and the sanctioning of another 10.New terms and age limits were established for IOC membership, and 15 former Olympic athletes wereadded to the committee. Stricter rules for future bids were imposed, with   35      imposed on the valueof gifts IOC members could accept from bid cities.

     Some economists have pointed out that in a knowledge-based economy, the most valuable commodity is not information, but attention. Michael Goldhaber (1997) proposed that we are not so much living in an information economy, as in an attention economy, where value is created from the exchange of attention and “[w]hat matters is seeking, obtaining and paying attention.” Digital media and the internet facilitate participation in this economy, by creating new channels for distributing attention. In order to get attention, you have to give attention; otherwise, your audience will lose interest and take their attention elsewhere. This is an important point for advertisers, especially those launching social media campaigns. The emphasis is on developing new kinds of relationships with customers, and in many cases, moving towards engaging customers in the design of products for themselves.

    Goldhaber notes that some people (he calls them “stars”) are better at attracting attention than others (he calls them “fans”). Stars are able to command more attention partly because they pay illusory attention to fans; that is, they give the illusion of personal attention even though they are addressing a large audience. Goldhaber illustrates this concept with the example of a presenter at a conference, who, while talking to a large crowd, makes eye contact with individuals in that crowd. In digital media, social media tools like Twitter and Facebook provide opportunities to pay illusory attention.

    If you accept the idea of an attention economy with attention as the valued commodity, then you have to adjust your ways of thinking about certain concepts. For example, our traditional way of thinking of privacy as freedom from the public gaze is not especially appropriate for people participating in an attention economy. People have to be “out there” in order to attract attention. In addition, intellectual property laws that forbid people from copying and distributing a creator’s work also seem out of place. This kind of copying and distributing draws attention to the creator, thus increasing their “wealth” in the attention economy. In other words, wealth comes not from the exchange of “intellectual property,” but from the exchange of attention.

        Satellites are made of metal that reflects sunlight. This makes them show up in the night sky as bright, slow-moving dots. After the launch, the Starlink satellites appeared in images taken by telescopes and deep-space cameras as a line of bright lights flying across the sky. Astronomers learn about space by using large telescopes and special cameras to observe light coming from very far away. The information they collect can help them understand things like how galaxies are formed or which planets might be able to support life.