Recently economists looked at the relationship between pupils’ month of birth and their schoolperformance. It was found that among fourth graders, the oldest children scored on math and readingsomewhere between four and twelve percentile points better than the youngest children. That can beexplained as a “huge effect.” It means that if you take two intellectually    21      fourth graders with birthdaysat opposite ends of the cutoff date, the older student could score in the eightieth percentile,    22    theyounger one could score in the sixty-eighth percentile. That’s the difference between    23    for a giftedprogram or not. The economists said, “We do ability grouping early on in childhood. We have advancedreading groups and advanced math groups. So, early on, if we look at young kids, in kindergarten and firstgrade, the teachers are    24    maturity with ability. And they put the old kids in the advanced stream,where they learn better skills; and the next year, because they are in the higher groups, they do even better;and in the next year, the same thing happens, and they do even better again. The only country we don’tsee this going on is Denmark.” Denmark waits to make selection decisions until maturity differences byage have      25   . This is because they have a national policy where they have no ability grouping untilthe age of ten.

     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.