Eyeballs, eyeballs, eyeballs! This familiar mantra seemed to have served an industry and economy of consumption well, but is it still relevant? How effective is attention to conversion really? Can we even cram any more info into our already crowded consciousness when most of us can’t remember a phone number or an address without the aid of our computers and mobiles?

So why is it that capturing attention is still the preoccupation with brand advertisers? Why is our entire market ecosystem still hanging on to that notion, while ad impressions and page views return less and less against the effort?

Sure, it’s getting more sophisticated with pre and post roll placements on online video, sponsored tweets of Twitter, and an entire empire like Google ruling the online ad kingdom with “contextually relevant” placements. While contextually relevant placements after reading through all our emails and search queries maybe inevitable, but is this gold rush for attention really necessary?

What if it wasn’t about attention at all? What if awareness, retention and recall were actually counterproductive goals to chase? What if instead, the real goal was actually about “reference” and “access” to when and where the information/brand was relevant to our distributed consciousness? For example, if you find this post useful, will you try to commit it to memory or will you rather Tweet, Facebook, bookmark or copy the link to this?

Looking Up—Reference over Retention: The signs that our cognitive abilities are heading towards a paradigm or reference vs. retention are all around us. We not only manage our time with clocks, calendars and alerts, but we also refer to everything else by knowing where to fetch it over keeping all the details in our heads. We don’t ever need to remember the rules for long division when accessing a calculator is a much easier reference point!

Want to share a video, picture, article, post, book, product, tweet, directions, coupon, reservation, purchase, game, contact info, report, tool, message or your availability? Find the link or use the app. Want to remember what you did yesterday, the day before, over a year ago? How about what to eat, where to go, when and how much to pay or even how to think about something? Again, it’s finding the source by either looking it up and/or sorting through your collection of all the stuff you’ve collected or asking your connected network of “friends” or in other words, your extended consciousness enabled by those fancy interwebs.

Obviously as all of us become active participants in the sharing of our thoughts, memories, wants and needs, the signal to noise ratio continues to grow exponentially. What may not be as obvious is whether or not the answer to sifting out signals from the abyss is that being aware of it is much less important than being able to find it. Our attention is increasingly thinning out over the virtual and real mashup we now call our conscious existence.

Faster Expiration Dates: When Einstein had said: “Imagination is more important than knowledge”, I don’t know if he could have imagined how much faster knowledge could actually spoil! Holding onto dated information is not only taxing to our overburdened mind space, it actually lessens our value in the world. Things get old fast! Much faster now, and even faster going forward as in when a month old media story today seems like eons ago. When the increasing rate of change is the only constant, the more old ideas you have about what the news is, what your options, abilities, knowledge and beliefs are and the fewer places to find/source them, the more you are limited in having a better life.

We see this economically manifest in the employability of the workforce and sustainability of companies, we see this socially and culturally manifest the latest wired vs. tired metaphor playing out in every community from fashion to tech to media, and we see this impact us physically when we hold on to dated ideas and references about nutrition, fitness and longevity.

Seems like now it just makes good sense to purge extraneous information that is about the “what”. Because the “what” is constantly changing, the “how” has to be getting better refined alongside it. For example, if you were in the business of making cars, knowing the names of the parts of a combustion engine is far less important than knowing where to find the most efficient ways to make the next innovations like electric drive trains better. Knowing of course that tomorrow it’ll change again!

So as purging the unnecessary becomes the norm and information is integrated into everywhere and everything in the physical world, what is the next evolution of a reference based commercial ecosystem? Where do we start?

Easier Reference? How about making the actions associated with referencing and retrieving the referenced easier and easier?  How about clarifying our objectives and the actions to achieve them context specific? How about we stop worrying about capturing attention altogether? Some very interesting things and ideas are emerging today to help us with just that… Here are a few examples:

Gamification: If you live in society you’re already playing it. From what you learn to what you earn, you are playing with society’s rules. The difference is that now those rules are now becoming crowdsourced and context specific as we access and share information to and from the collective pool with each other digitally. Collecting, acting, exchanging and more all game constructs that help us reference the next things to attend to rather than waste attention on. Gamification constructs like advergaming is still at its infancy, but as Jesse points out in the video below, it’s about to get way more interesting to reference:

Webification: Thoughts have always become things in our world as how we’ve designed the tools and rules for living better. Now those thoughts become more local and global as the web of things become more integrated into our lives. When “checking-in” at a location opens up new location-specific opportunities for everyone on the value chain ala Shopkick or Foursquare, it’s just the beginning. The web of things including places, objects and the information about them will become more ubiquitously local and global for that time and place context to be the “reference point” vs. details we will have to remember ahead of time. Think of how we had to travel with a place to stay with all our essential belongings and cash even 50 years back before bookable reservations with debit/credit cards became widely available and multiply that effect a thousand-fold. From reviews to statistics to current value, information where and when we are, do not just make things and places more intelligent, but us as a whole in the process.

Beautification: We are attracted to beauty, and if the invention of the mirror was any indicator, then you already know beauty gets referenced. If you look even closer, what we really find beautiful is also the most efficient for its purpose. A beautiful thing, place, animal or even a person is nothing more than a testament to better design (however you want to define “design”). Nature is of course beautiful because for the most part, we have yet to mimic its efficient design. As more information is referenced and accessed, the way we design our world becomes more efficient and thus beautiful. Just look at Apple’s product design from 20 years ago vs. today. Today’s clean energy revolution is exactly that, a beautification of our access to the planet’s energy through better design. Renewable inevitably becomes beautiful despite the fossil fuel economy’s reluctance to it, because when we can use less to get more done, we don’t just “save” what energy we have, but actually do “more” than we could have previously.

We’re just at the beginning of recognizing this shift, but the wise in our society have known it all along. If Gandhi’s “Being the change you wish to see” was actually a metaphor for behavior change mechanics, we are actually a lot closer to a truly beautiful future. A much better-designed future where our interaction with information by reference actually makes our lives better with positively reinforced actions, rather than being a burden by just sticking around in our minds and thus losing value much like the expired food in your fridge.