Every time you think people understand that trying to suppress some kind of information only draws more attention to it, it happens again. The latest, as pointed out by Tim O'Reilly is that basketball star LeBron James had videos confiscated after he was dunked on by a college sophomore -- and because of that it's now being written up on various news sites and blogs. If he'd just let the video go out it may have amused a few people but no one would have thought any less of James, one of the best players ever to play the game. Instead, even more people are finding out about it and makes James look really insecure and controlling. In fact, the Rivals.com points out that because the video can't be seen, people will just assume it makes James look as bad as possible:

The Crawford dunk would have been a temporary embarrassment for LeBron. Let's say the video was put on YouTube. It blows up for a bit, dominates blogs for 36 hours, everyone has a good chuckle and then it's forgotten about.

But by censoring the tape, LeBron turns the dunk into a legend. On video, it's just a dunk. Without video, the jam can reach mythic proportions. Because nobody can see it, the story of the dunk will grow in stature with each telling. Today, it was a simple two-handed slam. In a few days, it will be a 360-degree windmill. By the time Crawford makes his Xavier debut in October, he will have jumped off LeBron's shoulders, flipped in the air, slammed the ball home with his left pinkie and then handed LeBron $3.99 for his dry cleaning.

One day, perhaps, people will learn...

Last week on the Colbert Report, Stephen Colbert did a gag about the new Cheap Trick album coming out on 8-track. I assumed it was just a joke, but apparently it's real. The band, as a little marketing gimmick is actually releasing the album as an 8-track (for you kids out there, the 8-track was a briefly popular form of cassette music, though it lived on at radio stations for years after it disappeared from public use). But, much more interesting is a quote at the end of the article about plans to offer the digital tracks at a steep discount from the typical iTunes price:

"We're kind of more worried about being ignored than being ripped off."

Indeed. This is just another way of saying that "obscurity is a bigger fear than piracy." And while such things are usually applied to new, up-and-coming artists, it's nice to see that more well known artists recognize the same formula applies to them, as well.

There is an interesting Reuters article about how former NY state Democratic Majority Leader Malcolm Smith had a meeting scheduled with billionaire Tom Golisano, a major political fund contributor. (Eschewing the issue of how political contributions are accepted without question, as paid access to our elected officials,) the article describes how Mr. Smith spent enough time on his Blackberry to offend Golisano. The billionaire has clout, and subsequently engineered the ouster of Smith. The article's true focus, then, is how dangerous it is for people to use their mobile email devices during meetings, during social engagements, in the car with family, etc. It points out how rude it can be, and also point out how it can actually be less efficient, because a person's attention is split.

That is all true, but whenever one of these opinion pieces comes out, it ignores the other case: that oftentimes at meetings, our attention simply isn't necessary or productive. In any given multi-person meeting, for what % of the time is each person's participation and attention truly productive? Is every topic related to you? Could a quick check of email be more productive? I would argue that optimal participation is usually less than 100%. Same goes for conferences: Sometimes the conference agenda will include a speaker that is just not very relevant to your individual interests. Yes, you could learn something by listening, but perhaps you could be more productive by responding to your clients, staff, or boss on your mobile device. I've met a few people who take offense at every sighting of a Blackberry, but that's usually attached to a big ego that takes offense too easily. Not every word you say is golden, or even directed at me. In a one on one meeting, obviously one should be focused on the person in front, and one should not feign listening while actually reading. But in multi-party meetings, there are good opportunities to mentally duck out. A blanket Blackberry backlash isn't well-reasoned. As in most debates, a balance needs to be struck.

Kevin Kelly's latest post tackles a pretty common subject around here, about how the most important thing in a business model is getting attention, and from there, the money will follow. It's a response to those who insist that everything needs to be paid for up front. The problem is that that doesn't work when no one understands why they should give you any money. In some ways, it's just another way of saying the phrase that obscurity is a much bigger threat than piracy. As with most of Kelly's writings, it's a worthwhile read. I'm hopeful that he'll take this further and start to note how attention is very much a part of the economic equation as well, because attention is a very important scarce good.

Despite writing Techdirt for over a decade at this point, I still can't predict very well which stories will actually get a lot of comments and which won't (also, by the way, more comments often does not correlate to more page views, though I haven't quite figured out why). However, certain stories have a cascade effect, where they suddenly start getting a ton of comments, and the conversation goes on for quite a while. Take this story from last week, which racked up over 200 comments. There's an interesting column by Lee Gomes in the Wall Street Journal suggesting that blog comments on thought-provoking posts are sort of like a laser pointer to a cat. That may sound marginally insulting, but the idea is that for many types of people, our brains are simply hard wired to not be able to turn away from conversations like those held in the comments sometimes. I'm not sure that the cat:laser pointer analogy fully holds, but it does seem like some people just can't turn away from a comment debate (and, yes, I'm guilty of this). Personally, while sometimes those debates get frustrating (and repetitive) they also help keep me sharp -- rethinking, reformulating and revising my arguments to make sure they really make sense.

However, it is rather interesting to think about this from an evolutionary standpoint. As Gomes notes, "new" pieces of information that get you to think about things differently didn't always come along very often. So people's minds became somewhat hardwired to pay attention and think through the ideas more thoroughly. However, now, with information "abundant" it's much more difficult for people to actually turn away. While I tend to think that the term "addiction" shouldn't apply to things like the internet, this actually gives a reasonable explanation for why some people may feel compelled to keep digging for information beyond the point where it's no longer healthy. As Gomes suggests in the end, in many ways (beyond being similar to the cat and the laser pointer), it's similar to the obesity epidemic, where our bodies are trained to eat as much as possible now on the assumption that there may not be food later. But in an age where there's abundant food, that causes problems -- and combining that with abundant information that causes people to sit immobile in front of their computer screens for hours on end probably isn't helping. So, for any contribution we've made to information obesity, I apologize. But I'm not putting away the laser pointer any time soon...