I have been reading Clay Shirky’s book “Here Comes Everybody." While I was cringing through the chapter on organizations and transaction costs (which manages to ignore the 70 years of economics of the firm that followed Coase’s paper), I loved the chapters on how personal web publishing is changing the very nature of journalism. In those chapters is a real nugget in a section titled "Fame Happens." Clay gives a great definition of fame as occuring when inbound attention exceeds the ability to reciprocate with outbound attention. He gives the example of what would happen if Oprah published her email address. There is obviously no way that she could personally respond to all the incoming emails. Oprah is of course so famous that she can’t even respond to all the snail mail directed at her.
Using Clay’s definition, email has significantly reduced the "fame threshold." It is a lot easier for someone to whip up an email and hit send (and if necessary take a reasonable guess at the intended recipient’s email address) then it was to break out pen and paper, find an envelope and a stamp and send off an old-fashioned letter. Email, however, has not reduced the cost of outbound attention nearly as much, because responding (in anything other than an automated fashion) still requires reading the incoming email and figuring out what to say. This asymmetric reduction in the cost of attention means that the threshold for "fame” has been lowered. So even someone with more modest exposure can easily find themselves in a position of so much inbound attention that it can no longer be returned.
The challenge is that senders’ expectation of receiving a response has not been lowered as much as their cost of sending. Some people (e.g., Oprah) can employ a staff to respond, but the majority of folks just past the fame threshold cannot, which leaves them with many unanswered emails and probably quite a few disgruntled senders. There is simply no solution for this problem other than a gradual adjustment of expectations. My sense is that for anyone under 30 who has grown up with email this is already the case, but I may be wrong.
