Growing up in the 80s and 90s everywhere you looked people were talking about Artificial Intelligence. If you’re as hot for BSG as I am, it’s still all about Artificial Intelligence.

I predict, however, that people who live a lot of their lives online are about to find out it’s about something else now: Artificial Attention. Those that are already paying artificial attention to people will know what I’m talking about. Yesterday I learned from kottke.org that Friend Feed has just added a “fake follow” feature. The author called it “a little bit genius.”

I call it a solution.

The reason I found out about the “fake follow” function on FF is that one of the people I follow on Twitter wanted to help me answer the push/pull question (do you have to both push information and pull/receive information in order to have a dialog and build community?). It arose because I stumbled across Tim Ferriss’s Twitter feed and discovered that he has nearly five thousand followers and follows precisely zero. From what I understand after reading his book and this post, Tim’s walking the walk of keeping his “information diet” streamlined. He doesn’t follow you but he still gets to get his message out there; I believe he’s paying illusory attention to you.

Artificial Attention: A Solution

What I’m calling Artificial Attention (and Michael Goldhaber calls Illusory Attention and Friend Feed calls a Fake Follow) does one thing very well. It preserves the “wa” of a social network. It is, as Tech Crunch rightly points out, “a digital white lie” and I say no harm, no foul.

Reading up on this issue I ran across multiple comments saying that the Fake Follow on FriendFeed is basically, to borrow the words of my friend Vince, “weak sauce.” That one should consider it an honor to be paid attention to and to pay “fake attention” back is jerkish. How about Tim’s case where he’s followed (and presumably listened to) by so many and follows precisely none? Is he paying fake attention to you? Consider my Twitter friend @rgremill’s response: You should think of it like this. He’s a 100% giver, but only on his terms, kind of Ayn Rand’ish.

I have the time and energy to PUSH content. I can’t spend all day at my computer PULLING (that is, reading your blog posts, engaging your twitter stream, viewing your photos) and still have time at the end of the day to create my own content (in my case that’s podcasting once a week, publishing a blog post twice a week, posting to twitter on average 14 times a day, answering your emails, editing and putting up Flickr photos, doing my Kirtsy editor duties, the list goes on…).

I do try to discover the delicate balance between consumption and production. Some days I consume much more than I produce. I try to find ways to do it in equal parts because I think that’s how community is built. I don’t reply to every tweet that comes my way, but I do read them. Artificial Attention is a way of saying, “I love you, but I can’t take the time to personally dialog with you at the moment.” It’s also saying, I’m busy creating stuff so that you actually have a reason to follow me in the first place.

What Does Wa Look Like? How Do We Find Balance?

I learned about wa by doing business in Japan. My business was teaching English and later, running a business. It boils down to this: do whatever it takes to preserve harmony in relationship with others. Sometimes “it” is a white lie.

I think of myself as an honest person and I don’t build relationships on lies (by any stretch) but I do believe that sometimes it’s better to skirt an issue rather than plowing through it. This is distinctly unAmerican of me, isn’t it? It’s better to just make the complaint to the waiter’s face, right? To punch someone and get it over with? To get violent and move on.

I don’t believe it is. I think the people who we look up to are telling us little white lies all the time (even if that little white lie is “I’m paying attention to you”). The people with the biggest followings, the ones with the widest audiences, the ones we call our heroes. Not that they are liars, just that small white lies, helping others save face and preserving wa are things that they do with ease.

It takes real finesse to know when to make use of a white lie but with Fake Friending coming onto the scene I believe we’ll be seeing (or, more accurately, not seeing) the effects soon enough. It will become a way to manage your attention stream.