Download The attention economy and ecology of contemporary media

MA Creative Media Technologies
Critical Perspectives on the Attention Economy
2 things.
What is the ‘attention economy’ and media theory context of critical interest/angles?
And some egs of current, emerging phenomenon that can be approached in this way
(provided along the way)
‘ATTENTION ECONOMY’
90s: responses to emerging ‘digital transition’: rise of personal computing, internet
access; increase in media devices: pcs, game consoles, handhelds, on top of vcrs/dvds
and cable tv opening up tv choice
Challenge: ‘Info superhighway’ and ‘excessive access’ ….. info overload. Surfing
becoming drowning… anxiety/stress/inhibition not empowerment, mastery, wisdom.
KEY issue here: rhetoric of ‘information’, assumption that more access to more info =
more knowledge/wisdom/power. But that’s only part of recipe.
Knowledge = how to discriminate, to be selective, to discard….
Goldhaber: speculating on these changes in economics-related language/concerns:
Economics = study of how a society makes and distributes things by utilising scarce
resources.
Goldhaber: if info is abundant, and often now ‘free’ (but it is never really free); it
can’t work as the basis of a capitalistic economy (it’s become like ‘air’—up until
recently no one has charged for air—see China). What is scarce? Attention to
information.
New digital technological changes lead to an attention economy. Competition for
producing goods/services for profit using scarce resources of human attention.
Some followups on attention as part of production process in the workplace – cf.
Davenport and Beck 2001, The Attention Economy: Understanding the New Currency
of Business
But mostly the notion has been about the economics of consumer attention in 2
connected ways;
1. Competing for it to make your service profitable over other competitors for
attention (in renovating the old tv ratings = increased advertising rates for corporate
‘media buyers’—more a web 1.0 model of the big search engine, the web portal that
can sell ‘space’ to advertisers, or ‘experience design’ to ‘hook consumers into’ your
product, etc : in video game titles, trans-media franchises (Harry Potter, the Matrix,
etc etc)
eg. Youtube: ‘VIDEO MONETIZATION AGREEMENT
‘Advertising statistics compiled by Google shall be the conclusive basis for calculating Ad Revenues hereunder…’
and
2. then of monetising consumer/user attention by using the ‘fruits of their attentional
labour’: using the ‘content’ they make, collecting and repurposing the metadata of
their ‘attention trails’ into saleable forms for marketing/promotion.
CRITICAL CONTEXTS
Beller at about the same time (cf the dispute….and Dallas W Smythe as trumpcard:
‘audience-commodity’): a political economic critique of the growing ‘Attention
economy’ from a Marxist point of view: a continuation of exploitation of
labour/engineering of society: what Adorno and Horkheimer’s Culture industries
analysis (in Dialectic of Enlightenment) called ‘administration’ of society by careful
management/regulation of cultural production in the mainstream media: cinema,
radio, tv, print etc.
Beller: ‘Hollywood’ as capital of the 20th C: globalising force of US consumerist
‘lifestyle’ (beyond national/cultural identity)
Beller: Already in the 90s digital media/internet appropriation by the commercial
mainstream revealing the trends of this continuation and exacerbation:
Exploitation not only in the workplace but of ‘consumer’ outside it in their ‘leisure
time’; a total exploitation for profit of all acts, activities, interests, pursuits:
Attention towards X = revenue stream, attention becomes another kind of labour: cf.
perceptions of the obligation to update your status, to upgrade your device/system, to
level up your game character through ‘grinding’….
POST-90s critical work:
Cf Later conceptions: playbour (Julian Kucklich), the ‘prosumer’, ‘participatory
media’ (Joost Raessens): similar conceptions, but not from the explicitly Marxist
Kulturkritik point of view: eg. Raessens work is trying to consider the nonexploitative possibilities of these new forms of attentive media engagement.
More recently:
Cf ‘Paying Attention’ issue: other critical and other post-marxist revisitings of the
‘attention economy’ discovery.
Terranova: Italian post-marxist influences: she goes back to Gabriel Tarde via
Maurizio Lazzaratti on similar idea of ‘immaterial labour’ of the mind/brain.
Discussion of influence of neuroscientific work on the brain’s functioning in current
ideas and trends in mainstream media culture:
Neuroplasticity: flexibility, programmability and scientific calculability; systematic
exploitation via precise measurement and design of attention flows/focuses:
Cf What Shall We Do with our Brain? Catherine Malabou
Cf: QUIVIDI (SS, bookmark)
Google’s SCREENWISE TRENDS PANEL (SS, bookmark)
Terranova: attention as social/cultural phenomena, what operates between individuals,
in a community, as critical glue/medium between inside and outside, self and other, is
completely missing here, except as
A) exploitable data trail of links: ie the FB model of the ‘Like’ button (cf. Taina
Bucher on the Open Graph Protocol; itself lifted from the more democratically, opensource minded work on the social web and the semantic web by internet engineers—
cf. Yuk Hui and Harry Halpin essay in this collection: Unlike Us 8: Social Media
Monopolies and their Alternatives , http://networkcultures.org/wpmu/unlikeus/pastevents/3-amsterdam/reader/
B) or of ‘viral’ potential of a YT video, etc. a key concept appropriated by ‘viral
marketing’ discourses.
C) or of emerging exploitable media practices like ‘dual screening’:
Eg. Redbee media.com; Zeebox
STIEGLER: strident critique of ‘attention’ in attention economy: reduction of
something to this economic dimension, and to ‘econometrics’: like the reductive
model of ‘homo economicus’ underlying most ‘hard’ economics.
Stiegler; individual attention is;
Always social as well as individual: to pay attention, to be attentive, as well as to
direct one’s perception at X: the two develop together from infancy to childhood to
adulthood; is part of the very process of human pscychic and socio-cultural
development.
Is always related to ‘attentional forms’ that pre-exist it. Culture, society is made,
develops, grows on the basis of these. These are artefacts, techniques, practices,
rituals etc. an individual’s attention is formed in interactions with others through
these.
This is both: the basis of the potential for an attention economy type exploitation of
user attention, that attention is always mediated by attentional forms, ‘relational
technics’: Stiegler talks about pscyhotechniques/technics, and names
‘psychotechnologies’, ‘relational technologies’ as particular modern industrial forms
of this general condition for human social/cultural existence.
And….
Helps to better identify the real stakes of an unchecked proliferation of the kinds of
forms trying to implement and maximise an ‘attention economy’: these are cultural,
political, moral, social, etc.
Because our media technologies are the ‘and’ in ‘individual and collective’, they are
the milieu in which ‘we’ each exist and develop amongst others. All of our issues,
problems and possibilities are bound up with them; so how we configure, use,
understand and question them in order to modify, challenge and remake them has
consequences for all our challenges,futures today: of globalisation, economic,
environmental crises, our becoming post-human, or in-human, etc etc.
DISCUSSION:
Implications for media practice? Some egs.
Media potentials/possibilities of digital mediation?
References:
http://www.iri.centrepompidou.fr/ (stieglers French think tank/project development )
http://www.quividi.com/references.html
https://www.screenwisetrendspanel.co.uk/nrg/faq.php (google’s monitor)
http://zeebox.com/uk/
http://www.redbeemedia.com/
http://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/issue/ paying attention special issue
http://payingattention.org/ conference blog