This book comes at a time when our societies are living through a fundamental transformation in how we pay attention. Across the social order, complaints are growing about a scarcity of attention. This is coupled with an overriding push by corporations and institutions to capture, mobilize, and profit from attention. In the twenty-first century, attention is perceived as bearing a similarity to money: most of us do not have enough of it, we seek more of it, but it is unequally distributed. The multiplication of communication channels and platforms, caused by the digital transformation of our media systems, generates increasing demands on our attention, to the point that often we do not know which way to turn nor even how to spend the attention we do have given the quantity of communication channels available. Despite the abundance of information, many say they feel that none of the media available merit their attention. Others feel that their attention is being absorbed by habits generated outside of themselves, that they have internalized and that as a consequence they have lost agency over their lives.
The chapters in this book study the causes and consequences of attention scarcity from the point of view of a variety of social science disciplines. These are mapped out in Chap. 2 by Roda. While Franck, in Chap. 4, takes an economics viewpoint, three authors Citton, Doyle, and Boullier all refer to semiotic theory (Chaps 3, 5, and 6). In Chap. 7, Harsin provides a political communication perspective and explains the history of attention management in American politics. Huber (Chap. 8) applies digital geography to consider the way brands track human movement and commodify it through practices such as Vogue Night Out and Nike City Runs. Finally, in Chap. 9, Payne applies the concept of network promiscuity from Queer Theory to reflect on the notion of undivided attention.
All these chapters shape the contour of what we could define as a digital communications revolution as theorized by Castells (2013). In the sixteenth century, a communications revolution took place after the invention of print bringing major cultural changes, including perhaps the transformation of consciousness itself (Eisenstein 1993). Readers paid attention to the new print media in ways that also reorganized daily life. Parchment was replaced by paper and printing took the place of illumination. Sacred texts slowly lost their dominance over secular and profane texts. Reading moved from being performed aloud in groups to silently by oneself. As a consequence, religion and politics also changed. The new medium built the awareness of being part of national communities (Anderson 1991), time itself moved from being experienced as empty and homogeneous to precise and countable (Auerbach 2013). McLuhan (2001)ās famous adage that the medium is the message was reflected in the way the new print media changed how people communicated and thought of themselves. Fundamentally, print enacted a transformation in the way attention is produced and oriented.
Digital media are provoking an equally important revolution today, and we are experiencing a new communications revolution. Daily life is pervaded with digital devices that both capture our attention and manage it. Technological change and ubiquitous media affect, and are profoundly influenced by, what had already become a globalized network described by Van Dijk (2012) and Castells (1996) even before the explosion of digital media.
We are yet to understand the full consequences of digitization and how it will change politics, ethics, and economics, just as print may have done in the early modern period. This book, however, can help us sketch out two fundamental themes of this revolution. First, we are witnessing a reshaping of human agency and its place in the environment. Second, there is currently a strong push toward attention commodification, as is attested by the essential role played by brands.
Reshaping Human Agency and Its Place in theĀ Environment
In an increasingly digitized environment, the place of humans is being transformed rapidly (Citton) so that theorizing the autonomy of attention becomes progressively more difficult in the midst of the ever-expanding role of external agencies (Roda). Technology tends to produce its own context, indeed its own environment. This environment has become the theater that both attracts our attention and structures it. For example, political consultants at Cambridge Analytica were able, through algorithmic processes, to capture, maintain, and manipulate the attention of many to assist in the election of President Trump, and to play a role in persuading a majority of British voters to leave the European Union (Harsin). Such shifts in twenty-first-century power are linked to transformations in our communication practices and, consequently, attention allocation modalities.
The essential question has become: Who commands attention? Citton proposes that this question can be addressed by breaking the common dichotomy between individual and collective attention and considering instead an ecology of attention. Attention, he proposes, should be understood as an environment where figures or objects can appear. Drawing on Roland Barthes, he posits attention as not entirely anthropocentric and humanist, but rather āepochalā: things take on attention by appearing to be distinct from their environment while the environment becomes an agent of attention itself. This understanding of attention, as intrinsically dynamic and multifaceted, is reflected in Boullierās taxonomy of types of attention inspired by Sloterdijkās theory of globes, envelopes, and foam. Boullier rejects what he calls an essentialist idea of attention and argues that rather than being submitted to a single habitat of attention we now move between habitats. The digital world, he explains, creates a series of overlapping mini environments that co-exist and shape our capacity to be alert and our sense of immersion.
Huberās chapter brings together several of these principles. Although she does not refer to Boullier or Sloterdijk, her work on the pop-up event clearly demonstrates the working of Boullierās digital envelope. Huber examines the use of urban space by brands to create events where clientsā movements are traced on digital phones and wearables by GPS tracking. She employs Mark Andrejevicās term ādigital enclosureā to explain how brands track and map their clientsā movements who willingly give up their attention to receive celebrity status (e.g. by being placed on the Vogue website). In this situation, command of attention is willingly relinquished in order to receive media attention. The opposite viewpoint, where agency is actively sought, is exemplified by Payne who considers the attempts of individuals to control distraction. Payne uses the trope of promiscuity to question attention scarcity and attention control. Indeed, reading several texts or being on multiple screens simultaneously could be read not as attention deficit but as multiskilling and may be simply part of the shift we are living that demands a new set of skills for the command of attention. In the same vein, Harsin asks us to reconsider distraction as āa second type of attention.ā Through a rigorous investigation of political attention, Harsin questions the basis of liberal subjectivity arguing for a subtler understanding of the individualās willingness to pay attention. Drawing on Cittonās work, he shows that individual political attention is always dependent on collective attention and that the new brand-based command of attention has eroded civic virtue and consideration of the res pubblica.
Commodification of Attention and Brands
With the help of technology, human attention is captured and commodified. Franck argues that commodification is achieved through what he terms āvanity fairsā (e.g. the celebrity system). He compares the function of financial derivatives in the money economy to the function of vanity fairs in the attention economy and he sees both as a product of the neo-liberal economic system. Celebrity is a vector that enables maximization of the financial profitability of a public figure as a brand, generating economic value. Brands represent systems for the production, distribution, and consumption of attention. This perception of the brand as an immaterial conglomerate of attention is linked to the breakdown of distinctions between work and leisure, information and entertainment, along with the dematerialization of goods and the rise of services. The brand now defines schools, universities, trade unions, political parties, hospitals, cities, and even nation states. All of these institutions seek to imitate private corporations in managing human attention. Doyle applies semiotic theory to the understanding of brands as vectors of attention. He argues that brands concentrate and commodify attention and allow it to be moved and shifted from one object to another. Indeed, the same brand can be attached to completely different products. Therefore, he argues that the attention economy should not be thought of just as the relationship between a large quantity of information and limited human attention, but that brands are communication processes, games, and performances that structure and shape awareness and attention. Information is not simply something that attracts attention but is placed within a dynamic interactive and intersubjective process that shapes the self. He discusses how new processes of self-formation are linked to the decline of the significance of national brands, the rise of global brand cultures, and the globalization of consumer practices. This is echoed in Franckās and Boullierās discussion of the structural role of brands in attention markets. They argue, for example, that money is converted into attention through stylish consumption. Attention is attracted by paying money to perform style. For Franck, this is where the brand becomes the conveyor of attention, a medium that one can buy into to attract attention to oneself. As pointed out by Roda, many researchers go so far as to argue that the attention economy will one day supplant the money economy. In any case, the attention economy currently is just as unequal as the money economy. We hope this book will provide enough insights in its mechanisms and power games, to start a movement towards a more controlled and equally distributed attention economy.
References
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- Auerbach, E. Selected Essays. James I. Porter (ed. and introd.), and O. Jane (trans.) Newman. 2013. Time, History, and Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
- Castells, Manuel. 1996. The Rise of the Network Society. Information Age. Vol. 1. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers.
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- Eisenstein, Elizabeth L. 1993. The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press.
- McLuhan, Marshall. 2001. Understanding Media. 2nd ed. London: Routledge.
- Van Dijk, Jan. 2012. The Network Society. London: SAGE Publications.