Week 4: Attention Economy and the Net
By Ellen Santa Maria
Audio introduction: https://markcarrigan.files.wordpress.com/2019/11/goldhaber-article-intro-10_30_19-8.58-pm.mp3
As we consider what is included in this contemporary digital condition, I ask that we turn our attention to a piece from 22 years ago: Michael Goldhaber’s (1997) “The Attention Economy an the Net.” Just three years before Y2K, Goldhaber argues that to understand the economy of the future (our economy today), we “now have to think in wholly new economic terms, for we are entering an entirely new kind of economy,” an economy dictated by one central element of the digital condition.
He begins by defining how economies run: “by the overall patterns of effort and motivation that shape our lives,”, which are very different from feudal or industrial economies. In each of these economies, what is most valuable is what is most scarce, but the means of production and the lords and the ladies of old have come and gone, and there’s a new sheriff in town.
So what is the most scarce commodity of our time? He argues that it’s not information. Today’s Internet and the internet of 1997 look very different, but both claim(ed) an ever-growing amount of information, so scarcity is absent in the information economy. It’s also not material goods, because he argues that the better we’ve gotten at making and distributing goods, the less scarce they are.
He contends that more than anything, people, corporations, and organizations need attention to survive — both emotionally and economically — in our modern world. He says we “most likely make many more decisions every day about where and towards whom your attention should now go than about where your or anyone else’s money should go.” Looking at how I spent my day today: taking my dog to the park, purchasing dog food and birthday presents at the store, answering e-mails, participating in group texts, scrolling through Instagram, reading, reading, and reading, checking in on our Digital Condition page, and sending announcements to my class via Canvas, all but one of those actions involved exchanges of attention, and even selecting which dog food and which gifts to purchase entailed directing my attention to certain products over others. I’m sure your days are similarly distributed.
But if attention is modern currency, where can it be found? How is it traded? On what conditions? Who gives it, who gets it, and why? In the digital sphere, attention is exchanged through digital affordances of attention-trading platforms like Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, etc. with quantifiable/trackable attention measures such as likes, comments, shares, followers and upvotes. This means originality of digital content packs the most punch when it comes to getting attention. Anyone with access to the digital public sphere can give and receive attention, but this “anyone” excludes people who do not have access to the Internet for class, location, or education reasons. As for why attention is exchanged in the way it is, one could potentially argue that the success of the material economy robs material goods of their scarcity, but this doesn’t explain why the logic of the supply and demand economy chose attention as its next currency.
Unlike money, Goldhaber writes that attention is “rarely entirely lost.” Enter the contemporary practice of “cancelling,” a person, organization, or corporation. Cancel culture and cancelling refer to the discursive ways that people remove positive attention from those they deem worthy of public shaming and punishment. Hasthags like #cancelKanye surfaced after Kanye West claimed that slavery was a choice, #CancelObama after President Obama publicly denounced cancel culture, #cancellouisck after allegations of his sexual misconduct were made public, and the list goes on and on. In our modern attention economy mediated by the digital condition, people are finding ways to make material (read: monetary) impact on powerful people and organizations.
Goldhaber argues, “money now flows along with attention, or, to put this in more general terms, when there is a transition between economies, the old kind of wealth easily flows to the holders of the new.” Despite the claim to novelty in Goldhaber’s argument, I would say that attention and money exchanges have always been linked, but that the digital condition has made this link almost intractable.
The digital condition’s relationship with the attention economy can be connected to many contemporary research concerns. McRobbie’s (2018) work on the creative industries, Sarah Banet-Weiser’s research on popular feminism (2018) and authenticity (2012), Aronczyk and Powers’ (2010) research on branding and promotional culture, Dobson’s (2016) analysis of gender and self-representation online, and Duffy’s (2016) critique of aspirational labor, are just a few of the scholars thinking through the ways in which our contemporary neoliberal economy implicate social actors in digital spaces.
If the digital condition and the attention economy are as connected as Goldhaber says, we as researchers need to keep several questions in mind. Who has access to ways to get attention in digital spaces and why? What theories of power does the attention economy (enabled by the digital condition) forward? How can we work to make access to the attention economy more equal? How should digital spaces be regulated to ensure fair and responsible exchanges of attention take place? Who should get to make these decisions? In our globalized world, how do we negotiate cultural differences when the metrics of the attention economy are distinctively Western? How do politics, governance, and citizenship make use of the attention economy? With how rapidly technology changes, and by proxy, the way attention is exchanged changes, can we accurately recommend policy initiatives that will safeguard against unequal access and distribution of attention in digital spaces, and if so, how?
While this article seems to raise more questions than it answers, I hope it has been a useful tool for conceptualizing our digital condition.
