8- Paying attention: towards a critique of the attention economy

In the industrial era, the Frankfurt School concerns surrounded the relations between the media and the consumption need demanded by the producers. In the digital age, according to Patrick Crogan and Samuel Kinsley, the call is to understand how subjective experience and cognitive capacities are being modulated by the bio-political commodification of our senses (2). For the authors, this commodification of our bodies is what leads it to the regulation and subjectivation “…of and through [our] capacities for attention” (2). This combination between economy and attention, and its consequences, resulted in the called attention economy research area. In Crogan and Kinsley’ s editorial, they offer an overview of the discourse of attention economy and its key concepts.

According to Crogan and Kinsley’s study, discussions around attention economy can be clustered in four different ways of thinking this issue. The first of them is the “scarcity of attention” (4). The abundance of information available in digital technologies “…sets our ability to attend to that information as a scarcity.” (4). For this group, attention is a commodity and rules the economy on Internet. The authors cited Michael Goldhaber’s argument that puts attention as a property within an immaterial labor context (5). George Franck (1998, 1999), Goldhaber (1997), Thomas Davenport and John Beck (2001) are some of the authors that, according to Crogan and Kinsley, defend the transition happening from “ time as labor to time as attention” (6).

The second cluster is the “cognitive capitalism.” Attention is part of the Homo economicus’ cognition system and a crucial component to mediate his interaction and interactivity within the social, politic and economic system. Therefore, according to Crogan and Kinsley, some Marxist authors claim that the capacities for attention are appropriated by the systems of capitalism as a tool of cognition control. Citing Christian Marazzi (2008), Crogan and Kinsley posit the attention economy as central in the “New Economy” which places the conflicts between the growth in information and the limited human capacity (8). These movements also impact the consumption of leisure time and, consequently, the decrease in the quality of time expended to work. Crogan and Kinsley also cited Jonathan Beller (2006) and his theory about the production of human attention based on its capture by cinema and other medias, what Beller called cinematization (9).

The third way of thinking attention economy is the “taking care of brain and spirit.” Crogan and Kinsley say that in the last decade the humanities theorists engaged with neuroscience to explore the relationship between mind and body (10). The authors mentioned some authors such as Bernard Stigler and Catherine Malabou to illustrate research on psychotechnologies and neuroplasticity.

Finally, the last group is the “online intelligence,” where Crogan and Kinsley placed authors who express harms and benefits of the Internet. It goes from the pessimist view of the digital technologies offered by Nicholas Carr (2010) to the cognitive potential embedded in the leisure time afforded by digital media argued by Clay Shirky (2010).  Although the authors’ genealogy of readings describes the studies of attention economy based on four different rationales, Crogan and Kinsley close the article highlighting the importance of considering all four approaches connected to have a better understanding of attention economy (16).

Cited works:

Beller, J. (2006a) The Cinematic Mode of Production: Attention Economy and the Society of the Spectacle, Lebanon, NH: Dartmouth College Press.

Carr, N. (2010) The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to our Brains. New York, NY: W. W. Norton and Company.

Crogan P and Kinsley, S. (2012). “Paying attention: Toward a critique of the attention economy.” Culture Machine, 13, 1-29.

Davenport, T. H. and Beck, J. C. (2001) The Attention Economy: Understanding the new currency of business, Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business Press.

Franck, G. (1998) Okonomie der Aufmerksamkeit (The Economy of Attention), Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag.

Franck, G. (1999) ‘The Economy of Attention’, Telepolis (http://www.heise.de/tp/artikel/5/5567/1.html).

Malabou, C. (2008) What should we do with our brain? Trans. S. Rand, New York, NY: Fordham University Press.

Marazzi, C. (2008) Capitalism and Language: From the New Economy to the War Economy, trans. G. Conti, Los Angeles, CA: Semiotexte.

Shirky, C. (2010) Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and generosity in a connected age, London: Penguin.

Stiegler, B. (1998) Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus, trans. R. Beardsworth, G. Collins, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.