Attention Economy

This exploratory paper analyses monetary and power relations between Facebook and news companies by investigating their web traffic sources, social sharing practices and content distribution on Facebook. The paper also seeks to determine the extent to which news companies’ revenue is derived from the platform. This is an ambitious task because news corporations don’t publish any social media related revenue. Similarly, constant tweaks on Facebook algorithms means that the data about news companies news sharing, traffic and potential revenue is constantly changing, and this may distort some findings. Four New Zealand media companies are used as case studies to examine the issue. Two of the companies are news publishers, one a broadcaster and one a digital start-up. The findings of the paper are primarily based on the quantitative analysis of web traffic and social sharing data. In general, academic and industry related reports have concluded that news publishers have become overly reliant on Facebook in terms of news distribution, audience attention and traffic. However, there are contradictory views about the nature and extent of this dependency, and this requires further evaluation.
Social media has become a popular research topic in academia, and the field of research is expanding. Researchers such as Christian Fuchs have extensively analysed social media companies in terms of audience commodification, monetisation and exploitation of digital labour. The Tow Center for Digital Journalism has also examined the power relations between Facebook and news publishers. However, this relationship requires in-depth empirical investigation especially in regard to social sharing and the monetisation of news content on Facebook.
To aid the analysis of relations between Facebook and news companies the concept of platform capitalism is utilised. Platforms make a profit by extraditing large amounts of data from their users and by operating as an intermediary between different user groups, and this business model allows them to control users and set rules for other participants on the platform. With the evidence gathered from the five case studies, the paper will consider the usefulness of the platform capitalism concept in understanding the monetary and power relations between news companies and Facebook.

The future of human computation (HC) benefits from examining tasks that agents already perform and designing environments to give those tasks computational significance. We call this natural human computation (NHC). We consider the possible future of NHC through the lens of Swarm!, an application under development for Google Glass. Swarm! motivates users to compute the solutions to a class of economic optimization problems by engaging the attention dynamics of crowds. We argue that anticipating and managing economies of attention provides one of the most tantalizing future applications for NHC.

This article describes a participatory form of the attention economy, as opposed to another form, the market attention economy. The latter signifies an evolution of the market environment, characterized by an over-abundance of information at a cost that is quasi nil. In this context, attention becomes rare. The participatory attention economy accounts for the actors’ motives for engaging in social life, mainly through social media on the Internet, in a context where attention has become rare. Drawing on the work of pioneer authors who have studied the attention economy, I show that in its participatory form it can be described as a polity in the making, in the sense of Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot. This means that it embodies a set of collective rules and a specific principle of justice governing behaviours in the polity. I describe the normative characteristics of this emerging polity and compare it to the market form of the attention economy. This enables me to shed light on three contemporary problems in economic sociology and public policy making.

Skandale gehören zum journalistischen Alltagsgeschäft. Fast keine Woche vergeht ohne eine neue Enthüllung oder die Anprangerung skandalösen Verhaltens von Prominenten. Doch manchmal erscheinen Skandale beabsichtigt, beispielsweise wenn Politiker umstrittene Äußerungen tätigen.
Es handelt sich dann um eine Sonderform des Skandals, der von den Skandalisierten angestoßen wird, um bestimmte Ziele zu erreichen. Diese als intendierte Selbstskandalisierung bezeichnete Erscheinung des Skandals wird in diesem Buch theoretisch dargestellt und anhand zweier Wahlkämpfe in Deutschland und der Schweiz veranschaulicht.
Die Theorie der intendierten Selbstskandalisierung stellt erstmals eine ausführliche Grundlage für die Analyse absichtlich provozierter Skandale in der Politik dar. Sie ist außerdem für die kommunikationswissenschaftliche Erforschung weiterer Skandalfelder wie der Literatur oder der Populärkultur anwendbar.

How has the development of surveillance technology and its normalized intervention into our social structures and daily lives impact our imagination of the future? Does the "total view" of the intense yet impassive gaze of surveillance cameras, combined with the mediated intimacy of social media videos, foreshadow deeper social alienation or the fulfillment of individual desire? In order to address such questions, I take the Chinese artist Xu Bing and his team's film Dragonfly Eyes (Qingting zhi yan, 2017) and its surrounding media culture as a case study to demonstrate how surveillance footage and various modes of cinematic ontology, digital realism, and temporality work in a contemporary socio-political-medial context. Composed by Xu and a group of collaborators, Dragonfly Eyes is the only existing feature-length fiction film constructed completely from surveillance footage. As a highly reflexive film, Dragonfly epitomizes and embodies the precarious potentials of the digital future of capitalism, both invigorating and bleak, expressive and corrupt.

Drill rap is a Chicago-based, originally underground, subgenre of gangsta rap. The gritty and aggressive subgenre deals with violence and bravado, and urban street life. The "activist resurgence" references the current movement of grassroots activism primarily led by young black, brown, and/or politically left individuals organizing primarily around race, policing, poverty, economic equality, criminal justice, and LGBTQ rights. This study seeks to understand the creation, meaning, perspectives, and potential connections between drill rap music and the activist resurgence in Chicago over the past five years. It focuses on contemporary Chicago as an intentional place for the resurgence of these two formations of cultural and political resistance during relatively the same time period. The qualitative research—semi-structured in-depth interviews with drill rappers, underground music professionals, and activists—examines how authenticity, community, and other values the subjects deem important are impacted and promoted via technology and social media. Though differences exist between the groups, the participants present a strong sense of identity in authentic, grassroots narratives, which they propel to the mainstream via uncompromised self-production of commodified stigma, inequality, and cultural pride. Hage’s (1998) inclusion/exclusion dialectic serves as a relational framework for the formations’ function as resistance with respect to time, place, and meaning. This situates drill rap and the activist resurgence in a social, cultural, and economic matrix that pushes the creators to barter authentic social capital (Bourdieu 1986) often by way of social media and mobile technology in the advanced attention economy (Tufekci 2013).

This book discusses the current state of affairs of Cognitive Capitalism. It is the first book in a series of three. Edited by Warren Neidich and Arne De boever.  Contributions  include Jonathan Beller, Franco Berardi, Jodi Dean, Patricia Pisters, Jason Smith, Tiziana Terranova and Bruce Wexler. The Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalsim Part 2 is now available through Archive Books. http://www.archivebooks.org/ Edited by Warren Neidich Texts by Ina Blom, Arne De Boever, Pascal Gielen, Sanford Kwinter, Maurizio Lazzarato, Karl Lydén, Yann Moulier Boutang, Warren Neidich,
Matteo Pasquinelli, Alexei Penzin, Patricia Reed, John Roberts, Liss C. Werner, Charles T. Wolfe

O conceito dos ecossistemas biológicos funciona como metáfora para muitos sistemas complexos, e é utilizado e ampliado no presente estudo para representar as relações nos sistemas social, cultural e artístico, entre agentes envolvidos na criação, investigação, exposição, fruição, experimentação, educação e integração socioeconómica da média-arte digital, dando atenção a aspetos criativos, organizacionais e participativos. Para este trabalho, foi efetuado um percurso de investigação e reflexão, através de experiência direta do autor, mas sempre suportado pela experiência de terceiros, nos seus relatos e reflexões, nos ecossistemas materializados nos festivais de média-arte digital, realizados sobretudo em Portugal, e também através da análise sobre o pensamento contemporâneo, que disseca os mecanismos de controlo, agregação, separação e potenciação relevantes para os ecossistemas de média-arte digital. Esse percurso visa produzir um relato atual, analítico, certamente subjetivo – dado ser baseado em experiências pessoais e análise interpretativa – mas cuja intenção é desvelar mecanismos invisíveis, mas importantes, atuais e atuantes, que afetam as relações entre os vários agentes do ecossistema, a sua relação com os atuais paradigmas socioeconómicos, característicos das gerações ativas, permanentemente conectadas às redes digitais ubíquas: a economia da experiência e a economia da atenção. Num momento em que o centro do ecossistema foi tomado pela economia criativa e os seus agentes – a indústria, as empresas, os espaços de cultura e lazer e até a Academia – e assistindo-se à comoditização da criação e produção artísticas, aqueles paradigmas estão também ligados ao crescimento e popularização dos fenómenos do hacktivismo e o artivismo, que repõem os artistas e as suas obras no centro do ecossistema, reforçando as suas ligações a todo o meio envolvente, quer pelas intervenções a que se propõem, quer pelos questionamentos que levantam. Se porventura alguns desses mecanismos são já bem conhecidos isoladamente, a sua interdependência e interrelacionamento não tinham sido apresentados até ao momento, e produzir novo significado a partir de blocos de conhecimento prévio é um dos objetivos maiores de qualquer investigação.

The concept of biological ecosystems is used as a metaphor for many complex systems. In this work it is used and extended to represent relationships in social, cultural and artistic systems, between agents involved in the creation, research, exhibition, enjoyment, experimentation, education and socio-economic integration of digital media art, focusing on creative, organisational and participatory aspects. This work was developed over a journey of research and reflection, through the author’s direct experience, but always supported and inspired by the experience of others, through their writings and visions, and materialised in digital art ecosystems, mainly festivals, carried out in Portugal. It was also developed through the analysis of contemporary thought, dissecting control, aggregation, separation and strengthening mechanisms that are relevant to digital media art ecosystems. This journey’s goal is to elaborate a current, analytical, and certainly subjective account – for it is based on personal experiences and interpretative analysis – with the intent of unveiling invisible yet important, current and active mechanisms, that affect the relationships between the ecosystem agents and their relationship with contemporary socio-economic paradigms, characteristic of the permanently connected generations to ubiquitous digital networks: the experience economy and the attention economy. At a time when the centre of the ecosystem is taken by the creative economy and its agents – industry, business, cultural and leisure spaces and even by Academia while witnessing the commodification of art creation, those paradigms are also linked to the growth and popularization of hacktivism and artivism, which put back the artists and their works in the centre of the ecosystem, by strengthening their connections to the environment, either by their direct interventions, or by the questions they raise. If some of these mechanisms are already well-known in isolation, their interdependences and interrelationships had not been studied so far, and to produce new meaning from prior knowledge is one of the ultimate objectives of any research.

What do we do with media technologies, and what do they in turn do to us? These questions underlie much of the philosophy of media and technology, and they provide the context in which this project wishes to situate itself. I aim to investigate the construction of human-media relationships in the biopolitical arrangements of postindustrial  capitalism, in which the management of the somatic individual and the regulations of its various intimacies play a prominent role. I argue that contemporary media addictions, such as Internet and gaming addiction, exist as paradigmatic formulations of the way in which biopolitical
subjects engage with media; more than that, media addictions are pivotal in sustaining the production and maintenance of a media-infused ‗politics of life itself‘ (In Nikolas Rose‘s formulation). In order to support this argument, I will investigate some possibilities to reformulate the ontological basis of media-human relationships so as to re-read media
addiction as a self-affirming and fruitful intimacy with the in/nonhuman, i.e. media technologies, based on desire, pleasure and drive towards alternative relationalities. This project can be distilled into three main theoretical strands: the exploration of the biopoliticization of the phenomenon of media addiction one the one hand, a potential
refiguration of media use as a form of intimacy with the in- and non-human on the other, and finally an investigation into the place of gender and materiality within media philosophy. The crux of the project is the proposition that the ontology of media, in the context of Western
metaphysics, is in a perpetual oscillation between the poles of humanity and nonhumanity. Because of this unstable process, media technology is positioned as a threatening figuration that destabilizes the privilege accorded to the category of the human, while at the same time
redrawing its boundaries. Contemporary Western biopolitics, the ‗politics of life itself‘, relies precisely on the uncertain status of media in order to codify the character of the media addict as a paradigmatic figure of the contemporary climate, as a techno-somatic individual. The
goal of the work is to understand the role of media within contemporary Western biopolitics, and to survey the dynamics between the various ontological states attributed to media in political and academic discourse, and the human users who engage with them.

Cos’è l’economia dell’attenzione? Come ci condiziona? Per James Williams, prima strategist di Google poi filosofo formatosi a Oxford, la più recente minaccia alla libertà degli uomini viene dai sistemi di persuasione intelligente che sempre di più indirizzano i nostri pensieri e le nostre azioni. Mentre le tecnologie digitali rendevano abbondanti le informazioni, la nostra attenzione è diventata la risorsa che scarseggia e che le tecnologie competono per catturare, senza preoccuparsi di seguire gli obbiettivi che ci prefissiamo e aiutarci a raggiungerli. Abbiamo derubricato i danni che ne derivano come ‘distrazioni’ o piccoli fastidi: ma sono proprio questi, invece, a minare l’integrità della volontà umana a livello individuale e collettivo. Liberare l’attenzione dalle forze della persuasione intelligente può dunque essere il più importante compito morale e politico di questa epoca. Tenendo in equilibrio le nozioni dell’antica Grecia e quelle della Silicon Valley, l’analisi ragionata e appassionata di Williams fa luce su un aspetto cruciale dell’epoca in cui viviamo.

En el marco de los debates sobre “el futuro del trabajo” y/o “el trabajo del futuro”, nos proponemos abordar la cultura del trabajo en el marco de la sociedad informacional, entendida como el orden social emergente que deriva de las nuevas pautas de organización tecnosocial, con expresiones propias en cada cultura y en cada disciplina. Particularmente abordaremos las mutaciones de la percepción del tiempo y el espacio en los nuevos modelos productivos, y el modo en que este emergente epocal se discontinúa de la modernidad tardía para impactar en la cultura del trabajo y en las organizaciones inerciales del movimiento obrero organizado. Para esto adoptaremos la perspectiva interseccional, ya que —según entendemos— es un recurso teórico-metodológico que presenta algunas ventajas comparativas para abordar, desarrollar, debatir y visibilizar esta problemática.

Communication is a means to reach out to another. Language, a form of communication, was developed by humans to better connect with others and share abstract concepts and information. Electronic communication has evolved through today's use of the Smartphone. Smartphone use has exploded since it was introduced in the form of the iPhone in 2007. Within one device rest any number of devices which used to be separate in form and function. However, this modern form of communication has its down side. Some people use their smartphone in manners which suggest addictive behavior. Phone snubbing, or phubbing, has entered our lexicon because of phubbing's ubiquitous presence in modern communication. In addition to smartphone misuse comes corporate desire to keep you on the phone as long as they can. This paper examines the evolution of communication through language and electronic use and the rise of the Attention Economy which is designed to keep you on your smartphone.

An emerging body of literature has revealed that social media enhance digital business governance to facilitate Internet companies in generating profit throughout regulating the everyday lives of users. However, although existing debates are often contextualized in the West, little attention has been paid to China, where social media are widely used. To fill this knowledge gap, this article investigates the digital business governance practiced by Chinese Internet companies such as Tencent. Specifically, I employ an affective lens to analyze how WeChat, the most popular social media application launched by Tencent, allows this Internet company to influence users for its own business purposes. Chinese college students, which constitute a representative group of young people, were early adopters of WeChat, and they have led the trend of social media use in China. Based on a yearlong netnographic study of Chinese college students, the results reveal that the affective design of WeChat captured their attention and influenced their everyday practices. These results provide insight into how digital business governance operates in the Chinese context, in which authoritarianism and capitalism work closely together.

Loathing abounds in the novels of French author Michel Houellebecq, the greatest amount of which appears to be directed at women. All females in the Houellebecquien universe risk being insulted and labelled as 'sluts', 'tarts', and 'bimbos'. Misogyny in Houellebecq's writing has already been addressed by various scholars, associating it with the denunciation of feminism and modern masculinity, and linked to the cult of the body that is, in turn, linked to a critique of free-market capitalism. This paper suggests that the misogynistic comments in Houellebecq's novels also point to an alternative economic system at play in the Houellebecquien universe. In a world where money and material goods are abundant but time is finite and precious, the intangible commodity of attention becomes increasingly important. Drawing on the concept of attention economy, this paper explores the possibility that Houellebecq's lonely, attention-deprived male characters loath the women they see because their unreciprocated gaze confirms their fears that they have no market values themselves.

In contemporary urban environments, there are numerous types of digital screens that facilitate the datafication of human affect by actively eliciting or passively collecting feedback from the public. The public often interfaces with such screens without being aware of the data they may be supplying. Therefore, the aim of this research project is to contribute to an improved legibility of data collection moments by analysing how networked urban screens shape the affective labour processes that enmesh the mobile and reactive body into the digital economy. Examples of affective strategies are asking consumers to personally review a service through a selection of emoji, requiring consumers to smile to confirm their payment, or monitoring which ‘demographic types’ of consumers smile at a specific advertisement. The corresponding processes that enmesh the body into the digital economy prove to be different in every case, but what lies at the core of every screen-facilitated affective labour setting is the modification of communication into a capital relation. As the exchange of affect becomes the most critical strategic asset in sustaining reputations and privileges, even love and friendship are being subordinated to the digitized capitalist circuit.

This short paper proposes a partial re-definition of 'digital constitutionalism' inspired by the broader theoretical framework of societal constitutionalism. It points out that 'digital constitutionalism' discourses are traversed by an inner tension between its analytical background and its normative (liberal) matrix. Therefore, and mobilising digital constitutionalism's critical potential, it proposes a re-definition of digital constitutionalism as an ideology in the thicker sense, that is, as a set of socially constructed relationships * This short paper was first published as a blogpost on 'The Digital Constitutionalist', 24 January 2022, <http://digicon.org/redefining-digital-constitutionalism-as-critique-and-ideology-the-perspective-of-societal-constitutionalism/>.

En el capitalismo tardío los cuerpos se mueven a un ritmo frenético, sin descanso, del mismo modo que un GIF se reproduce en bucle infinito hasta que cambiamos de pantalla. Bajo una apariencia autónoma, los cuerpos se relacionan con la producción a través de la comunicación y las relaciones sociales, donde se han enfatizado virtudes como el entusiasmo y todos los aspectos relacionados con la energía y la hiper-productividad. En este contexto, el tiempo se ha transformado en valor monetario y “el individuo ha sido redefinido como un agente económico a tiempo completo”.

Since the birth of MP3.com in the late 1990s, aspiring and independent musicians have been able to circumvent the mainstream structures of the record industry and employ ‘direct to market’ online platforms to go ‘direct to the fan’. Due to these ‘new’ opportunities, a prevailing idea has emerged that, ‘The only relationship that matters now is between the artist and the fan.’ (Toomey cited in Kot, 2009, 217) This notion has taken hold to the point where: 1.There is an expectation that all independent musicians have to have an online presence 2. Despite, at best, only sub-professional knowledge, skills and resources, consumers demand independent musicians deliver a consistent and coherent professionally comparable online experience that facilitates active fan engagement. This level of expectation serves the business models of the corporate social media giants and related businesses in their continuous drive for content. But does it serve the artistic and economic needs of independent musicians? What too often gets lost in the ‘direct to fan’ theory, is the fundamental principle that all artist/fan interaction is predicated upon a fans deep connection – as expressed through repeated listening - with the artist’s music. This paper proposes the non-musical distractions of maintaining a ‘professional’ online presence diminishes the ability of sub professional musicians’ to deliver the only activity that ultimately matters in an artist/fan relationship: producing a catalogue of work that over time captures and maintains the attention of listeners.

The increasing prevalence of the internet in the lives of young children implies a change in the way information is accessed, selected, valued and consumed. Information transferred online differs from information disseminated through traditional media in content and composition as well as the associated user experience. Current circumstances of Internet use amongst children can lead to information obesity, defined by Andrew Whitworth as “a failure to convert information into knowledge and thus use it to sustain our minds, bodies, lives and communities”. (Whitworth qtd. in Brown, 168)
The phenomenon of information obesity can be analyzed through a comparison with physical obesity amongst children. Much like physical obesity, information obesity presents a complex set of causes and solutions, rather than embracing the computational linearity of overload. This humanized way of thinking about the topic of information consumption allows for a different approach in finding sustainable solutions to the problem at hand, of which information overload is only one factor.
This paper reviews ideas from key works by Shenk, Whitworth and Johnson, on information overload and information obesity in order to differentiate the two concepts and highlight issues connected to information consumption, such as disconnect, information malnutrition and information literacy.
Johnson suggests in his book “Information Diet,” consuming right rather than consuming less is a more feasible solution than disconnecting from the Internet. Dieting in this case, would imply a critical filtering of information. By empowering children through awareness and critical skills, information literacy could contribute to the prevention of information obesity in the same way as with physical obesity. More importantly however information literacy online becomes a vital democratic tool in a consumer democracy, where not information but attention is a scarce commodity. (Terranova, 4; Fuller, Goffey, 154) Searching for, selecting and evaluating information online thus becomes an important element of sustaining high quality content online.

This article seeks to theorise boredom in the wake of the new technological modes of capture and commodification that have emerged in a digital network culture, by focusing on the popular 'What to do When You're Bored' sub-genre of YouTube video tutorials that are addressed largely to female teenage audiences. Situating itself in relation to the fields of boredom studies, critical attention studies and feminist media studies, the article reads these videos as performing a variety of affective labour that is increasingly required of gendered subjects in the so-called 'attention economy' of twenty-first century media. As I will argue, platforms such as YouTube construct users above all as boredom managers-agents who are responsible for, and capable of coordinating, the affective texture of their own experience as it unfolds in real time. And yet, as I will suggest, this discursive construction of boredom overlooks the significant role that such media play, not only in producing and intensifying new cultural forms of tedium, but also in capturing and modulating the subject's affective experience before she becomes aware of it. Reflecting on the blatant gendering of affect in these YouTube tutorials through the figure of the teenage girl, I go on to ask why this work of boredom management should fall so resoundingly to young women to perform. Why has the figure of the teenage girl been rendered so excessively visible in these YouTube tutorials as an ideal conduit for the monitoring and self-management of twenty-first century boredom?

This paper considers 2 basic paradigms of attention: one in which attention constitutes a focusing or a narrowing of perception which reveals the nature of objects in greater profundity by shining a light upon them, and a second Bergsonian (and Kaprowian, after Allan Kaprow) paradigm where attention is conceived as a practice of immanent thought. The crisis of attention in the former paradigm is the distraction of that gaze when it hops from one discrete thing to another, or the diffusion of that light over too many different things at once – what the informational paradigm might call skimming and multi-tasking respectively. Here, to enhance attention or to save it from its current degraded form - means to shine more light on a thing, to make a conscious decision to think harder about it, to look at it more closely. 

By contrast, in the Kaprow/Bergson paradigm, attention is a thing in itself (rather than a mere effect of the sum of human discourses) but understood as a process rather than a static object. In turn, the solution here to the crisis of attentiveness is not a question of bringing more power of attention or perception (more consciousness, more representation) to the thing, but ironically less of these representationalist elements: less selection and more a kind of immersion in the object understood as a process, less conscious effort and more an immanent mode of thought forced upon us by the thing itself. Bergson defines the philosophical practice of ‘intuition’ as a reversal of the direction of thought: philosophy moving in the opposite direction from its usual trajectory. Concepts don’t come from us  and project themselves on to the object here, but move in the other direction from the object to us – the attended is attending us, the object is thinking us. This is the nature of an expanded perception or an attention without the blinders that restrict it in consciousness. Attention is not about a decision to think harder, look harder about x; rather attention occurs when an unexpected y forces us to think anew.

In this article, we critically reflect on the role of Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson as a public intellectual in an increasingly hybrid, interconnected, and plural public sphere. In today’s attention economy, and in the face of a general climate of scepticism and crisis of expertise, we are faced with the limits of the liberal ideal of the public intellectual who filters information for the public. In fact, we argue, the public intellectual can in some cases come to function as a creator of filter bubbles instead of furthering democracy. We analyse Peterson’s writings and public performances in order to illustrate this, focusing on the particularities of his rhetoric and dramaturgical strategies. First, we discuss his misreadings and misrepresentation of ‘postmodernist’ thought. Then, we examine the non-verbal aspects of his performance, in order to unpack his appeal by examining his affective strategies. Last, we apply theory from the cognitive sciences, most notably relevance theory and the guru effect, to examine Peterson’s rhetoric and the strategies he uses to inspire trust in his audience.

Streaming services have endured scrutiny and criticism from musicians and industry commentators as to the fairness, viability and sustainability of their economic and royalty distribution models. Streaming circumvents conventional unit capitalism, employing royalty distribution models that value each act or track by comparing their total plays against all the other acts or tracks on the platform. Whilst affording record companies an unprecedented opportunity to perpetually monetise their entire catalogues, at the same time, music streaming services offer acts far less in immediate royalty returns than the unit model. As streaming services continue to struggle to post profits, it is difficult to ascertain if the innovation of streaming's royalty distribution models are productive ones. Despite the very public concerns of acts and their labels, music users are increasingly adopting streaming as a way of listening to music. This paper considers the choice music users face between freemium and premium subscription models and provides an overview of the implications of those choices for record labels, acts, advertisers and the streaming platforms.

The purpose of this integrative review of theory and research is to assess the economic impact of digital media in ways that are unreached by instrumental means of measuring economic activity. Specifically, we use three overarching arguments identified from a review of the literature that broadly defines the economic force of digital media content in contemporary society. We contextualize those arguments in terms of current issues in the field and gaps in the research base before concluding with a discussion of the implications of what we learned for education, civic engagement, social practice, and policy.

Privacy debates conventionally tend to focus on information.  In this paper, I argue for a novel formulation of right to attentional privacy, which protects individual autonomy from the continuing onslaught of intrusive, immersive, persuasive and addictive technologies.  I contend that the harvesting of an individual’s attention through hypernudges and supernormal stimuli deployed in form of behavioral targeting undermines an individual’s autonomy.  I construct a Razian justification for interest in attention that needs to be protected against sophisticated technological practices such as A/B Testing and Real Time Bidding carried out by Big Tech.  I invoke dual conception of right to attentional privacy as a negative liberty to safeguard against intrusive technologies and as a positive liberty to keep at bay immersive, persuasive and addictive technologies.

"Bei meinen Lesungen und Vorträgen widmeten die örtlichen Medien den 20 Demonstranten, die vor der Tür Schilder wie ›Sarrazin, halt’s Maul‹ hochhielten, regelmäßig weitaus mehr Berichtszeilen als dem Inhalt des Vortrags und der Diskussion im Saal mit 400 oder 700 Zuhörern. Allenfalls war zu lesen, dass der ›umstrittene Autor‹ im Ton ›erstaunlich sachlich‹ gewesen sei."
Die zitierte Selbsteinschätzung Thilo Sarrazins veranschaulicht, welche Wirkung Autorenlesungen erreichen können. Veranstaltungen mit dem ehemaligen Finanzsenator, besonders zu seinem Erstlingswerk Deutschland schafft sich ab, spalteten die Republik in zwei Lager und riefen vor Ort zum Teil große Proteste hervor. Sarrazins Auftritte wurden vor dem Hintergrund der erregten öffentlichen Diskussion nicht mehr nur als Autorenlesungen verstanden, sondern erhielten Eventcharakter und wurden damit zum gefragten Thema in der medialen Berichterstattung.
Im vorliegenden Beitrag sollen Autorenlesungen und Buchvorstellungen kommunikationswissenschaftlich untersucht werden. Es stellt sich daher die Frage, wie sich die beiden Veranstaltungsformen mit kommunikationswissenschaftlichen Ansätzen erklären lassen. Es wird beschrieben, dass Buchvorstellungen und Lesungen vor allem Instrumente des Literaturmarketings sind, die zur Aufmerksamkeitserringung eingesetzt werden. Zunächst führt der Beitrag deshalb in die Überlegungen der "Ökonomie der Aufmerksamkeit" ein. Anschließend werden dem Leser die wesentlichen Selektionshürden massenmedialer Berichterstattung, die die Arbeit von Verlagen beeinflussen, präsentiert. Lesungen und Buchvorstellungen werden danach in die kommunikationswissenschaftliche Ereignisklassifizierung eingeordnet und hinsichtlich ihrer Rolle für das Literaturmarketing analysiert. Abschließend wird ein Modell des Literaturvermarktungsprozesses präsentiert, das die unterschiedlichen Kommunikationswege bei der Buchvermarktung darstellt und die beiden vorgestellten Veranstaltungsformen integriert.

The concept of the public intellectual has always been a somewhat contested term. This article serves as both an introduction to the debates around what it constitutes and an entry point into how the new media environment is producing a different configuration of the public intellectual. Through key thinkers who have addressed the idea of the public intellectual internationally and those who have focused on the Australian context, this essay positions the arguments made by the authors in this special issue. Via a short case-study of TED, the conference and online idea-spreading phenomenon, it argues that the contemporary moment is producing and privileging a different constellation of experts as celebrities that match the exigencies of online attention economy. A shifted conception of the public intellectual is beginning to take shape that is differently constituted, used and situated, and this article helps to define the parameters for further discussion of these transformations.
To cite:  Marshall, P David and Atherton, Cassandra (2015), 'Situating public intellectuals', Media International Australia, Incorporating Culture & Policy, 156 (August), 69-78.

In this article, we critically reflect on the role of Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson as a public intellectual in an increasingly hybrid, interconnected, and plural public sphere. In today’s attention economy, and in the face of a general climate of scepticism and crisis of expertise, we are faced with the limits of the liberal ideal of the public intellectual who filters information for the public. In fact, we argue, the public intellectual can in some cases come to function as a creator of filter bubbles instead of furthering democracy. We analyse Peterson’s writings and public performances in order to illustrate this, focusing on the particularities of his rhetoric and dramaturgical strategies. First, we discuss his misreadings and misrepresentation of ‘postmodernist’ thought. Then, we examine the non-verbal aspects of his performance, in order to unpack his appeal by examining his affective strategies. Last, we apply theory from the cognitive sciences, most notably relevan...

Mobile and other digital technologies facilitate ubiquitous learning that offers unprecedented benefits. With mobile learners being able to “squeeze in” learning in-between other daily activities, they face contesting demands on their attention and their brain. Their learning experience might be hindered by multitasking, distraction, mind wandering, and even problematic dependence on digital devices. These influences are addressed in the chapter, and recommendations are presented on how to promote higher levels of attention and engagement in m-learning events. Based on the latest empirical evidence, mindfulness strategies can aid in attention regulation and cultivation of “healthier” learning habits, thus alleviating these problems amongst mobile learners. Recent discoveries in neuroscience and the renewed understanding of brain plasticity are bridging the science and practice of mindfulness. Combined with 35 years of scientific research in mindfulness, more recent exploration of the applications of mindfulness in education has demonstrated that learners can train their mind to respond to stimuli in a purposeful controlled manner leading to more successful learning. Incremental mindfulness practice tunes up our nervous system and strengthens the neuro-components that help us connect with our intentional attention capabilities. It is hence the purpose of this exploration and the resulting chapter to identify such learner-centered strategies to promote the development of mindfulness practice leading to enhanced intentional attention in mobile learning. Mobile technologies can be used to provide scaffolds for learners to engage and persist in mindful learning and practice of mindfulness. The author presents a variety of proven mindfulness practices and techniques that can be adapted in the m-learning design. She concludes with a call for more interdisciplinary studies and rigorous explorations of the intersection of mobile learning, education, instructional design, contemplative practices, cognitive science, and neuroscience to attain a better understanding of how to harness attention in mobile and ubiquitous learning.

This short article historicizes Trump, examines his brand logic and the links between his electoral victory and the monetization of attention online. It argues that his win reveals contemporary politics as "nothing but the reign of feints and shenanigans" and, as such, is irredeemably broken.

Nas redações jornalísticas voltadas às plataformas digitais, o newsgames é uma uma ferramenta cada vez mais pertinente para informar e atrair a atenção dos usuários aos sites de notícias. Esta mídia utiliza, além de textos e informações audiovisuais, as mecânicas de jogo em congruência com a mensagem a ser transmitida a fim de informar os usuários. Para destacar a relevância do gameplay e da simulação – em confluência com a narrativa – como transmissão de informações e conteúdos jornalísticos aos jogadores, este artigo utiliza referenciais teóricas das áreas da comunicação e dos estudos de jogos digitais.

In digital platform newsrooms, the newsgames is a increasingly relevant journalistic tool to inform and draw users attention to news sites. This media uses, in addition to text and audiovisual information, the game mechanics in congruence with the message to be transmitted in order to inform users. To highlight the importance of gameplay and simulation – in confluence with narrative – as form of information and news content transmission to players, this article uses theoretical references from the fields of communication and study of digital games.

En las salas de redacción direccionadas a las plataformas digitales, el newsgames es un instrumento periodístico cada vez más relevante para informar y atraer la atención de los usuarios a sitios de noticias. Este medio utiliza, así como texto e información audiovisual, la mecánica del juego coincidente con el mensaje a transmitir con el fin de informar a los usuarios. Para resaltar la importancia del juego y la simulación – en confluencia con la narrativa – como una transmisión de información y contenido de noticias a los jugadores, este artículo utiliza marcos teóricos en las áreas de comunicación y estudio de los juegos digitales.

The emergence of digital file based formats for music distribution in the late 1990s has matured into a recorded music market in 2013 of abundant online choice and ubiquitous ‘cheap’ access.  The explosion of music available, coupled with a diverse range of digital options that disaggregate the album format, has enabled audiences to exercise efficient autonomous control of their personal listening experience.  For recording artists and industry, the reality is as Herbert Simon proposed, “A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”  (1971 p.40) Arguably, music users’ attention is now the scarcest commodity in the production and consumption of record music.  Meaning the economic value of recorded music is increasingly dependent on the amount of listening attention ‘paid’ to it.  If correct, by quantifying and qualifying audiences’ online expression about ‘their’ music, that seeks reciprocal attention to what has captured their attention, there are possibilities for exploring the value of attention through audience expression.  This paper proposes to review existing approaches for identifying and analysing attention as a currency, towards establishing if there is any feasibility of developing a working methodology of an attention economy in recorded music.

This study develops and tests a theoretical framework, which draws on herd behavior literature and explains how and under what conditions tabloids' attention to misinformation drives broadsheets' attention to misinformation. More specifically, the study analyzes all cases of political and business misinformation in Switzerland and the U.K. between 2002 and 2018, which are selected based on corresponding Swiss and U.K. press councils' rulings (N = 114). The findings show that during amplifying events (i.e., election campaigns and economic downturns) tabloids allocate more attention to political and business misinformation, which, in turn, drives broadsheets to allocate more attention to the misinformation as well-and especially if the misinformation serves broadsheets' ideological goals. Moreover, the findings show differences between Swiss and U.K. media markets only in the case of business misinformation and suggest that the attention allocation process depends in particular on the strength of the amplifying event in a media market. Thereby, this study contributes to the understanding of how and under what conditions misinformation spreads in media markets.

This article discusses the (in)famous Kony 2012 (Kony) viral video, which had a record-
100 million views in six days. It discusses its unique status as a viral advocacy video by NGO Invisible Children (IC) to make Joseph Kony ‘‘famous.’’ I analyze Kony 2012 as an event from political economic structures, strategic/advocacy and narrative, viral networks, affective online social relations, prosumer cognition, and managed participation. Theorizing Kony’s eventfulness entails insights for twenty-first-century communication and critical cultural
studies: especially regarding virality, imitation, sharing, attention, activism, influence affect, citizenship, power, control, participation, and social media.

What if capitalism was on the agenda at a world summit on sustainable development? Do we need to pay more attention t the ways in which our immersion in the culture of capitalism compromises our responses to the environmental crises? These are two of the questions taken up in this paper.