Session 2: Theories of Attention Economy (1)

Session 2 collects together some theorisations of the attention economy, engaging with a number of social theoretical approaches.

Taina Bucher Technicity of Attention: On Immediacy and the Update Sphere

Taina’s presentation started with her agreement of elements of Taziana’s talk, such as current thinking on the plasticity of the human brain, the effect of digital media on development of ability to focus, and recent press coverage on attention – how we are controlled by rather than controlling digital media.

With regard to theories of the effect of  digital media on brain development, deep attention may be missing but is this the same as saying that attention has become a scarce resource? – we need to specify what sort of attention and what platform we are talking about: attention is not necessarily the same as time spent, the modality of concentration needs to be included – concentration alone is not enough as a way of understanding attention.

We need a better understanding of the effects that likes, shares, tags, retweets etc have on attention, and to look at specific ways that different media platforms support and encourage different modes of attention.

Attention is multiple – it manifests in diferent forms, entails different paces and medialities.

Attention is media specific – e.g. difference between watching cinema and using facebook.

In the 1970s and 80s media was produced with specific assumptions about people’s ability to pay attention so for example MTV designed content to appeal to young people who were said to have short attention span.

Twitter pages are an example of media technology that organises its messages in reverse chronological order, feeds on freshness, desire is for new information. The 140 character limit is considered a blessing rather than a limitation – twitter users have to think how to formulate info and express it in a concise way, this acts as an information filter – to whom or to what do you want to pay attention?

Facebook is another important platform of the update sphere, constructed around personal profile and newsfeed, with activity defined by sharing objects – videos, pictures, newsclips…

The ‘like’ is the major activity – comments and likes – people use and hope people will pay attention. The like feature constitutes one of the lowest entry barriers to paying attention. The like button can be added to websites – interesting way of accumulating info. Used for companies marketing – potential to become a currency of the web. The quantified marketing button not a new one, but the like button is something we trust – because it is our friends opinion

Attention here is defined by amount of activity such as likes and shares, not time spent on facebook. The social networking subject is never finished, is always in the making.

Attention on the web is linked to freshness and relevance, is often platform specific, flows in and out of shared objects/videos etc but also hinged on friendships.

There was a question about whether people focus on obtaining metrics and forget about everything else – eg if they focus on getting most friends they are ignoring the true dynamics of facebook. Taina’s response was How do you define the ‘true dynamics’ of facebook?

Francesca Odella Adolescents’ social communication practices and infringement of norms on the Web: a private or public issue?

Outcomes of research with 15/16 year old classmates in Italian school, looking at their attitudes to and awareness of privacy issues, and how they construct their own groups of intimate connections/friends.

Odella suggests that the operational definition of privacy has been attempted in social and psychological research in the form of multi-dimensional indicators and variables referring to the individual perception of sensitivity and confidentiality of information.  However, privacy is also a property of social contexts and organizations; as such it can change with the introduction of technology inside daily life.

Privacy awareness:

• changes in social interaction
• can suffer social corruption
• is subject to the infringing of norms on the web
• is regulated by ‘institutions’ of privacy awareness

Odella suggests that privacy has a relational nature, it must be understood in terms of interpersonal dimensions and institutional or organisational dimensions.  The former is a property of the individual network of relations that can be disclosed intentionally by the subject.  The latter is actualised in the rules and sanctions for privacy violation, availability and feasibility of technical measures for individual and group privacy protection, cultural preferences and norms.

The price of free is a particularly relevant question when considering adolescents’ understandings of privacy – lack of awareness of what is happening with their data.

Odella examined the adolescents’ rules of conduct in communities, how they developed their own social attitudes and sets of norms within their peer groups that they created. There is a distinct lack of adult awareness and/or supervision of these online spaces, whether from parents or educators.

Odella argues that privacy concerns seem to be related to different levels of threat awareness which can also vary if perceived against oneself (violation of my privacy, punishment for infringements), or against someone else (privacy infringements and damage) and also to different level of possible damage that the single individual can foresee (for example commercial frauds or identity theft).  However, according to Odella’s research, moral judgments about different ways of behaving while online or calling from a mobile is substantially different from legally oriented prescriptions and in most of the cases also from the perspective of normative ‘good practice’.

Elizabeth Van Couvering The Trade in Traffic: Search Engines and Social Media

Search engines are profitable media businesses, central media actors.

Van Couvering seems to argue that only the economies of search are important – which tends towards monopoly, turned from publishers to aggregators, advertising. The generic means of constructing a value chain in ‘older’ media is the vertical integration of production, packaging and distribution. In the immediate anticedents of search engine this was expressed in the format of the ‘portal’ website. The audience-based value chain thus ties together: the hardware, software, telco, ISP, browser, search engine, and destination website. Van Couvering poses the question – where can there be vertical integration? This comes, she argues, in the move away from ‘banner’ advertising, inspired by traditional media formats, to contextual ‘featured ads’ in search engine results. In this model traffic becomes a commodity. Accordingly, Van Couvering argues that, in the wake of the consolidation of social media sites and services, there is a new kind of media logic developing online, due to the abundance of information and a scarcity of attention, which consists as follows: produce the platform not the content, allow access to pools of content, create the method, allow content pool to access the platform. The principal outcome of this logic is that the metadata about the producers and the users is the most saleable asset.