If the attention economy is a system for valuing and trading in attention as a form of commodity then issues around distribution and its geographically variable nature are important considerations. Throughout the conference there were presentations which addressed both the global and local operation of economic practices for/of attention.
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The attention economy provokes significant questions about the ways in which consumers/users can understand information about them, how it used, commodified and valued, where it is kept, who has access to it, and why the others within those relations can/cannot or should/should not be trusted.
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Tiziana Terranova expertly laid out in her keynote paper the means by which the attention economy, and its Homo Economicus – the ‘subject of interest’ that is always assessing and calculating the worth and value of information -finds a corollary in recent neuro-scientific research. new forms of technics are emerging as biological affordnaces, which ties together neuro-science and economics (complimenting William Connolly’s work on ‘neuropolitics‘). Terranova argued that attention does not simply indicate the effort by which the individual brain works – as neuroscience seems to suggest – neither can it be reduced to a tradeable commodity. Instead, and following Stiegler, attention is the process by which the production of value is inseparable from the production of subjectivity. These are produced from the invention and diffusion of common desires, beliefs and affects. Taina Bucher reinforced these points using specific examples from social media technologies. Bucher argued that attention is multiple, that is it manifests in different forms and entails different paces and medialities.
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Following late 20th century work by Georg Franck and Michael Goldhaber, we can understand attention as a key tenet to the discourse that encompasses ‘the new economy’ or ‘digital economy’ of new media. If an economy is the way in which a society distributes a scarce resource, that resource is now attention, following Goldhaber, because: ‘the sum total of human attention is necessarily limited and therefore scarce’ (Goldhaber “The Value of Openness in an Attention Economy“). The economic problem encapsulated in this ‘new’ economics was that – if information is so abundant that that it becomes basically worthless as a tradeable commodity, where is value to be created? The provisional answer has come in the form of participatory and social media, or ‘web 2.0′. In this way, and following Franck, attention has become something like ‘the new currency of business’ (Franck, “The Economy of Attention“).
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What comes from Paying Attention? Those who attended the conference might answer: ‘Plenty!’ The three days of the recent conference in Linkoping saw a wide range of ways of addressing the problematic of ‘attention’ given the many activities, media and technologies vying for that apparently scarce human faculty. As Tiziana Terranova summarised in the opening keynote paper: If an economy is, simply put, the mode by which a given society commodifies scarce resources, then the ‘attention economy’ situates human attention as a scarce commodity. Regardless of the veracity of the claim, this is the socio-technical milieu in which contemporary Western societies operate.
This key problem in our understanding of contemporary life was addressed, questioned and refigured in a number of ways across three days of presentations by artists, philosophers, sociologists, technologists and many who span or do not comply to disciplinary distinctions. Participants were asked to consider the ways in which their neurological make-up is socio-technically channelled, how exchange value is being technically reconfigured, how attention is performed, the surveillance and ethics of attention and how attentional activities are themselves observed, and the globality or uneven distribution of what has been characterised as an attention economy.
Underlying all of these issues is the argument that we should understand human life as fundamentally held in relation to technology. Following a trajectory from the Ancient Greeks through Heidegger and on to Derrida, according to our keynote Bernard Stiegler being human is bound up in being in some way technical. We fashion technologies and they shape our bodily and mental capacities, the one does not happen without the other. Attention is, and always has been, therefore a technological issue.
The remaining part of this post offers a thematic summary of the wealth of material presented at ‘Paying Attention’. Of course, in-depth, ‘live’ blogged, reporting of the various contributions to the conference already exist on this blog. We might, however, identify seven themes under which to collect the key issues presented at the conference, these are:
The UK Cabinet Office in partnership with the Institute for Government have recently published a report called ‘Mindspace: Influencing behaviour through public policy‘. The report aims to take recent insights from ‘behavioural theory’ and neuroscience and operationalise them as a ‘checklist’ for the formulation of policy that is not overtly coercive but nonetheless explicitly aims for the change of behaviour:
The vast majority of public policy aims to change or shape our behaviour. And policy-makers have many ways of doing so. Most obviously, they can use “hard” instruments such as legislation and regulation to compel us to act in certain ways. These approaches are often very effective, but are costly and inappropriate in many instances. So government often turns to less coercive, and sometimes very effective, measures, such as incentives (e.g. excise duty) and information provision (e.g. public health guidance) – as well as sophisticated communications techniques.
Institute for Government ‘MINDSPACE’ report, page 7.
The report lays out the initialism ‘MINDSPACE’ as a checklist of concepts or points of focus to which policy writers should attend:
| Messenger | we are heavily influenced by who communicates information |
| Incentives | our responses to incentives are shaped by predictable mental shortcuts such as strongly avoiding losses |
| Norms | we are strongly influenced by what others do |
| Defaults | we “go with the flow‟ of pre-set options |
| Salience | our attention is drawn to what is novel and seems relevant to us |
| Priming | our acts are often influenced by sub-conscious cues |
| Affect | our emotional associations can powerfully shape our actions |
| Commitments | we seek to be consistent with our public promises, and reciprocate acts |
| Ego | we act in ways that make us feel better about ourselves |
Table from Institute for Government ‘MINDSPACE’ report, page 8.
This is clearly not only based on the traditional model of the ‘rational’ economic subject, i.e. entirely based in rational cognition, but also, interestingly, the report moves into the kind of ‘affectual’, ‘pre-cognitive’ or ‘ego’ -oriented ideas of pre-subjective judgement/thought. There are accordingly overlaps with explorations of the precognitive embodied understandings of the world addressed in late-20th century Continental Philosophy1. So, by virtue of this inclusion of the understanding of affective attention to the world leading to cognitive action, i.e. ‘behaviour’, this report can be seen as a set of recommendations for the government of attention. This is particularly evident in the ways in which the report suggests that policy acts can become the ‘triggers’ for citizens to take ‘greater personal responsibility’. The argument appears to be that by pointing people in the ‘right’ direction, i.e. by focussing and entraining attention to particular ends, the social norms desired by a government can be, apparently, achieved:
Whether reluctantly or enthusiastically, today’s policymakers are in the business of influencing behaviour, and therefore need to understand the various effects on behaviour their policies may be having. MINDSPACE helps them do so, and therefore has the potential to achieve better outcomes for individuals and society.
Institute for Government ‘MINDSPACE’ report, page 10.
As Tiziana Terranova argued in her paper, this might be understood as the attempted ‘production of values’, by attempting to influence the circulation of flows of desires, beliefs and affects that is inseparable from the production of subjectivity. Again, we might understand this, in light of Bernard Stiegler’s paper, as the attempt to influence the processes of ‘transindividuation’ through forms of education, which is, at root, the instruction of attention.
Moves towards understanding government policy not as the directly coercive forms of action upon a governed society but instead as means of directing attention and action in desirable ways poses interesting questions for how we might understand an ‘attention economy’. Not only are the political economic forces of the market at work, but, arguably and perhaps unsurprisingly, the mode of governance is also mutating to align with these new economic forms.
[1] Interestingly, social theorists following in that vein have also addressed issues raised by neuroscience, see for example: William Connolly’s Neuropolitics, Catherine Malabou’s What should we do with our brain? and, as a counterpoint, Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows.
It seems an appropriate time, after two weeks, to reflect upon how the ‘Paying Attention’ conference has itself attracted attention. Several of the delegates have blogged about the conference, far and wide, and the fruitful discussion about the idea/problematic of the ‘attention economy’ forged in Linköping is being perpetuated and broadened. The rest of this post is a quick review of the blogging on our radar, please feel free to add links through the comments section below.
An extraordinarily intricate and wide-ranging mind-map concerning ‘everything open and free‘ includes many of the issues raised by Michel Bauwens during the conference on mindmeister.
Conference participant Taina Bucher has written a two-part detailed reflection on the conference on her blog. The first post is a reflection on Bernard Stiegler’s work. The second post is more generally concerned with getting to grips with the attention economy, drawing on several papers at the conference.
Elizabeth Van Couvering, another conference participant, has blogged a good thematic summary of her experience of the conference.
Marco Fioretti, freelance writer and conference participant, has also written a nice review post, outlining his interests from across the programme.
The conference has also been picked up more broadly:
DCRC PhD researcher Tomas Rawlings picks up on some highlights of the conference on his personal blog.
A number of interesting and fun reflections on various aspects of the conference feature on the group blog woohaaa.com: ‘Facebook data provocations’, ‘Webcamming Identities‘, ‘Reassembling trust for the future internet‘, and ‘15 seconds of fame‘.
Also, a French-language engagement with Tiziana Terranova’s paper, Attention: a cultural and social value, features on the website of Xavier de la Porte (Web Producer for France Culture).
We encourage other conference participants to post links to any material they have posted online that we have somehow missed below, in the comments.
