Attention Economics

Attention has become a form of currency; when something like a social media platform costs nothing to participate, we pay with attention. In an age of informational surplus we have a scarcity of attention in terms of resource allocation. Extracting profits from attention requires the marketization of it, meaning the development of protocols to measure it, for which (online) metrics include clicks, likes, shares, retweets, etc. When thinking the ‘attention economy’, only through the lens of economic scarcity (or the poverty of brain performance when distracted), we leave a potentially fruitful aspect of its force unrecognized. As Tiziana Terranova insists, “[p]articipating in the attentional assemblages of digital media implies becoming part of social processes, where paying attention triggers responses of imitation.”¹ That ‘imitation’, need not be negatively construed as ‘herd-like’, non-thinking behaviour, but is necessary for the social invention and diffusion of common desires, beliefs and affects.² In this generative register, the imitative dynamics at work in the practice of ‘paying attention’, are inseparable from the collective creation of novel possibilities for social, and cooperative invention.
Patricia Reed