April 2019
Katelyn Anderson University of Calgary
Abstract
The attention economy and surveillance capitalism are both useful frames for how to understand the systematic causes and effects of the centralization and corporatization of the public sphere, which takes place both online and offline. In this paper I trace the intellectual roots of the two interwoven theories, in order to make clear both how they rely on each other, and how they pull forward Dallas Smythe’s ideas around the audience commodity in the digital age. Employing a political economic theoretical foundation is essential in order to conceptualize and then put into practice solutions for how to enable the consumption and production of information—some created consciously, while much is created as a byproduct of navigating through our every day — without exploitation. The corruption of utopian visions of the decentralized internet not only impact discourse, but the design of the corporate internet is becoming increasingly successful in its goal of modifying our behaviour, and our ability to think for ourselves.
Keywords: attention economy, audience commodity, surveillance capitalism, political economy, Dallas Smythe
Introduction
The attention economy and surveillance capitalism are both useful frames for how to understand the systemic causes and effects of the centralization and corporatization of the public sphere, which takes place both online and offline. In this paper I trace the intellectual roots of the two interwoven theories, in order to make clear both how they rely on each other, and how they pull forward Dallas Smythe’s ideas around the audience commodity in the digital age. Employing a political economic theoretical foundation is essential in order to conceptualize and then put into practice solutions for how to enable the consumption and production of information—some created consciously, while much is created as a byproduct of navigating through our every day — without exploitation. The corruption of utopian visions of the decentralized internet (Barlow 1996) not only impact discourse, but the design of the corporate internet is becoming increasingly successful in its goal of modifying our behaviour, and our ability to think for ourselves.
Increasingly, technology has been put forward as the answer to the flattened problem of democracy. In 2005, Jodi Dean wrote that people need more information in order to participate in society, and so it follows that more information through the internet equals more and better participation and therefore a better democracy. Dean’s theory of communicative capitalism is helpful in that it attempts to lay bare the problems at the heart of the “knowledge is power” logic that underlays so much of the utopian ideas about how the internet would empower citizens (2005). Mark Andrejevic, an early surveillance capitalism theorist, also employed a critical lens towards information as empowerment narratives, writing that it is “worth considering the assumptions that underlie the equation of access to information with empowerment” (Andrejevic 2013, 10). In recent years, many scholars are placing knowledge in opposition to “big data,” showing how instead of leading to emancipation, the glut of online information, which is controlled corporately, is always already being used to oppress traditionally marginalized communities (Eubanks 2018, Hicks 2018, O’Neil 2018). In her 2018 book, Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism, Safiya Umoja Noble argued the underlying ideology that universal access to information will automatically lead to a just and fair society—as exemplified by early cyber libertarians like John Perry Barlow (1996)—were “rooted in ideas of unmarked humanity” (62). Instead, she worked to illustrate the ways in which online life reflects real life: the same hegemonic ideas and corporate interests that profit off of marginalized communities offline do not cease to exist when one logs on to the internet. Further, Noble showed how corporate control of the world’s information, as exemplified by Google, has instead exacerbated existing power structures and further exploit marginalized communities for profit (3, 16). The reality that Noble described in her book—and what others have called both the attention economy and surveillance capitalism — was made possible because early internet creators and users bought into narratives that more knowledge always equals more power, and subsequently allowed corporations to become the keepers and distributors of ever-increasing amounts of information, without regulation and instead of building and utilizing non-commercially based information architectures. It is within this context of critiques of underlying assumptions of knowledge as power that we turn to the attention economy.
Early Conceptualizations of the Attention Economy
American political scientist Herbert Simon is often cited as the first to use the term ‘attention economy’ in his discussion of how rising computer usage for organizational purposes would produce ever more amounts of information (1971). Famously, he wrote “what information consumes is rather obvious: It consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention” (40). Simon worried that increase in information would create a corresponding need for workers and managers to ensure they were relying on summaries of that increase, lest they get caught spending valuable time attempting to process ever more information themselves. This concern about information overload is not new. The idea that technology is producing too much information while simultaneously corrupting our thinking process has been around since at least the introduction of writing. In ancient Greece, Socrates feared that the technology of the written word would introduce forgetfulness into those who came to rely on it (Plato 360 B.C.E.). Socrates warned that those who employed the external practice of writing would be in the practice of being reminded, rather than learning and relying on their internal mind (as such, our records of Socrates views on this were recorded by Plato, rather than by the philosopher himself). With the introduction of the printing press in the 1400s, and the resulting rise of popular books—which needed to be marketed to larger audiences to make a printing run worth the cost—some feared that there would be too much information for people to process (Standage and Stevenson 2018). Erasmus of Rotterdam was said to have thought the printing press led to works that were subpar: not well thought through and poorly edited, and as such not worthy of being printed, let alone read (Hoffman 1999). In more modern times, when radio news broadcasts went from being on the hour, to twice an hour, in the 1950s, there were anxieties that the increase in news would lead to information overload (Boorstin 1961). More recently, some, including then-executive editor of the New York Times Bill Keller, lamented that the internet, including “Twitter and YouTube, are nibbling away at our attention spans. And what little memory we had not already surrendered to Gutenberg we have relinquished to Google” (2011). Keller’s anxiety that by using social media “we may be unlearning, tweet by tweet—complexity, acuity, patience, wisdom, intimacy” was roundly mocked at the time (Honan 2011, Nolan 2011). But as corporate control of the internet has grown, in 2019 those fears have crept into a much larger audience (Bridle 2018, Farman 2018, Karppi 2018, Lanier 2018, Newport 2019, Odell 2019). Reasons for these concerns are further fuelled by the successful resources spent on how to keep ‘users’ online for longer, while keeping them coming back habitutely for a dose of dopamine (Haynes 2018) by using the same techniques as slot machine makers (Schüll 2012, Clark 2014).
In the late 1990s, Jonathan Crary sought to place the “ongoing crisis of attentiveness” (1999, 14) within the context of modernity. He wrote that the “changing configurations of capitalism continually push attention and distraction to new limits and thresholds, with an endless sequence of new products, sources of stimulation, and streams of information” (14). The modern art scholar, most well known for his book Techniques of the Observer, wrote that humanity had developed over the last 150 years into a state of unnatural attention. He argued that “ideas about perception and attention were transformed in the late nineteenth century alongside the emergence of new technological forms of spectacle, display, projection, attraction, and recording” (2). For Crary, distraction needs to be understood through modern norms and practices around attention. Attention needs to be understood as a double-edged sword: it “is the means by which an individual observer can transcend subjective limitations and make perception its own, and attention is at the same time a means by which a perceiver becomes open to control and annexation by external agencies” (5). This is a helpful warning that our attention can be hijacked, and that there are forces who benefit from that exploitation.
Attempting to reckon with the rise of the internet in the late 1990s, Michael Goldhaber brought back the term attention economy. Economies are defined by what is scarce, and in an information economy what is scarce is attention: as information becomes more abundant, attention becomes more valuable (Goldhaber 1997). The former theoretical physicist and head of think tank The Center for Technology and Democracy, wrote that attention “is an intrinsically scarce resource,” and each person only has a “certain stock of attention at [their] disposal” (3). In defining the attention economy in opposition to contemporary definitions of the information economy, Goldhaber warned the revolutionary potential of the internet was coming with a Faustian bargain. He wrote that he was attempting to overcome the vagueness around the changing nature of attention. While delivering the paper to an audience he directed them to think of specific images and take certain actions, and after they obeyed he declared that “it should be evident that having your attention means that I have the power to bend your minds and your bodies at my will” (3). This warning speaks to the power intrinsic within attention, not only in terms of framing what we think about, and how we think about it, but by the influence that controlling someone’s attention can have on their actions.
The Attention Economy in the Digital Age
Interest in the commodification of attention has expanded along side digitization’s infiltration into ever-increasing aspects of human life. In a 2012 edition of Culture Machine dedicated to “paying attention,” Patrick Crogan and Samuel Kinsley opened the issue by outlining what they saw as four contemporary facets of attention and its related economies. First, they pointed to theories which inverted “the ‘information economy,’ in which information is plentiful and attention is the scarce resource” (3), following Goldhaber and Simon. Second, they grouped post-Marxist critics who “identified ‘cognitive capitalism,’ the enrolment of human cognitive capacities as ‘immaterial labour,’ par excellence as the foundation for an attention economy” (3-4). Here they highlighted authors like Jonathan Beller (1994, 2006a, 2006b) who wrote about an “attention theory of value” (Crogan and Kinsley, 9) and saw labour as a subset of attention—labour being just one activity where attention can be focussed. Third, they looked to authors, like Bernard Stiegler (2010) and Kathryn Hayles (2007), who “identified the cerebral and neural as an object or site of politics” (4). Lastly, they grouped together thinkers who viewed the internet “as a mediator of contemporary intellectual and social activities … [being] a threat to our ability to contribute to society” (4). Crary’s focus on what he called the “crisis of attention” is at the heart of the anxieties expressed by these thinkers, while Nicholas Carr, writing in Wired (2010a) and his 2010 book, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, is perhaps the most well known to write about these fears.
Italian social network scholar Tiziana Terranova, also writing in Culture Machine’s “Paying Attention” issue, mapped the contemporary landscape into two very different ways of thinking about the intersection of attention, economy, and the internet. On one side she saw those who theorized that “attention seems to bring with it a recoding of the economy along more orthodox lines” (2012, 2). Following Simon (1977) and Goldhaber (1997, 2006), as information becomes increasingly abundant, it introduces a scarce resource, attention, which allows for traditional understandings of economics to be applied to the internet. Terranova wrote that for these thinkers because “attention is both scarce and measurable, it can become not simply a commodity ... but a kind of capital” (2). Also within this group are those who saw attention being degraded, or what she called a “poverty of attention” (4), where subjects suffer from “a depletion of cognitive capacities” (7). Here she pointed to the work of authors like Crary (1999) and Carr (2010a, 2010b), who saw new technologies as rewiring the brain’s attention pathways. Terranova criticized these models which “appear locked within the limits of scarcity, unable to account for the powers of invention of networked subjectivities” (13). Relying too heavily on traditional economic frameworks causes one to get stuck in conceptualizations of attention that draw on strictly individual mindsets which are thought to be self-interested and calculating. Instead, Terranova wrote that any theory of the attention economy should consider collective and social contexts, which do “not simply indicate the effort by which the individual brain works, nor can [attention] be reduced to a scarce, hence tradeable, commodity” (13). Terranova pointed out that as individuals spend time online they often imitate what they see, “by means of which network culture produces and reproduces itself” (7). With this in mind, “the economy of attention is, then, also the economy of socialization of ideas, affects and percepts, and hence an economy of social production and cooperation” (8). Here she looked to the work of traditional political economy critics like Bernard Stiegler (2009, 2010), who view modern technology as having a large impact on our relations to each other, or what he called “tertiary retentions.” For Stiegler (2008), modern media,
Destroyed … on one hand a set of knowledges which he describes as ‘savoir-vivre’ (which corresponds to the Foucauldian notion of ‘care of the self’) and civility (care of others as founded on ‘philia,’ that is socialized libidinal energy), and, on the other, the ‘psychical apparatus and the social apparatus as a whole’ (Terranova 2012, 11).