Being attacked beats being ignored in the attention economy

Evidence

We can identify here a PROFIT FROM OPPORTUNIST VISIBILITY: from the moment we start living off visibility, everything that lifts us out of obscurity is worth having, even if the original intention is to do us harm. In other words, as the saying traditionally associated with Mae West goes, ‘there is no such thing as bad publicity’. The most likely – and most humiliating – fate of any one of the six hundred novels published at the beginning of the literary year is to go unnoticed. A prominent critic may decide to take it to pieces, a paranoid celebrity may sue for libel, or a prudish censor may take pride in exposing it: its fate is immediately sealed. It will be the subject of debate and this will make it exist – esse est percipi – for those who attack and for those who defend it, and above all for those who are curious as to why people are fighting about it. From which comes a COROLLARY OF CRITICAL RENUNCIATION: if you would like it to go away, don’t talk about it. — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 155

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines profit-from-opportunist-visibility and the corollary of critical renunciation.
• SEED: The corollary — ‘if you’d like it to go away, don’t talk about it’ — is a provocative rule for the reader’s platform-skepticism essay.
• XREF: connects to: Self-commodification in the attention economy creates an escalating spiral of exposure and attack — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror…, 207; Outrage-driven provocation is a status strategy with no downside in the attention economy — W. David Marx, Blank Space: A Cultural History of the…, 435; Attention-maximizing incentives plus eroded norms produced unconstrained provocation

Broader Connections

• Self-commodification in the attention economy creates an escalating spiral of exposure and attack #expands (0.85) — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 207
• Outrage-driven provocation is a status strategy with no downside in the attention economy #expands (0.80) — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 435
• Attention-maximizing incentives plus eroded norms produced unconstrained provocation #expands (0.80)