Mass media exploit receivers because industrial production meets artisanal biological reception.
Evidence
Alongside their use as weapons of mass distraction, the mass media are dangerous because of the ease with which a standardized, ‘industrialized’ message – produced, multiplied and automatically distributed at low cost – initiates a labour of reception in those to whom it is addressed that is still ‘artisan’ and costly in time and effort since it has to be performed by our old biological apparatus (eyes, ears, brain). — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 189
Categorization
- DEFINE: Introduces the asymmetry-of-labor concept at the heart of attention capitalism.
- DEEPTHINKING: The idea that reception is a costly handicraft while production is cheap and automated reframes who ‘works’ in media — dense enough to sit with.
- XREF: connects to: Mass media exploit receiver attention through a stark production-to-reception asymmetry. — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 192; Industrial society’s liberties themselves capture populations as a captive audience — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2582; Mass media openly admit being business to justify their production (+10 more)
Broader Connections
- Mass-media profits derive from non-reciprocal attention exchange
#corroborates(0.90) — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 251 - Industrial society’s liberties themselves capture populations as a captive audience
#corroborates(0.85) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2582 - Cultural invasion can be broadcast through technology to render people passive spectators
#corroborates(0.85) — Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 580 - Mass media openly admit being business to justify their production
#expands(0.80) - Advertising industrialized attention by converting it into a resellable commodity
#exemplifies(0.80) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 24 - Every communication medium pairs its symbols with a symbiotic mechanism anchored in organic existence
#qualifies(0.80) - Media act as a genetic code mutating the real into the hyperreal.
#expands(0.80) — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 112 - Every communication medium depends on shared organic conditions among participants
#corroborates(0.80) - Mass media function as banks for the attention economy
#exemplifies(0.78) — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 159 - The internet functions as a factory producing the self as commodity
#exemplifies(0.75) — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 18 - A modernism absorbed into mass media serves the existing socio-economic structure.
#qualifies(0.75) — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 787 - Economic arrangements of image circulation industrially produce narcissistic structure.
#expands(0.75) — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 90