Mass-media profits derive from non-reciprocal attention exchange

Evidence

As Georg Franck highlighted, the massive forms of exploitation characteristic of our current attention economy are rooted in the non-reciprocity introduced by mass-media apparatuses organized in accordance with the ‘radio system’. Before the hope of a post-media future kindled by the arrival of the ‘network system’ in the form of the internet – anticipated by Flusser who wrote these lines in 1974 – the cultural industries based their profit and their authority on a regime of unequal exchange, which broadcast electrified attention (reproducible at low cost) to collect living attention (much rarer and costlier). When we pass from the analysis of collective attention, organized by the profoundly asymmetrical apparatuses characterizing the mass media, to joint attention whose model is the reciprocal conversation supported by the telephone or the post, we are therefore doing something very different to simply changing scale with respect to the number of participants involved. Most importantly, we are changing the structure of relations. — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 251

Categorization

• XREF: Directly bridges Frankfurt School attention-exploitation critique (cf. Adorno/Horkheimer earlier in the book) to digital-era network systems (Flusser’s 1974 forecast evokes the internet). — connects to: Attention works as a needle weaving global links at the price of inequality — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 560; Platform profits come from harvesting user attention and selling it back to advertisers — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 43; Mass media function as banks for the attention economy — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 159 (+12 more)
• SEED: Essay angle: ‘reciprocity as antidote’ — how bidirectional platforms renegotiate or fail to renegotiate the asymmetric attention bargain of broadcast media.
• ADDENDUM: The broadcast-electrified-attention-to-collect-living-attention asymmetry is a precise mechanism some readers may connect to attention-economy treatments in the tree/sacrifice essays as infrastructures of exchange.

Broader Connections

• Ad-supported media sell audiences’ attention, not content, to advertisers #expands (0.88) — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 219
• Advertising industrialized attention by converting it into a resellable commodity #exemplifies (0.82) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 24
• Subscriptions capture deeper sustained attention than the fragmented kind advertising harvests #qualifies (0.80) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 1098
• Public attention is a self-reproducing form of value convertible into fame #corroborates (0.75) — Michael H. Goldhaber, The Attention Economy and the Net, 6
• Networks quantified audience attention as inventory sold by gross rating points #corroborates (0.72) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 489