Tarde saw advertising as structured by interruption and fixation of attention.

Evidence

Tarde understood immediately, moreover, the extent to which advertising, necessary for the absorption of excess goods coming from industrial overproduction, needed to be considered in terms of attention: ‘Interrupting attention, fixing it on the thing being proffered, is the immediate and direct effect of advertising.’ He sensed perfectly the contagious implications of this: ‘it is not just the fourth page of newspapers that is made up of advertisements. The whole body of the paper is a one big continuous and general advertisement.’ — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 33

Categorization

Category: Factual Claims

• XREF: Tarde’s contagion-of-attention framing connects to later work on attention cascades and the Frankfurt School tradition of diagnosing advertising’s total penetration of media.