A theory of culture and attention
TV Tropes
TV Tropes, the all-devouring pop-culture wiki, catalogs and cross-references recurrent plot devices, archetypes, and tropes in all forms of media.
Television
Television is a visual interface for personal agents, a space for creating, arranging, and reusing artifacts.
Rethinking the cognitive foundations of the attention economy
The attention economy is the economic system in which human attention is the scarce resource. This literature takes a particular passage in Herbert Simon’s seminal Chapter Designing Organization fo...
No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior
Electronic media present us with a collage of experiences from everyplace. We eat dinner at home while watching starving children thousands of miles away reach out to us for food. From our easy chairs, we stare at blindfolded hostages, and coolly
How We Lost Communication to Entertainment
How We Lost Communication to Entertainment par Ploum - Lionel Dricot.
The Birth of the Attention Economy
The rise of the cheap, daily newspaper in the 19th century remade how Americans engaged with the world.
The attention market—and what is wrong with it
Attention is described as a “scarce commodity” that is traded in “a marketplace.” This, it is further claimed, contributes to a “widespread sense of attentional crisis.” But is there really an attention market, and if so, what, if anything, is wrong with it? We defend the claim that there are markets in attention. We provide an account of such attention markets and use that account to address what is morally wrong with them. Our account draws on knowledge of how attention works and what roles it plays in the mind. The attention market trades in an ability to influence our attention – somewhat (though not exactly) like the labor market trades in an ability to influence how we use our capacity for work. Specifically, the commodity it trades in is attentional landscaping potential, viz. the ability to systematically influence patterns of attention by changes to the sensory environment individuals are exposed to. Attention markets thus, we argue, commodify influence over a human capacity that plays a central role in shaping individual experience, agency, and belief formation. This feature of attention markets makes them ethically problematic. As markets in access to external influence, attention markets pose a special threat to individual autonomy and escape the classical liberal defense of free markets. Those who value autonomy should worry about the attention markets that exist today.
Chris Hayes on the attention economy
A conversation about how attention was commodified, why it's so easy to steal, where industry is looking for new supplies, and whether democracy can survive this.
Gazing Back at the Surveillance Cameras That Watch Us (Published 2018)
These photographers explored the implications of a culture of pervasive monitoring.
Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology
A witty, often terrifying that chronicles our transform…
How social norms emerge: The interindividual actor–critic.
I do think this is a kind of novel problem with our current media environment - Serious people aren't good at making content, they have other things to do, but content is what drives attention. Tastemakers used to highlight the serious people but they're gone, replaced by content creators.
attention economy and media critique
I don't enjoy the Internet any more
neilpostman.org
AI Is a Waste of Time
This life gives you nothing
Are We Having Too Much Fun?
Do Not Research | Substack
